Tag Archives: Family Lexicon
Dear Natalia: How I translated “Caro Michele”
By Minna Zallman Proctor In 1963, Natalia Ginzburg’s seminal, miraculous, autobiographical novel, Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon), came out in Italy and was an instant hit—selling over 86,000 copies that first year and going into five reprints. Then ten years passed before Caro Michele (Happiness, As Such). The decade-long gap between novels is not the result […]
On Humor, Eccentricity, and Sound in “Family Lexicon”: A Conversation with Ginzburg Translator Jenny McPhee
Jenny McPhee is an accomplished translator of Italian literature––she has translated works by Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Fausta Cialente, Natalia Ginzburg, Curzio Malaparte, and Primo Levi, among others. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2020. In this interview, which is part of the special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg,” we focus on her translation of Ginzburg’s 1963 novel Family Lexicon (Lessico […]
The Light of Turin: Natalia Ginzburg’s Cityscape
By Roberto Carretta Translated by Stiliana Milkova Via Morgari is located in Turin’s San Salvario neighborhood—a little Le Marais where the encounter and superimposition of new identities is the norm. San Salvario stretches from the nineteenth-century buildings, now apartment blocks flanking the Porta Nuova railway station, to the edge of the suburbs on the east. […]
Natalia Ginzburg’s Speech Acts: The Female Voice as a Form of Resistance
By Serena Todesco “And so memories of our own past constantly crop up in the things we write, our own voice constantly echoes there and we are unable to silence it” Natalia Ginzburg, “My Vocation,” The Little Virtues Whenever I listen to Natalia Ginzburg’s voice, it seems that the fleshly dimension of her words is […]
Forging the Female Voice out of the Ruins of History: Reading Natalia Ginzburg
By Katrin Wehling-Giorgi In recent years, partly abetted by the phenomenal global and transmedial success of Elena Ferrante’s works, Natalia Ginzburg’s novels and short stories have undergone a major revival and rediscovery, leading to a number of (re-)translations and increasing attention by a new transnational readership.[1] As a translator herself (of Proust, Vercors, Flaubert, among […]
“History’s Inexorable Demands”: An Excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s “La corsara”
As part of our special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg,” we are featuring an excerpt from the English translation of Sandra Petrignani’s biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara. Ritratto di Natalia Ginzburg (Neri Pozza 2019). The passages excerpted here are from chapter six, “History’s Inexorable Demands,” and are published with Sandra Petrignani’s permission and courtesy of […]
Putting a Brave Face on Loneliness and Loss: Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family” and “Borghesia”
By Jeanne Bonner I do not think of Natalia Ginzburg as a sad figure or a writer of sad, tragic works. I’ve seen her in old interviews, and I’ve read her nonfiction work. Archival photos often show her smiling. She was not melodramatic. She did not seek pity or any kind of rapt attention beyond […]
A World Filled with Echoes: On Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Little Virtues”
By Andrew Martino There are books that become a part of us in profound and magical ways. Books that become companions, whether in childhood or in adulthood, and that leave a trace of its magic on our souls. For those of us who read voraciously, most books are forgotten, or at best, leave only a […]
Unlived Lives in Natalia Ginzburg’s “Valentino” and “Sagittarius,” Translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni
By Eric Gudas One refers, as a commonplace, to “the unlived life”; but fiction excels at dramatizing people’s myriad unlived lives. Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction links stifled hopes and ambitions with suppressed speech. The narrators of Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius: Two Novellas (1957), which New York Review Books Classics has just reissued in Avril Bardoni’s decades-old […]