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Tag: italy

  • Translating Fascisms

    Translating Fascisms

    Alex Valente on translating fascism between Italy, the UK and the US.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    In the summer of 2019, I translated a short satirical book by Italian author Michela Murgia. The original title – Istruzioni per diventare fascisti, literally ‘Instructions to become fascist’ – is a little different in the English version. The didascalic application is the same, though: Follow these steps, reader, and you too can contribute to the creation of a totalitarian reactionary country.

    The book was published in Italy in 2018, at the peak of Matteo Salvini’s power as Minister of the Interior and the height of the far right’s hold on the country’s wants – rampant xenophobia, anti-immigration policies, increased and targeted policing. These all built on years of bipartisan populist appeal to the lowest possible common denominator among the electorate: personal success, external threats, no accountability. On publication, many voices on the supposed left vocally denounced the trick played by Murgia: how dare she suggest that, if you share any of the statements in the Fascistometer (a quiz-style list of statements for measuring your own level of commitment to the cause), you might be complicit? How can she absolve herself (she does not, and explicitly so) while initiating a witch-hunt for anyone who doesn’t think like her, who she brands as a fascist? The point was both effectively made and entirely missed.

    The UK version of the book was published in January 2020. Two years after the original publication, we were facing a supposed shift in power and policies in the Italian government, the actual arrival of the Brexit process in the UK, the beginning of the supposed final year of the US Trump administration, and the Western spread of COVID-19.

    I was asked, as part of the translation process, to localise the references and historical contexts that were specifically about Italy – about its precedents with historical, capital-F Fascism, with tyrannical rule, with mass propaganda and media manipulation. Some could easily be swapped with a similar equivalent; some, such as the side of the war the country had been on, and most of the book’s last section, had to undergo a complete overhaul.

    To talk to ‘them’, whilst remembering there was no ‘them’, I had to locate an appropriate ‘them’ for the translation of context. Who are the populist ‘they’ in the anglophone world?

    What the task really meant, I realised, was that I had to inhabit the language of similar individuals, groups and ideologies as those Murgia was targeting in Italy. Years of being Very Online, editing political publications, and working within activist circles was finally coming to fruition: I had a chance to ‘bridge the gap’ – to talk to ‘them’, to talk like ‘them’, to get ‘them’ to listen. All the while, I had to keep in mind the crux of the book: there is no ‘us’ or ‘them’, there is no bridge; there are only slippery slopes and normalisation of language and method-through-baby-steps.

    To talk to ‘them’, whilst remembering there was no ‘them’, I had to locate an appropriate ‘them’ for the translation of context. Who are the populist ‘they’ in the anglophone world? Anti-trans movements, religious extremists, anti-intellectual thinkers, political icons, 4chan, incels, debate-me social-media users, YouTube professors, speakers of the free marketplace of ideas – the fertile grounds of radicalisation and the perpetration of harmful ideologies. After all, the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free. Some slogans and words have almost direct correspondents: ‘stay human’ for restiamo umani, ‘reverse racism’, ‘telling it like it is’, ‘will no one think of the children’. But what would ‘they’ call idiosyncratic concepts such as the ideologia del gender, radical chic, prima gli italiani, buonismo? The buzzwords of these platforms are not hard to find. I might choose, then, something like ‘gay agenda’, ‘armchair activism’ or ‘liberal elite’, ‘Britain/America first’, probably some ‘virtue signalling’, ‘sea-lioning’, and, at different moments in time, maybe even refer to a ‘feminazi’, ‘cuck’, ‘soy-boy’ or ‘simp’.

    It was a little harder to de-Italianify the specifics of fascist nostalgia, though, trying to avoid making it sound like the butt of a joke about Italians and their trains running on time. I looked to the other side of the pond, where there has been talk of ‘fine people on both sides’, and lines like ‘the Republicans were the ones to end slavery’; where ‘they started out as national socialists’ and ‘so much for the tolerant left’ are dark, memefied jokes based on actual statements by real people with political and media power.

    The US version of the book was released in August 2020, to coincide with the GOP primaries and party convention. (That was the plan all along, I was told, with a wink and nudge. I haven’t had the heart, yet, to point out that the Democratic Party is doing pretty well on the Fascistometer too, and has done so for decades.)

    Prior to its release, I asked the editors to let me take a look at any changes they had needed to make to adapt the book for a US readership. Surprisingly (though perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise), there were very few.

    My fear, specifically, was that historical references to the British Empire – to Churchill, to UK-localised allusions and semi-citations – would not land in the US. My work in finding the closest kind of statement and target between Southern European and British might not carry any weight at all, unlike the translators into European Spanish and German, whose countries both share similar histories with Italy. The conversation that I had with one of the US editors, however, highlighted two things: first, that their target readers would be at least ‘familiar’ with American imperialism – a different incarnation, on paper, to the literal empire of the British Crown, but a vicious, culturally pervading one nonetheless. And, second, that the kind of US politics targeted by the book’s satire ‘loves to reference Western Civilization, empires, and Great Men of History like Churchill’. Though the references may not have the same impact as with a UK reader, they do in fact still work. In light of recent global developments, the Churchill references perhaps carry even more weight than I initially intended. I should’ve snuck in something about Columbus when I was asked to remove Matteotti and Gramsci, and slid in a ‘strong and stable’, and mentioned all the best words.

    If anything, the US edition drives Murgia’s point even further: the ‘us’ and ‘them’ construct of the past can no longer be applied, if the us is now using the language used by them, while claiming – at the same time – that this is not us and when they go low, we go high. The distinction is made through language and in language: they are deplorable, their words are horrifying, they scare us, we must say and do better, because we are better than them. What we are prone to forget is that their language is our language too, because it is still language.

    Fascist language is othering, monstering, ostracising, oppressing. But all language – all the ones we share across communities of practice, across countries, across histories – has the potential also to do so.

    One early review pointed out that ‘satire requires worthy targets. While some […] deserve [Murgia’s] barbs, others (people who think that “gender studies is ruining families”) lack a comparable moral weight and take throwaway jabs.’ Yet again, the same reaction: only some forms of language and thought are ‘worthy targets’; only the more explicit, more deplorable statements are truly a sign of fascism. Yet again, the point is being missed. Supposed liberals and progressives are regularly aghast at being made aware of the danger and damage of their own words, their statements, their platforms and their followings. Letters are drafted, appeals are forwarded, the news cycle – slowly reporting on the global rise of totalitarian politics – is eclipsed for another week, everything is cancelled, and new book deals are signed.

