Penguin Random House<\/a>
\nReview by Jeanne Bonner<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine the editor of a large, door-stopper compilation of, say, short stories, calling the arduous task of sorting and selecting the entries a labor of love? And what if the short stories are in a foreign language and the editing also involved commissioning new translations and tracking down old ones?<\/p>\n
Author Jhumpa Lahiri, who edited the new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories<\/em>, doesn\u2019t use those exact words in the anthology\u2019s introduction, but she comes pretty close as she describes what inspired her to want to curate such a collection. It\u2019s of a piece with what inspired her in 2012 (a dozen years after winning the Pulitzer Prize) to move her family to Rome so she could surround herself with the Italian language: \u201cI surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself and to acquire a second literary formation.\u201d That second literary formation she mentions (it makes me think of \u201cformazione,\u201d which in Italian means training or education) has been fruitful. In addition to publishing two books in Italian, including In Other Words<\/em>, based on the Italian diary she kept in Rome, Lahiri has translated Domenico Starnone’s novels Ties<\/em> and Trick,<\/em> and now the short stories of underappreciated or overlooked authors such as Corrado Alvaro, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Fabrizia Ramondino\u2014all of which appear in the anthology.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s not unprecedented for an author to go abroad and lose her head over a language and a country (James Joyce also decamped to Italy, and would converse with his children in Italian; James Baldwin lived for decades in France, as did Mavis Gallant). But how often does such an author\u2014especially one gifted enough to receive this country\u2019s highest literary honor\u2014master the new language enough to write in it or translate important works, as she has done? Indeed, Lahiri\u2019s role as not only a booster of Italian lit, but also a practitioner arguably transformed the process of editing and curating the Penguin anthology (just as, in her diary, she wrote how Rome had transformed her). The result is a primer on short fiction from Italy that, given its thorough and nuanced selections, will likely be used as a college text. Indeed, Lahiri\u2019s inclusion of a side-by-side chronology of Italian literary and historical events\u2014a copy of which may go up on my wall\u2014is peerless in a general interest book of this kind.<\/p>\n
With works by 40 writers whose stories were published over the span of 100 years, the anthology appears at a time when so-called #FerranteFever remains high. Indeed, a new novel by Elena Ferrante, the author of the spectacularly successful Neapolitan Series of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend<\/em>, has already been published in Italian and will arrive in American bookstores next year, not a moment too soon for fans of the reclusive writer. It can sometimes seem like everyone in America knows Italy\u2014and everyone knows someone who has just returned from Italy, aglow in Mediterranean reminiscing. But beyond Ferrante and a handful of other authors (Dante? Andrea Camilleri?), what does everyone know about Italian literature? Not a whole lot. And perhaps with good reason: translations of books originally published in Italy continue to trail translations of books from France, for example, according to Three Percent\u2019s Translation Database, now hosted by Publisher\u2019s Weekly<\/em>.<\/p>\nLahiri\u2019s anthology will help, with short stories from some of the peninsula\u2019s most important classic writers (Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Antonio Tabucchi, Leonardo Sciascia, Cesare Pavese, Grazia Deledda, Alberto Moravia, et al) as well as a host of lesser-known authors (Anna Banti, Luce D\u2019Eramo, Goffredo Parise, Beppe Fenoglio).<\/p>\n
Lahiri uses her learned introduction to trace the trajectory of the Italian short story back to its origins beyond the well-known Boccaccio, namechecking Matteo Bandello and Masuccio Salernitano. Both of these authors (along with Boccaccio) composed what was known as novelle <\/em>or short tales, stories that often had a moral slant or fable quality to them. They sometimes introduced characters and locales from faraway, and could be quite ribald, as they reveled in deconstructing male-female relationships.