Tag Archives: Oonagh Stransky
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.
“The Drinkers”: An Excerpt from Domenico Starnone’s “Via Gemito”
My position is all wrong. The water will forever spill onto the tomatoes, the plate, the cloth. My father placed me in a position where, even with Luigi reaching as far as he can, I will never be able to pour the water into his glass.
“Via Gemito”: Domenico Starnone’s Ur-Text
From the very beginning, readers are confronted with an exhausting tension between father and son, their antithetic visions threatening at every step to converge and become enmeshed into the furious flow of Mimi’s narrative which, despite his alleged commitment to a serene composure, is far from tidy or calming. That prose is, after all, the exhibition of a carefully performed identity, constructed through repetition of linguistic and paralinguistic gestures, reminding us of Butler’s idea that subjects are the effect of signifying practices and social discourse (Butler 1999).