    As Murgia says in her closing disclaimer, ‘the problem is being able to pinpoint anyone who isn’t even marginally complicit in the legitimisation of fascism as a method’ and its amazing property of ‘contaminating absolutely anything and everything’ by means of gradual or sudden normalisation. Fascist language is othering, monstering, ostracising, oppressing. But all language – all the ones we share across communities of practice, across countries, across histories – has the potential also to do so. The translatorial process just highlighted, for me at least, in screaming red ink, what the book was already eagerly pointing towards.

    I am the product (genetically and educationally) of two very specific cultural backgrounds, one of which historically fought the other to stop the spread of European fascism, and both of which are now happily rising together in populism and authoritarianism as they look to, borrow from, and mimic each other’s linguistic practices and slogans.

    Inhabiting this specific type of language is not something I’d recommend. Learning, however, the language that aids and abets oppression can teach us how to counteract it, how to defuse it, how to avoid falling into its traps all the way to the normalisation of fascism. It becomes a constant exercise in deconstruction, a form of active translation that subverts the usual labels of commentary. Not thought policing, but awareness. Not cancelling, but checking and helping each other learn. Not simplification, but critical engagement. Not defensiveness, but learning opportunities.

    I am the product (genetically and educationally) of two very specific cultural backgrounds, one of which historically fought the other to stop the spread of European fascism, and both of which are now happily rising together in populism and authoritarianism as they look to, borrow from, and mimic each other’s linguistic practices and slogans. If that made my job easier in making this manual accessible to two sides of an anglophone pond, it is not a good thing. At the same time, if it makes even a few readers rethink how they use language, how internalised some totalitarian seeds have become, it might have been worth it.

    Alex Valente (he/him) is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire white European currently living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh land. He is an award-winning literary translator from Italian into English, though he also dabbles with French, and regularly struggles with Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch. His translation of Michela Murgia’s book is available through Pushkin Press (UK) or Penguin Random House (US),and his work can be found in The Short Story Project, The Massachusetts Review, NYT Magazine.

  • Ghosts

    Ghosts

    As she reflects on the current political situation in her home, Claudia Durastanti elegantly dispatches with the idea of the ‘ghost of fascism’ that supposedly haunts Italy

     

    I’ve just landed in Fiumicino when I see a video for the forthcoming European elections play on a loop. Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister, is advising me to ‘eat Italian, drink Italian, buy Italian’. As I stare at him, I feel transported back to a place I visited in primary school, Italia in miniature: a theme park near Rimini, where you can walk around a country made of tiny replicas of important cities. You can jump from Florence to Pisa to Venice in a matter of a few steps, you can pretend to crush iconic landmarks. It used to be fun and creepy. The miniatures retained the same melancholy of Luigi Ghirri’s photos. I would discover his photographs very much later – faded commercials, deserted playgrounds, scattered atlases –, but I would feel the same uneasiness:  the artificial proportions, a fairground version of a homeland. What we lose with a loss of scale.

    Silvio Berlusconi won the elections that year. I didn’t know much about politics at ten, but I felt echoes of it, in that park. A shrunk governable country, to be sold as an attraction.

    Twenty-five years later, in the airport back home, I stare at Matteo Salvini and I ask myself what he reminds me of.  I know he should remind me of someone like Mussolini, but he doesn’t. Behind the despotic aura, the fetishization of para-fascist gear, and his close ties with far-right movements, he reminds me of what it felt like to be a child, then a teenager and then a young woman under Silvio Berlusconi’s rule and influence. He reminds me of how Berlusconi used to sell products all the time, all those broke anchormen who moved to commercial TV channels where they promoted bikes and pans and polishing products. He, Salvini, is trying to sell me my country as a brand. Add the crucifix and rosary he’s been kissing in front of the cameras for a while now, and it’s really hard to separate him from a preacher or a tarot reader. If we were in America he’d be wearing a purple tuxedo in a parking lot full of junk cars, screaming in a bullhorn. That’s how cheap it feels, and, still, dangerous.

    For most of my life, I’ve heard the same thing about Italy: there’s something tragically unhip in the Italian approach to contemporaneity, a quick falling in love and reluctance to discard it when contemporaneity reveals its brokenness.

    Italy turns everything into ruins that cannot be replaced, for fear that replacing them would mean identity loss. The fear of identity loss plagues far-right movements, but not only them: I’ve seen it in the Left I belong to as well. I came to see it as an extended disease, a reluctant nostalgia seeping through our pores even when we are disgusted by it.

    It takes a specific kind of faith to believe in the past. We are encouraged to believe that certain processes, ideas and forms of violence are constant in time, that their core is preserved under very different circumstances. As I consider this, I try to go back to the practice of translation: should we carry the past into the present, or translate the memory of it into another language, based on different metaphors?

    Over time, I’ve grown resentful of metaphors tying fascism to spectres. The ghosts of fascism. Il fantasma del fascismo. I hate the immateriality and elegance ghosts suggest, the haunted house charm, the starkness of period videos, where blood is always expressionist black and never what it should be, a vivid and squalid red. I hate the contrast between the involuntary aristocracy of these ghosts and the brutality and suffering fascism has caused.

    So to make things really ugly, I say we live in the age of zombies, immersed in a sickly liminality. ‘You mean zombies ‘cause fascists never died. They are undead so they can’t be ghosts,’ people say when I suggest this figurative switch. But that’s not what I mean: a zombie is not dead, but it’s not exactly alive either. Unless we feed it morsels of our skin and conscience.

    The zombies of fascism are in our streets, neighbourhoods, and public spaces; they are colonising our lives more and more. They are not an army; instead they have become a banal daily sight.  

    We need to remember how it was, we’ve always been told, but memory can’t just be long term, can’t just be about the worst thing to ever happen to the country. If we need to have faith in history, we also need to have faith in a more recent past. Twenty years of Berlusconi were not a much better enemy. He facilitated and encouraged the national craving for a new strong leader.  This has led us to where we are today. Salvini might be wearing black clothes soon, but his darkness comes from somewhere very close in time, much closer than the 1920s. It originates in a time when power became laughable and, falsely, belonged to everyone.

    –

    When I was a child I believed that power was hidden. I believed authority was strictly dependent on invisibility, rulers had to be opaque. Politics was a land of dark rooms, crowded with men behind the curtains. But then Silvio Berlusconi made everything visible through the TV channels he owned, and now Matteo Salvini is making everything visible through the social media we think we own, when we actually don’t.

    The invisible power I believed in as a child never really existed. Power was never a series of dark rooms, but a house made of mirrors: we walk blindly in it, we hurt ourselves and we wonder where the cut came from. As I walk away from Salvini’s video in the airport I feel the same uneasiness I felt in Rimini when all I wanted was to step out of the miniature park, where everything was so ready to be crushed.