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s in the introduction that we also learn how Lahiri specifically sought out women writers, lesser-known writers, and overlooked writers in compiling the anthology. She says she selected stories with an eye particularly toward the experiences of women, as written by women or men. It is gratifying to find works in the anthology by Lalla Romano, Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg and Fausta Cialente\u2014five writers whom author Dacia Maraini, one of Italy\u2019s greatest living novelists, has identified as so significant as to be her \u201cliterary mothers.\u201d (Maraini is not included in the anthology because Lahiri decided to feature only the work of deceased authors). The inclusion of these five writers, as well as other women, is critical because women authors are often passed over for prizes and less appreciated in Italy, and correspondingly less translated than their male counterparts abroad (according to Three Percent\u2019s Translation Database, of the 45 books originally published in Italy that were translated from Italian into English in 2018, only seven were by women authors). Moreover, there are quite a few anthologies of Italian short stories where women writers are given scant attention. But not this anthology.<\/p>\n
The Penguin work distinguishes itself in other ways, most notably by including more than a dozen works that have never been translated into English, such as \u201cThe Ambitious Ones,\u201d a gem of a story by Elsa Morante, and \u201cDialogue with a Tortoise\u201d by the much-celebrated Italo Calvino. That\u2019s the power of an anthology like this: not merely compiling in a new place what already existed (which has a value in its own right, particularly here with literature not native to America), but indeed commissioning translations of works that heretofore were unavailable to the vast majority of Anglophone readers, since they do not read Italian.<\/p>\n
Also of note among these new translations is \u201cInvitation to Dinner\u201d by Alba de Cespedes, which is narrated by an unnamed woman and which brings us the story of a dinner with an English officer in wartime Italy who helps transport the narrator\u2019s brother back to Rome after the liberation of Northern Italy. The officer smugly tells them the world won\u2019t automatically welcome Italy back into the fold after 20 long years of barbarous Fascism. The narrator seethes in silence, lamenting that:<\/p>\n
\u2026 it wasn\u2019t enough, as proof of civilization, to have manufactured that porcelain or to have written those books squeezed into the shelves that lined the walls of the library. We had to demonstrate once again, to prove, to pass, all forty-five million of us together, a lengthy exam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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The anthology also includes new, updated translations, and among those stories, Elio Vittorini\u2019s \u201cName and Tears\u201d feels like a revelation. It\u2019s a fable and a mystery wrapped in one, with an extremely fluid translation by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. The story is about a man searching for a woman. Is she real? He hears her sobbing, and at the end of the tale is left only with a \u201chandkerchief, damp with her tears.\u201d The book features a new translation of \u201cThe Long Voyage\u201d by Leonardo Sciascia, a pivotal twentieth century Sicilian author who was the first to write incisively about the Mafia but whose prose style, as translator and scholar Frederika Randall has remarked, hasn\u2019t always been served well by English translations.<\/p>\n
The anthology caps a wave of newly translated works and retranslated works from Italy in recent years, that\u2019s been fueled in part perhaps by interest in Ferrante\u2019s works (and the furor over her identity; Ferrante is a pseudonym). For example, some of the novels of the seminal Ginzburg have been re-translated in recent years, including Jenny McPhee\u2019s wonderful translation of Family Lexicon, <\/em>published in 2017 by NYRB. Primo Levi\u2019s oeuvre has also received the attention it deserves through the tome The Complete Works of Primo Levi, <\/em>which was edited and translated by Ann Goldstein\u2014a.k.a. Ferrante\u2019s translator.<\/p>\nIt is unsurprising, then, that the anthology reprints excerpts from some of the more notable translations appearing in recent years, including the stunningly good translation of Anna Maria Ortese\u2019s \u201cA Pair of Eyeglasses\u201d by the Italian translation dream-team of McPhee and Goldstein (it appeared in the collection Neapolitan Chronicles<\/em>, published by New Vessel Press in 2018). Ortese\u2019s influence on her peers and on contemporary writers has been keenly felt, with an echo of her candid descriptions here of an impoverished neighborhood in post-war Naples, and the singular combination of superstition, fate, and politics that reigns over the characters\u2019 lives evident in the works of Ferrante, among others. Ortese\u2019s characters come alive in wonderful and wretched ways, in particular Eugenia, the innocent girl whose family\u2019s poverty deprives her of glasses, leaving her practically in the dark for years, and Nunziata\u2014the nagging, morose, unmarried aunt biding her time until death and who utters the unforgettable line, \u201cMy child, it\u2019s better not to see the world than to see it.