Tag Archives: Europa Editions
Mary Magdalene and the Revolutionary Power of Women’s History: Adriana Valerio’s “Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church and the Great Deception,” translated from Italian by Wendy Wheatley
Engaging in dialogue with an Italian feminist tradition that seeks to retrieve the voices and experiences of our female ancestors, Valerio is unwavering in her commitment to unearthing a “female genealogy” which will liberate women from the male-authored tradition that has misrepresented us for millennia.
Reading Elena Ferrante in Bulgaria(n)
By Stiliana Milkova Last year I read Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Lying Life of Adults (La vita bugiarda degli adulti) in Bulgarian, in Ivo Yonkov’s translation from Italian. It was September 2020, it had just been released by Ferrante’s Bulgarian publisher, Colibri, and I was in Bulgaria myself. I went to Helikon, the largest […]
Translation is a Performance of Language: An Interview with Translator and Poet Will Schutt
I’m not sure there’s an Italian word for microaggression. If there is, it is probably lifted from americano.
The Truth that Lies Behind the Lies
Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, is intense and bitter.
The Lying Life of Narrators
It seems hardly coincidental that Ferrante, whose own “true” identity has been the object of intense scrutiny and speculation, chooses to underscore the act of crafting a fiction about oneself.
Innocence Redeemed
By Richard Carvalho The Lying Lives of Adults starts with a misunderstanding: Giovanna, the protagonist, is 12. She is well into puberty, having been menstruating for a year. Her breasts seem to her over-large encumbrances inviting men’s unwelcome interest, and her burgeoning body is a profound source of shame. She hears her father say, prompted […]
The Gospel According to Elena Ferrante
As she probes the association of God with forces of repression and domination, Giovanna condemns the patriarchal nature of her relationship with Andrea.
Alone With Language
By David Kurnick You could tell it like a fairy tale: a malevolent father who curses his daughter with ugliness; a comely prince who, some difficult years later, lifts the curse by praising the girl’s beauty. An enchanted bracelet, invested with mysterious power by the father’s hated and feared sister, who practices the “terrible arts” […]
Under His Watchful Eye: Family and Power in “The Lying Life of Adults”
The Lying Life of Adults is about the often-subtle ways men wield their power over women.
Elusions and Disillusions
Reading Elena Ferrante’s latest novel from this place of incertitude is consequently a puzzling, if not uncanny experience.
Live on August 31, 2020: Special Issue on Elena Ferrante’s New Novel “The Lying Life of Adults,” Translated by Ann Goldstein
Elena Ferrante and the Question of Gender, Pseudonyms, and Authorship
The Global Novel and Elena Ferrante’s Uncanny Underground Realism: Tiziana de Rogatis’ “Elena Ferrante’s Key Words,” translated from Italian by Will Schutt
By Isabella Pinto Translated from Italian by Rebecca Walker The long-awaited English language version of Tiziana de Rogatis’ Elena Ferrante’s Keywords, recently published by Europa Editions, has been made possible thanks to the work of translator Will Schutt. The volume is ordered thematically by keyword, and is divided into seven chapters, preceded by a comprehensive […]
Framing by Fragmentation: Elena Ferrante’s “Incidental Inventions,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
By Stiliana Milkova The timing of Elena Ferrante’s Incidental Inventions is impeccable – it offers us an aperitivo before we can delve into her new novel scheduled to come out in English translation in June 2020. While we wait, we can flip leisurely through the pages of Incidental Inventions, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, and already in bookstores. […]
The Mother of All Questions: Donatella di Pietrantonio’s “A Girl Returned,” translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
By Barbara Halla “Motherhood,” writes Jacqueline Rose in her book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, “is … the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our conflicts, of what it means to be fully human” (1). More than one century of Italian literature has grappled precisely with […]
Me, She, I, Too: Adélaïde Bon’s “The Little Girl on the Ice Floe,” Translated from French by Tina Kover
Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Rape By Alec Joyner Over the last few years, more and more novels, memoirs, and books of poetry have begun to plumb the depths—the intricate, historically entrenched structures of sexual violence—that extend far beneath the #MeToo hashtag. These books are making a case, implicitly, for the ongoing value of literature, a […]