    Claudia Durastanti (Brooklyn, 1984) is a writer and literary translator, and author of four prize-winning novels. Her novel Cleopatra va in prigione (Cleopatra Goes to Prison) will be published in the UK by Dedalus in July 2019. The translation of her latest book, La straniera (The Stranger), will be published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Riverhead Books in the United States. In 2017 she started the Festival of Italian Literature in London with fellow writers and journalists based in the UK. She lives in London.

    Image credit: Sarah Lucas Agutoli

  • the fact of experiencing something or being affected by it because of being in a particular situation or place

    the fact of experiencing something or being affected by it because of being in a particular situation or place

    Livia Franchini is stuck between two countries and languages, ‘back and forth between two distinct, self-sufficient identities of home’.

     

    I have a problem with control and after many years of more or less quietly coping with it, I have recently sought therapy to improve my condition. In the first session, wanting to amuse my new therapist, somewhat needing her to be ‘on my side’, rather than on the other side of the couch, I suppose (though this is cognitive-behavioural therapy, these are blue NHS plastic chairs), I joke: ‘I have a problem with needing things to be perfect. The catch is I work as a writer, and I write in a language that I can’t fully master.’ I reveal that English isn’t the language I spoke for the first twenty years of my life; like most, her reaction is one of incredulity. I blend in, having almost fully lost my Italian accent.

    ‘Well, you’re not alone,’ she tells me. ‘What else?’

    I tell her that my need for control is usually triggered by interactions with others.

    –

    How did my irrational need for watertight control of any given situation become bound to a desire to query the world in a language that isn’t my own? I still don’t have an answer to the riddle, despite having been stuck as a pendulum between Italy and the United Kingdom for the last eleven years: back and forth between two distinct, self-sufficient identities of home.

    I travel to Spain to teach a class of Spanish children about writing and translation. When I offer students the option between my first and my second language, they request I speak in Italian. They ask me to talk about my novel, of which they have read an extract. The original manuscript is in English, but I have translated a section of it into Italian myself, which was then translated into Spanish. The final product of this three-fold process is what the students have read. It makes my head spin to think about it. My Italian to Spanish translator has come along to the event and agrees to act as an interpreter, though I sense she is unsettled at the prospect of having to translate orally, imprecisely.

    I begin in Italian, taking care to speak slowly to facilitate translation. But I stumble, slow down, interrupt myself when I realise that I lack the appropriate specialist vocabulary to describe the novel I, myself, have written. It’s a book in English, I only ever think about it in English. A girl raises her hand and asks, in Spanish: ‘What’s your book even about? I don’t get it.’ I answer, professionally: ‘You don’t have to get it, or even like it. That’s allowed.’ I smile. A boy speaks next, to me, directly, in good English, ‘How could you move to England at nineteen without considering the consequences?’ Suddenly, I am made visible. I have no answer to give him.

    ‘The thing is, she didn’t think about them,’ my Spanish translator laughs, jumping in to rescue me.

    –

    One important consequence of conceiving the private self as an idiom is that it can no more be equated with an interior than an external self. Your idiom is somehow both openly visible and strangely imperceptible. Walking, smiling, speaking, writing, joking, drawing, eating, weeping, listening – in all these modes of being and doing, you’re revealed as at once the most self-evident fact and the most impenetrable secret. Your private self is diffused in all the ways you express yourself, and so it isn’t reducible to any of them. It’s concealed, you could say, less behind than in the face you show the world. You are a secret that hides in plain sight. [1]

     

    I tire myself out, I say to my therapist, because I cannot avoid engaging with any one line of questioning that is presented to me. It’s like playing Devil’s advocate, but there’s no fun in it. It can get really bad, and when it is bad I have the impression that six or so fleshy tendrils are stemming out of my brain, extending in different directions. When it is really bad it feels like six very developed private conversations are happening at the same time in different quarters of my brain. It has become second nature for me to operate in this way.

    My therapist asks me to make annotations on a paper diagram, a working model known as the ‘hot cross bun’. I fill in each section and stare down at my own words, taking in the familiar vertigo of cognitive dissonance. Written down in English, my fears feel more manageable; at the same time, I’m not sure what I’m reading is about me at all, though I recognize the familiar handwriting. Did I really write this? How is this supposed to make me feel better?

    The private self speaks its own tragic idiom: a language of one, with no referent. If the true self makes itself visible through the weave of experience, existing across two languages means that the tapestry is woven with thread of two different colours. You develop the habit of sticking two fingers into the fissures in the texture and wiggling them. Sometimes this habit leads to analytical overgrooming. Six separate arguments shooting off into six different directions: your sense of self is tethered to each equally and the strain to retain control over it all makes you feel like you might be about to explode.

    The private self, stretched thin in such a way, on some days seems barely sufficient to cover up the worst of two cultures – two countries, bubbling under the upper level of your consciousness. How is it possible to keep a hold over it? On some days, the lid just comes loose.

    For instance, there is your momentary annoyance when the Spanish children asked you to speak in Italian, because it would’ve been easier to speak of your work in English; the momentary assumption that everybody will understand you, wherever you travel. Did you really pick up on one of the worst traits of the British? How did you lose a grip on your own, Italian thought process? Your private self is other: you don’t have the intellectual capacity to keep track of it all. Some days you give away more about yourself than you had intended to: you’re untidy, indecently exposed. Sometimes others seem to know more about you than you do.

    There is an Italian acquaintance who introduces himself afresh in Italian, after first introducing himself in English: ‘Sorry, I had to. You’re a completely different person when you speak in each of your languages.’ A university professor, to whom you confess you are struggling with research, tells you you’re no longer entitled ‘playing the language card.’ But this isn’t a game: your mother understands your English the worst out of all of your English-speaking friends. Your two selves, the Italian and the English, are equally, privately familiar to you, but never publicly so to anyone you to talk to.

    Others can only engage with one self or the other at one time, but they see that half of you with more clarity than you do yourself, pick up on all the details. By which I mean, as I write this, I have no full control over what you learn about me by reading it, and that terrifies me.

    –

    I recently learned from a friend that there is a Spanish word for feeling shame and embarrassment on behalf of someone else; the closest equivalent I can think of in English is ‘cringe’, but this is a poor translation, conveying nothing of shame’s ability to flood the thresholds of selves. In poetry, the confessional is served up with this feeling so often that they might be considered composite, two parts of the same whole. [2]

    Back in Spain, I’m about to give a reading at a place called Vergüenza Ajena, and despite the ominous moniker, something good happens to me there. The place is a small, welcoming bar – warm (it is winter). I am sleep-deprived, highly-strung, quite unhinged. Reading as a foreigner in a combination of English and Italian, in front of an audience whose language I don’t speak, I am unshackled from the expectation of being understood. I read confidently, very well. It is an intimate performance. Afterwards, a Venezuelan woman comes over to hug me. ‘I didn’t know what you were saying, but it made sense to me,’ she says, in Spanish, or this is what I understand, and it is enough for a private understanding between us, a small triumph of poetry weaving together the strands of languages and selves.

    … writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness. [3]

     

    ‘This is the working model we’ll be using. We’ll call it a “hot-cross bun”, because, well, it looks like one, doesn’t it? In this section, write about a situation that made you feel bad. Try to remember all of the details.’

    There is no Easter equivalent of a hot-cross bun in Italy. We do, however, have Easter eggs.

     

    [1] Josh Cohen, The Private Life (London: Granta, 2013)

    [2] Daisy LaFarge, ‘Wildly Unmothered’

    [3] Joyce Carol Oates, quoted in Eva Hoffman, ‘The Uses of the Past’, in Writing Worlds 1, The Norwich Exchanges, ed. Vesna Goldsworthy.

    Livia Franchini is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy. Selected publications include The Quietus, 3:AM, The White Review, LESTE, Hotel, PEN Transmissions and the anthologies On Bodies (3 of Cups) and Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press). She has translated Natalia Ginzburg, James Tiptree Jr. and Michael Donaghy among many others. Livia is one of the inaugural writers-in-residence of the Connecting Emerging Literary Artist project, funded by the European Union, which will see her work translated into 6 languages. She has performed from her work internationally, most notably at Faber Social, Standon Calling, Lowlands and Hay Festival. Livia is currently at work on her first novel, as part of a funded PhD in experimental women’s writing at Goldsmiths.

    Photo credit: Robin Silas Christian

  • For sale along with the book

    Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.

    …Then there is the problem of my creative choices, which I am not capable of explaining clearly, especially to those who might pick out of the text phrases and situations and feel wounded by them. I am used to writing as if it were a matter of dividing up the booty. To one character I give a trait of Tom’s, to another a phrase of Dick’s; I reproduce situations in which people I know and have known have actually been. I draw on real situations and events but not as they really happened; rather, I assume as having ‘really happened’ only the impressions or fantasies that originated in the years when that experience was lived. So what I write is full of references to situations and events that are real and verifiable but reorganized and reinvented as if they had never happened. The farther I am from my writing, then, the more it becomes what it wants to be: a novelistic invention. The closer I get, and am inside it, the more overwhelmed the novel is by real details, and the book stops being a novel, and risks wounding me, above all, as the malicious account of a disrespectful ingrate. Thus I want my novel to go as far as possible precisely so that it can present its novelistic truth and not the accidental scraps –which it nevertheless contains – of autobiography.

    But the media, especially when it links photographs of the author with the book, media appearances by the writer with its cover, goes precisely in the opposite direction: it abolishes the distance between author and book, operates in such a way that the one is spent in favour of the other, mixes the first with the materials of the second and vice versa. In the face of these types of intervention, I feel exactly what you correctly define as ‘private timidity’. I worked for a long time, plunging headlong into the material that I wanted to narrate, to distill from my own experience and that of others whatever ‘public’ material could be distilled, whatever appeared to me extractable from voices, facts, persons near and far, to construct characters and a narrative organism of some public coherence. Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for ‘public interest’, would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.

    Perhaps this last part of the subject, in particular, merits discussion. Is there a way of safeguarding the right of an author to choose to establish, once and for all, through his writing alone, what of himself should become public? The editorial marketplace is in particular preoccupied with finding out if the author can be used as an engaging character and thus assist the journey of his work through the marketplace. If one yields, one accepts, at least in theory, that the entire person, with all his experiences and his affections, is placed for sale along with the book. But the nerves of the private person are too sensitive. If they are out in the open, all they offer is a spectacle of suffering or joy or malice or resentment (sometimes even generosity, but, like it or not, on display); certainly I cannot add anything to the work.

    I would conclude this subject by saying, finally, that writing with the knowledge that I don’t have to appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom. It’s a corner of my own that I intend to defend, now that I’ve tried it. If I were deprived of it, I would feel abruptly impoverished…

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Roberto Saviano

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.
    Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon.

    Zero Zero Zero follows money and cocaine all round the world, presenting a global phenomenon in which organised crime becomes part of ‘the power dynamic of contemporary capitalism’. The book traces how the $400 billion generated each year by drug trafficking filters into the international banking system through money laundering, from Wall Street to the City of London. Can you describe how banks and other global players get involved? Why did you decide to focus your attention on cocaine?

    The mechanism is very simple and is based on an established practice which is the same throughout the world: absence of control. For too many years the banking giants have failed to question where huge sums of money are coming from and why they are being moved. And when controls have been carried out, as in the case of Wachovia Bank, this is often because individuals have decided to do their duty. Martin Woods, a senior anti-money laundering officer in the London offices and previously a detective in the National Crime Squad, compiled so many Suspicious Activity Reports that he was hindered in his work by the same people who had commissioned the controls. Everything must start from the banks since it is their vaults that keep the money for criminal organisations, and it is from there that the modern democracies are being eaten away from within. And why I decided to focus on cocaine is easy to answer: it is by far the most profitable business for the criminal cartels.

    It is a global story, but also very European. What is the effect of the cocaine trade on the UK, and in particular, on London?

    The UK is a country of cocaine users in which the turnover reaches £6 billion a year, of which £1 billion alone for the 25 or 30 tons of cocaine imported. There are an estimated one million users, often very young, and one in ten people has admitted using cocaine at least once. And these are the official figures, therefore much lower than the real ones.

    What is your view of contemporary capitalism and the way our economy works?

    Generally speaking, I tend not to look back, but so far as the functioning of the economy is concerned, I’m afraid there weren’t enough antibodies to prevent the massive infiltration of capital from illegal trafficking. This has placed a terrible burden on the future economy. It is by overrunning and taking control of ever vaster spaces in the legal economy that criminal organisations leave no way ahead for the free market, the real one, the one whose lifeblood is competition, real competition. It is said the coca plant has its roots in South America and has its leaves in Europe. There is no separation, it is all connected: cultivation, processing and distribution.

    You claim that cocaine affects all of us and many people, from lawyers to cleaners, use it to sustain the pace of their work. What are the figures involved? Do you think that the scale of this problem is growing?

    The figure of 15 million users in the world doesn’t mean very much because this is an official figure and, in the case of illegal substances, there is a submerged area that is equal to if not greater than the figures in our possession. Cocaine is the preferred stimulant for anyone who needs to keep up a high level of performance and this is not just the case for particular categories but for anyone who needs to stay alert. On the other hand, the drop in prices makes it accessible to everyone.