\u201d The anthology also includes a short story by Levi about a centaur (as Lahiri notes in her preface to the story, Levi defied categories).<\/p>\nEqually as good is a story from Ginzburg called \u201cMy Husband,\u201d expertly translated by Paul Lewis. Ginzburg always writes perceptively about family dynamics and here she has applied her skills to exposing some of the less savory aspects of marriage. When she writes about male-female relationships, she often exposes male infidelity or indifference but without any feminist grandstanding or judgement (she was a better person than I ever will be). In this short story, the husband rather boldly confesses that his surprising indiscretions have continued after the birth of the couple\u2019s first child, in a scene that is nothing short of breathtaking:<\/p>\n
He knelt down in front of me and kissed my bare arms. \u2018Help me, I\u2019m begging you,\u2019 he said. \u2018What am I going to do if you won\u2019t help me?\u2019 \u2018But how can I possibly help you?\u2019 I screamed, pushing him away and bursting into tears. Then my husband picked up Giorgio, kissed him, gave him to me and said, \u2018Everything will be easier now, you\u2019ll see.\u2019<\/p>\n
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Reader, I will only tell you that \u201ceasier\u201d would not be the word I\u2019d have chosen to describe the finale of this stunning short tale of Ginzburg\u2019s.<\/p>\n
There are many theories about how translations should sound. Some translators and publishers prefer works that retain a trace of foreignness, while others say the translated works should read no differently than a work by an American author. These stories for the most part, like Lahiri\u2019s translation of the Starnone novels, read so fluidly that you forget they are works in translation. Theory aside, there\u2019s no arguing that these crisp translations will have the reader eagerly turning pages.<\/p>\n
Those of us who have immersed ourselves in Italian literature face a particular conundrum: love of Italy and Italian culture seems to be ubiquitous in America these days, but knowledge and appreciation of the peninsula\u2019s literary output is, in reality, quite limited. This is partly because other countries subsidize translations with prizes, grants and fellowships, and Italy does not. This is not a recent problem, and as a result, there\u2019s long been a familiarity with, in particular, French and German authors. Americans know Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Herman Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, W.\u00a0G. Sebald, Gunter Grass and so on. But do they know Sciascia? Are Morante\u2019s books taught widely in high schools and colleges here?<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s to that familiarity extending to Sunny Italy. Indeed, here\u2019s hoping if the anthology is updated in the future, American readers will be arguing over whether it should have included a short story by Maraini or Niccolo Ammaniti or Donatella Di Pietrantonio. As Lahiri notes in her introduction, English-language literature dominates literary discussions far beyond the borders of Anglophone nations\u2014something that \u201cfew, on the English-speaking side of the border, stop to question.\u201d Perhaps they should. Lahiri, in her Rome diary, had described the sensation that the Italian language and its literature inspired in her as nothing short of \u201crapture.\u201d Here\u2019s hoping that rapture is catching. For she\u2019s understood that Italy produces something even more satisfying\u2014far more so, in fact\u2014than a caffelatte<\/em> or a slice of Neapolitan pizza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri Translated from the Italian by Various 528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00 Penguin Random House Review by Jeanne Bonner Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":428432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[41016,14086,69972,65476,69982,66716],"class_list":["post-428372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-italian-fiction","tag-italian-literature","tag-italian-short-stories","tag-jeanne-bonner","tag-jhuma-lahiri","tag-penguin-random-house"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428872,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428372\/revisions\/428872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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