Tag Archives: Enrica Ferrara
The Novel as Oracle and the Voice of Women Writers: Nadia Terranova’s “The Night Trembles,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
Nadia Terranova’s 2022 novel “The Night Trembles” (Trema la notte), translated in English by Ann Goldstein for Seven Stories Press (2025), gives voice to Barbara and Nicola, a young woman and a boy whose parallel plot lines develop against the background of a catastrophic natural disaster – the earthquake that decimated the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria, on each side of the Strait of Messina, on December 28, 1908. Terranova, a contemporary Italian writer from Messina, has been mapping in her narratives the topographies of trauma – personal and collective – of her hometown and her native Sicily.
Translators on Books that Should Be Translated: Enrica Ferrara’s “Mia madre aveva una cinquecento gialla”
The novel is a vivid recapturing of Italian life in the 1980s, but more than that it engages, and beautifully captures, the universal mystery of each person’s origins – in a specific place and time, in a social caste, and, most of all, from a set of parents – and evokes the loneliness of that insoluble mystery.
An Act of Love and a Restitution: Maria Grazia Calandrone’s “Your Little Matter,” translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri
The memoir “Dove non mi hai portata” by multi-awarded poet and journalist Maria Grazia Calandrone was published in Italy in 2022 to huge public and critical acclaim. A finalist for the 2023 Strega Prize, now translated into English by Antonella Lettieri as “Your Little Matter” for Foundry Editions, this book is a restitution. This is the first information we learn as we dwell over the book’s threshold and read its epigraph: “All I have seen of you, to you I return, loved.”
Stransky & Starnone
Oonagh Stransky’s translation of Domenico Starnone’s monumental novel “The House on Via Gemito” (Europa Editions, 2023) is a tour de force. The vast, complex narrative comes to life in Stransky’s words, enabling in English Starnone’s profound investigation of a son’s relationship with his larger-than-life, exuberant, violent, irrepressible father. Longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize and shortlisted the 2024 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, Stransky’s translation deserves more attention.
A Renaissance Woman: In Conversation with Italian-Irish writer, scholar, and translator Enrica Ferrara
An Italian-Irish scholar, translator, teacher, and writer, Enrica Ferrara is a Renaissance woman. In this energetic conversation with Stiliana Milkova Rousseva, Enrica Ferrara recounts the story of her debut novel in Italian, “Mia madre aveva una cinquecento gialla” (Fazi, 2024), and discusses some of its major themes and plot elements.
On the Language and Style of Domenico Starnone’s Novels
By Chiara De Caprio Translated from Italian by Rebecca Falkoff Considering the novels and short stories of Domenico Starnone from a linguistic perspective means to bring out the double-edged quality and the internal stratification of their linguistic composition. A reasonable pace and feverish emotional sequences intersect in his works. His style alternates between solitary self-reflection, […]
Translators on Books that Should Be Translated: Simona Baldelli’s “Evelina e le fate” (Evelina and the Fairies)
Baldelli’s inventiveness and skillful stylistic prowess are already noticeable in Evelina e le fate, with its vivid language adhering to a world of objects in which the characters come alive through a meddling of voices, each with its own substantive body