    Your book is very gripping and your style of writing very immediate and novelistic. One reads it almost like a thriller. Why did you decide on this writing style?

    Yes, I’ve certainly thought about it. For a long time I was undecided about the form to give to Zero Zero Zero. Then I decided to follow the path I took for Gomorrah of the non-fiction novel, as I feel that reality exceeds all imagination and I didn’t want to deprive readers of Zero Zero Zero of the thrill of reading stories apparently absurd but which have actually happened. I didn’t want there to be any doubts about how unbelievable reality can be. If I had used fictional names or had included unreal details, the power of reality would have ended up being compromised.

    Your book exposing Gomorrah made you into a symbol of the universal right to freedom of speech but your life has been profoundly changed and your personal freedom hugely limited because of the risks involved. Would you make the same choice if you knew the consequences?

    Absolutely not. The price I am paying, from every point of view, is too high.

    You said in interviews that you mistrust everybody. You also said that you looked into the abyss of narco-trafficking and that now ‘the abyss wants to peer inside you’. How has this exposure to risks and to cruelty changed you personally?

    It has made me a worse person. You begin not to trust anybody, not just because of the threats received, but also because you notice the suspicion of what ought to be the ‘right-minded’ part of society. I know the majority of people are on my side, they support my battle and appreciate the work I’m doing, but there’s a part who scorn every effort. Those who have not stood up, those who have not rebelled against the rules imposed by local criminal organisations, have turned me into a black sheep. Those who have not stood up, those who have not rebelled, cannot accept that someone else has done so. And then living under escort for so many years – it’s now been ten years – makes me a walking dead, but also someone who ought to have died and hasn’t. The most atrocious thing I often hear is: ‘If the criminal organisations really wanted to kill you then you’d be dead by now.’ This suggestion is atrocious because it admits by implication that these organisations are omnipotent and that any protection against their will has no sense. I, personally, refuse to imagine that a world really exists in which it is for them to decide who can live and who must die. The escort still has a sense: it is the state that is saying ‘I am stronger.’ And not a police state, but the state as a community, as people who rally to support those in danger.

    Your research for Gomorrah has been very involved – you famously worked undercover at a mob-owned construction site and waited tables at a Mafia wedding. How did you do your research for Zero Zero Zero?

    Life under escort has, on the one hand, made it more difficult to move about but, on the other, as a writer who is known and identifiable, I’ve been given access to a quantity of information that is rarely available to someone unknown. I’m becoming a sort of catalyst for stories; I’m contacted by ex-criminals, former drug smugglers, police forces, who tell me their experiences so that through me they can be brought to light. Most of my work now involves checking sources, carrying out the right research at local level, since I can no longer wander around aimlessly and choose the storylines I consider most interesting and useful for developing my ideas.

    You believe in telling the truth and spreading information. How do you see the impact of your books on readers?

    I believe in it deeply, and this is why I haven’t written fiction books. Every truth, of course, however objective it might be, is the truth of the person telling it. Naturally, the truth of a man under escort for almost ten years is the manic, claustrophobic viewpoint of a man with an obsession – an obsession that has ruined his life. Paradoxically those reviews written about Zero Zero Zero that get closest to the point are not the best ones. When I read criticisms of the style I think the journalist has understood exactly what he has read. My writing in Gomorrah was already an obstacle course, and now, in Zero Zero Zero it has become a cage, into which the reader agrees to enter even before reading the opening lines. Those who pick up my book know who I am: I’m not a writer and I’m not a journalist – I’m a spurious being who recounts what he sees filtered through his own eyes, which are now those of an animal in a cage.

    Read more about Zero Zero Zero on the Penguin Press website and buy it from our book partner Foyles.

    On Wednesday 1 July, intelligence2
     hosted Roberto Saviano in conversation with Robert Collins about the war on organised crime. Full video footage and a podcast of the event will be made available here soon.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Margaret Mazzantini

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.

    Many of your books touch upon current conflicts, their aftermath and the tragedy they cause to individuals. How do you see the role of literature?

    Literature is increasingly alone. We live in an excessively extrovert period, everyone wants to say something before they’ve even thought about what to say. Writing is damaged, words lose their meaning. We speak too loudly and too quickly, we scream on television, we write on our iPhones. To deprive words of their dimension and depth is to become dehumanised, because we are the words we utter. It’s words that make us human. For me as a writer, introspection is the only way to protect human beings. Our society needs to find its way back to introspection.

    In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino said that literature must be ambitious, must set itself vast objectives. That’s what I think too. For me, literature is a revolutionary force, it requires courage and risk-taking, it must have the ability to thrust you out of your comfort zone, take you on a dangerous journey, a journey into the unknown, and then bring you back to the centre of yourself. The purpose of literature is to make us more human. Today more than ever.

    In Twice Born you deal with the post-Yugoslav conflict and the siege of Sarajevo; in Morning Sea it is the current refugee crisis and Libya in the 1960s and 1970s.  How do you choose your subjects? Is the fact that all these dramas happen on the doorstep of Europe significant?

    I always find it hard to talk about how my work comes into being. Even now, I don’t know how it functions. For me, writing is like trusting in a creative engine that’s travelling towards an unknown destination. I never look for a meaning first. I never know why I’ve decided to write a particular book. If I did, I wouldn’t write it. I write to talk about what I don’t know, which only writing reveals to me. Every time it’s as if I was trying to stop a landslide. The first mental image is always the recurring one of a landslide, a hole. I go through an apprenticeship, a long inner preparation. A kind of spiritual retreat before battle commences. I withdraw from the world in order to try and restore something of the world. What I want before anything else is to free myself of my own ego. I never write in front of a mirror, I write leaning out of an open window. At this window, I see everything that goes on. The story of the siege of Sarajevo is emblematic, a terrible war that took place in the heart of Europe just a few years ago and seems to have already been forgotten. Very few people know the painful story of the Italians of Libya. I felt the need to go back to these roots of pain that unite the peoples of Europe. They are things that young people today know nothing about. In this sense, literature can have a political role.

    Morning Sea is also an exploration of Italy’s colonial past and the ‘festering wounds and collective guilt’ carried by the whole nation. Why did you decide to look at this period in Italian history?

    I’m not an essayist, I’m just a writer of novels. The novel is the Trojan horse in which I hide my warriors: the subjects that mean a lot to me, the things which make me indignant, which I can’t swallow, which weigh on my conscience.

    I feel I’m being given the opportunity, in a very small way, to stitch up the wound, to ease the pain by simply not leaving it alone. To put people in contact with themselves, with the damaged, most bereft part of themselves. In this excessively extrovert era, we aren’t really in contact with the pain of the world, we are an expression of its sickness. A writer is like a detective who lingers at the scene of the crime when the floodlights have been turned off. He looks for traces of a past that may just possibly point to the future. Since the end of the Cold War, which froze the world into two opposing poles, the great rift of our time has come to the surface: on one side, the rich West, on the other, the South of the world. Through the human stories of my characters I’ve unearthed the hidden story of Italian colonialism, which was about poor people deported and flung out into the desert, but also about a cruel and ruthless policy.

    You look at these events through the damaged lives of two women and their families: Angelina, Italian, born in Tripoli and expelled from Libya following Gaddafi’s coup, and Jamila, Bedouin, escaping the Libyan unrest with her son across the Mediterranean. Why did you decide to link these two women in your novel?

    A writer is a person who lives in an unbalanced way, between her need to withdraw, her own inner tension, and the great conflicts convulsing the world. Like a seismologist, she captures the tremors of the time in which she lives. My starting point was those distressing images of boats and people fleeing wars and famine, which we see every day on our television sets. An abyss of pain which seems as if it will never end.

    True charity, as we know, isn’t throwing the dog a bone. It’s becoming that hungry dog. We Italians know what that means, we’ve also been hungry dogs. We mustn’t forget it.  There are stories of emigration that everyone knows about, like the Italians who went to America, but nobody remembers the ‘Tripolini’, the Italians who were born and brought up in Libya, and were expelled by Gaddafi after his coup in 1970. I felt the need to unearth this story, the story of these ‘interrupted lives’. Because that same sea which today is overrun by people fleeing Africa, just a few decades ago was crossed by Italians with the same desperation in their eyes. The history of man is the history of his hunger. Man moves through hunger. The hunger of the poor. The greedy hunger of the powerful.

    Your book is also a serious reflection on the refugee crisis on the borders of Europe. And tragically, even though your book was published in Italy a few years ago, the terrible refugee crisis has deepened since then and people die every day trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. How do you think Europeans should address this problem?

    Europe is wondering how to stop this migration, how to ‘sort out’ these people. It’s a ‘technical’ problem. Now everyone is afraid of this ‘black sea’. We should probably have thought about it before. Angelina in my book says: no nation that has colonised another nation is innocent.

    For us Italians, it’s personal. These people reach our coasts, or die in our sea. Italy is surrounded by sea. The people of Lampedusa have been heroic over the past few years. They’ve had a huge burden to bear. But the world shouldn’t need isolated heroes, just greater sharing of the responsibility.

    The Mediterranean is a door that must remain open. A bridge. I thought of that hanging bridge, of a silent dialogue between a woman of the desert fleeing war who boards a boat to get to Italy and an Italian woman born in Tripoli who looks at the sea and keeps searching for the meaning of her interrupted story, but also the moral responsibility of her country.

    I thought of a boy collecting the flotsam from shipwrecks on the beach of Lampedusa. A wonderful place, where the sea turtles lay their eggs, a place where death arrives every day. The boy collects this flotsam and pins it to a big panel. It’s as if he’s trying to restore memory, to stop a shipwreck. He may become an artist, but he doesn’t know it yet.

    The countries of Africa were colonised and exploited. We know what an enormous mistake the war in Iraq was, when the Arab spring came we all hoped things would change. But what emerged was the black flower of Isis. Those condemned to death wear the same orange jumpsuits as the prisoners in Guantanamo. Now we live in fear of beheadings on the internet, terrorist attacks, the Islamisation of the world. And many of us start to think it was better before… when there were local dictators who kept their populations subjugated. The vague idea of exporting democracy has failed in countries organised on tribal lines that are hard to fathom. The results are there for all to see, the civilian population is increasingly isolated, at the mercy of ragtag armies of madmen, which somehow attract the young. The phenomenon of infiltrators, of foreign fighters, is appalling. Now everyone is afraid – of these poor people arriving on ramshackle boats… of our dark-skinned neighbour who goes to the mosque. And we all know that whoever controls fear controls the world…

    Through Angelina you look at the issue of immigration and the feelings of alienation that it often brings. You were born in Ireland, lived in various countries and then settled in Italy. Have you experienced these feelings yourself?

    I felt a great deal of empathy with Angelina, a brusque, withdrawn woman with an interrupted life behind her. A woman who every Monday has a day’s silence like Gandhi and writes notes to communicate with the world. On one of these notes that she leaves to her son, she writes: break down the wall of feelings. That’s what I try to do every time I write, I try to break down that wall.

    I come from an eccentric family that wandered all over. I’ve always felt rather out of place everywhere, I’ve had to find a place within myself. An artist is always an illegal immigrant, a person who makes himself and other people uncomfortable, who finds it hard to acclimatise himself to the surface of things. Far from everything, he still remains in contact with his ‘ancestors’, with a distant spirit.

    Imagery and landscape play a huge part in Morning Sea. The sun is unsparing and the sea both uniting and dividing.  Are landscapes as powerful in your other novels?

    I write through images… for me, the activity that’s closest to writing is dreaming. In dreams, without the control of the ego, our inner images are able to emerge. Jung said we need to go back to the beauty in our hearts, and the heart doesn’t reason through ideas, but through images…

    The sea is an inner landscape that recurs constantly in my dreams and in my books. The sea is a psychic, mysterious, evocative place. A living barrier, like a blank page. It’s calm but it hides storms. The sea is amniotic, it’s the blue blood of the earth.

    This novel has been translated by Ann Gagliardi and your books have been translated into many languages. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

    A writer is her writing, the words she chooses, the rhythm with which she puts them together. When a writer finds her language, she finds the book. Language is the inner voice, the psyche of a book. You have to find the ‘music’. To restore this music in another language is very hard. That’s why I think translators have a very tough profession; they don’t just translate, they rewrite. They have to allow themselves to be ‘inhabited’, to reach an empathy with the subconscious level of the subject matter. I’ve been lucky, Anne Gagliardi did a really extraordinary job. Morning Sea is a very lyrical book, and translating poetry is particularly tricky.

    Who are your literary influences?

    Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Morante, Duras, Woolf, Böll… and today, Auster, Kureishi, Grossman, Oates… I could go on. Mishima says: life is short, but I want to live forever. That’s the possibility that true writers give themselves and their readers.

    Are there any young Italian writers whom you would like to recommend to readers and publishers abroad?

    I’ve heard that in America only six per cent of books are by foreign authors, and that includes Dante! And yet we have many well-known writers. Two names stand out: Roberto Saviano, a social and political writer, and Elena Ferrante, who’s more private and mysterious.

    Howard Curtis has translated more than ninety books from Italian, French and Spanish, mostly contemporary fiction.

    About the Editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books.

  • The Weight of Language

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    France for me – long, long before Paris – was Yonville-l’Abbaye, eight leagues from Rouen. I remember crouching inside that place-name one afternoon, when I was barely fourteen, traveling through the pages of Madame Bovary. Slowly, over the years, thousands of other names of cities and towns followed, some near Yonville, others far away. But France remained essentially Yonville, as I discovered it one afternoon decades ago, and it seemed to me that at the same time I came upon the craft of making metaphors and upon myself.

    I certainly saw myself in Berthe Bovary, Emma and Charles’s daughter, and felt a jolt. I knew that I had my eyes on a page, I could see the words clearly, yet it seemed to me that I had approached my mother just as Berthe tried to approach Emma, catching hold of her par le bout, les rubans de son tablier (‘the ends of her apron strings’). I heard clearly the voice of Madame Bovary saying, with increasing annoyance, ‘Laisse-moi! Laisse-moi! Eh! Laisse- moi donc!’ (‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Won’t you leave me alone!’), and it was like the voice of my mother when she was lost in her tasks or her thoughts, and I didn’t want to leave her, I didn’t want her to leave me. That cry of irritation of a woman dragged away from her own bouleversements, like a leaf on a rainy day toward the black mouth of a manhole, made a deep impression on me. The blow arrived right afterward, with her elbow. Berthe – I – alla tomber au pied de la comode, contre la patère de cuivre; elle s’y coupa la joue, le sang sortit (‘fell at the foot of the chest of drawers, against the brass fittings; she cut her cheek, it began to bleed’).

    I read Madame Bovary in the city of my birth, Naples. I read it laboriously, in the original, on the orders of a cold, brilliant teacher. My native language, Neapolitan, has layers of Greek, Latin, Arabic, German, Spanish, English, and French – a lot of French. Laisse-moi (‘leave me alone’) in Neapolitan is làssame and sang (‘blood’) is ’o sanghe. It’s not so surprising if the language of Madame Bovary seemed to me, at times, my own language, the language in which my mother appeared to be Emma and said laisse-moi. She also said le sparadrap (but she pronounced it ’o sparatràp), the adhesive plaster that had to be put on the cut I’d gotten – while I read and was Berthe – when I fell contre la patère de cuivre.

    I understood then, for the first time, that geography, language, society, politics, the whole history of a people were for me in the books that I loved and which I could enter as if I were writing them. France was near, Yonville not that far from Naples, the wound dripped blood, the sparatràp, stuck to my cheek, pulled the stretched skin to one side. Madame Bovary struck with swift punches, leaving bruises that haven’t faded. All my life since then, I’ve wondered whether my mother, at least once, with Emma’s words precisely – the same terrible words – thought, looking at me, as Emma does with Berthe:  C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide! (‘It’s strange how ugly this child is!’) Ugly: to appear ugly to one’s own mother. I have rarely read-heard a better conceived, better written, more unbearable sentence. The sentence arrived from France and hit me right in the chest, it’s still hitting me, harder than the shove with which Emma sent – sends – little Berthe against the chest of drawers, against the brass fittings.

    The words entered and emerged from me: when I read a book I never think of who has written it, it’s as if I were doing it myself. So as a child I didn’t know the names of authors; every book was written by itself, it began and ended, it excited me or not, made me cry or made me laugh. The Frenchman named Gustave Flaubert came later, and by then I knew quite a lot about France: I had been there not only thanks to books and not happily, as in books; I could measure the true distance between Naples and Rouen, between the Italian novel and the French. Now I read Flaubert’s letters, his other books. Every sentence was well shaped, some more than others, but not one – not one ever had for me the devastating force of that mother’s thought: C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide! In certain phases of my life I’ve imagined that only a man could conceive it, and only a man without children, a peevish Frenchman, a bear shut up in his house honing his complaints, a misogynist who thought he was father and mother just because he had a niece. In other periods I’ve believed, angrily, bitterly, that men who are masters of writing are able to have their female characters say what women truly think and say and live but do not dare write. Today, instead, I’ve returned to the beliefs of early adolescence. I think that authors are devoted, diligent scribes, who draw in black and white following a more or less rigorous order of their own, but that the true writing, what counts, is the work of readers. Although the page of Flaubert is in French, Emma’s laisse-moi, read in Naples, has Neapolitan cadences, the brass fittings make ’o sanghe gush from Berthe’s cheek, and Charles Bovary stretches the child’s skin by sticking ’o sparatràp on it. It’s my mother who thought, but in her language, comm’è brutta chesta bambina (“How ugly this child is”). And I believe that she thought it for the same reason Emma thinks it of Berthe. So I’ve tried, over the years, to take that sentence out of French and place it somewhere on a page of my own, write it myself to feel its weight, transport it into the language of my mother, attribute it to her, hear it in her mouth and see if it’s a woman’s phrase, if a female really could say it, if I’ve ever thought it of my daughters, if, in other words, it should be rejected and erased or accepted and elaborated, removed from the page of masculine French and transported into the language of female-daughter-mother. That is the work that truly leads to France, juxtaposing sexes, languages, peoples, eras, geography.

    The central passages of this essay were conceived as a response to the Swedish publisher Bromberg, who, after acquiring the rights to The Days of Abandonment and reading the translation, decided not to publish it, considering the behavior of Olga, the novel’s protagonist, toward her children morally reprehensible (cf. ‘Ferrante molesta per la Svezia,’ by Cinzia Fiori, Corriere della Sera, October 21, 2003). The essay was later published, with some modifications, by Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, of Amsterdam, for the 2004 Paris book fair, in the anthology Frankrijk, dat ben ik (Wereldbibliotheek; 2004), under the title ‘Het gewicht van de taal’ (‘The Weight of Language’). It also appeared in the Repubblica of June 28, 2005.

    You can read a review of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay at The Telegraph website.

    You can buy Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay through our bookseller partner Foyles.

  • The Earthquake Method

    From constant earthquakes to a Borges short story, Giorgio Vasta’s dispatch for PEN Atlas offers an original, honest and illuminating take on the current state of Italy and its politics

    Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt

    From time to time I ask myself why I wrote my first book. Because I wanted to tell a story of ineffectual love, I answer my own question. Because I wanted that story of ineffectual love to have a precise historical setting, I add. Because that precise historical setting, Italy in the 1970s, coincides with my own childhood and pre-adolescence, I think on. Because there’s a curious affinity, to my mind at least, between the febrile intensity of pre-adolescence and that of 1970s Italy. The phase of personal development and the historical period are both pervaded, it seems to me, by a kind of restlessness, a constant succession of almost imperceptible physical upheavals. But whereas the pre-adolescent body changes as it grows, the body of Italian society changed without ever growing.

    Thirty-five years after 1978 (the year in which the story I wrote is set), although the socio-cultural reality of the country has undoubtedly altered, it still seems like an organism that’s constitutionally incapable of reaching adulthood. It’s as though the bodily functions, which ought to ensure that change leads to development, have atrophied.

    And yet, if you look at the outward, the most conspicuous, phenomena, the appearance of change is very marked.

    Let’s consider the events of the past few months, after a fleeting glance at that mass of social and anthropological metamorphoses – the twenty-year Berlusconian period – which was both the effect of what had happened in previous decades (following the end of the Second World War) and the cause of what has happened since: an intermediate period which serves as a magnifying glass for examining what happened (and did not happen) in Italy during the final years of the twentieth century and the early years of the new one.

    To understand what the past few months in Italy have been like, you have to imagine an earthquake. The ground starts to quiver, the shaking grows stronger and stronger, but then, when it ought to subside and die away, when this pathology of the earth’s crust ought to give space and time back to physiology, it does not subside and die away; it continues, it remains.

    In Italy an earthquake is in progress.

    But the constant shocks are not greeted by panic, or even fear. At most a fine dust of anxiety hangs in the air, condensing, when evening comes, into a well-worn set of rhetorical modes (diatribe, invective, pathos, sarcasm) on political chat shows on television. The overriding feeling you get is that the earthquake is being institutionalized.

    After the shock of February 24th and 25th, the dates of our latest national elections, a picture emerged that is almost unparalleled. It became clear that in generating what was in effect a three-way tie (the Partito Democratico, the Popolo della Libertà, and the Movimento 5 Stelle) the Italians had voted for instability. They had done so by revealing the existence – in some cases the persistence – of three distinct electorates, and therefore of three distinct cultural physiognomies, within the nation. That is to say, in brutal synthesis:  a perennially irresolute centre-left which, through a constant fear of making radical decisions, ends up losing the trust of its own electors; a centre-right which for years has appealed to the gut instincts and fears of millions of citizens with whom it shares a desire for an ever more simplified political grammar; and lastly, the Movimento 5 Stelle, which claims to be the only true political alternative, speaks in quasi-religious terms of an apocalypse and a new birth in Italian politics, and deploys a rhetorical system dominated by callow protest and delusions of self-evident purity.

    This inconclusive equilibrium has led on the one hand to the re-election of Giorgio Napolitano as President of the Republic, a kind of political déjà vu or persistence of vision; and on the other to the appointment of Enrico Letta to lead a government resembling those little green salads that are served up as a side dish to whatever main course you choose, the insipid sustenance of a regime that seems able to function only through conditions and compromises (not too much salt, not too much oil), again lacking the natural courage of decisiveness. A method – a peculiarly Italian one, it would seem – for maintaining the system of pressures and counter-pressures, balances and imperceptible imbalances that underlies our never-ending earthquake, our irremediable fever.

    Italy, then – both in its 1978 and in its 2013 versions – is an ominous, uncomfortable presence in the centre of Europe, a drunken country, a socio-cultural body that shudders, seethes and quakes. Its borders quiver with tremors and aftershocks.

    Just as Jorge Luis Borges describes in Deutsches Requiem, through the confession of a Nazi officer under sentence of death, what the Germany of the first half of the twentieth century gives to Europe (a ‘circular, perfect gift’), so Italy – minus the tragic circumstances of war and the holocaust (slipping, rather, from national tragedy into national tragi-comedy) – offers itself to Europe as a symbol of seemingly unfathomable processes that can be summed up in a question: what happens when a nation’s history has failed to build a self-sustaining democratic culture (I don’t mean a democracy in perfect health, but at least one with an adequate immune system), and the nation is faced with the challenges and ambiguities of the present*?

     

    *I note in passing that the word ‘present’, as well as indicating the time in which we live, also denotes a gift. In short, Italy bestows, on itself and on Europe, the ‘circular, perfect gift’ of a precise, pitiless perception of the time in which we are immersed.

     

    About the Author

    Giorgio Vasta was born in Palermo in 1970 and now lives and works in Turin. A former editor at the publishing house Einaudi, his stories have been published in various anthologies. Time on My Hands is his first novel.

    About the Translator

    Jonathan Hunt divides his time between Italy and the UK. His translations from the Italian include Niccolò Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared (Canongate, 2003) and Luca Rastello’s I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton and Live Happily (Granta, 2010).

     

  • Grammar and Glamour: On Translating Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar

    Following our previous PEN Atlas piece by Diego Marani, his English translator Judith Landry talks us through the strange music of Finnish and translation as walking a tight-rope

    Diego Marani, the author of ‘New Finnish Grammar’ which I have recently translated, adopts a blessedly laissez-faire attitude towards his translators: they know best. Such modesty and trust are surely unusual; many translators have their work criticized by authors who clearly do not know their language as well as they do. I had always dreamt of translating a living author whom I could consult if difficulties arose. But in this case none did (or so I am blithe enough to believe). It felt like an opportunity missed. When asked what it felt like to be ‘collaborating’ with Marani, I would reply that there was no collaboration. He wrote and I translated. But it was strange, and exciting, to set eyes on ‘my’ author; I only wished that I had some questions to ask him … At one point he and I had our photograph taken by a photographer specializing in ‘authors and their translators’. Now there’s a subject for you. The photographer asked us to sit nearer to one another on the sofa; I said we didn’t know each other very well.

    On first reading this novel, I was not at all sure that I could do it justice, but as I proceeded things just seemed to fall into place (or so I am blithe enough …) There is a lot in it about sound, about breathing, about the way words are formed in Finnish, that strangest of languages – it often seems to me that writing in French and Italian, the two languages from which I translate, has more in it about sound than writing in English does; words about sounds are inevitably abstract, and I have sometime found this to be a problem; I’m not sure sound interests me all that much, though the loss is certainly mine.

    The title itself is bewitching, if in a sense meaningless. New Finnish Grammar? Not many novels have the word ‘grammar’ in the title, and no doubt it was as off-putting to some as it was intriguing to others, though I gather that the words ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ are somehow related, odd though this may seem. In any translation, there are always particularly appealing phrases or sentences in the original to which the translator simply cannot do justice, and all that he or she can hope for is to improve on the original at some other point, thereby evening things out after a fashion.

    There is much talk nowadays about the most apposite metaphor for translation. I go along with the tight-rope walker metaphor myself; it’s not quite like walking between the Twin Towers, but it does feel dangerous, you’re never sure quite how much of a safety-net you have or which phrase might cause you to lose your balance. In a way, perhaps, that long pole that tightrope walkers hold is your knowledge of your own language, and the safety-net is your knowledge of the other. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

    About the Author

    Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

    Her translations are: The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Prague Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.

    Her latest translation is The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, published in May 2012 by Dedalus.
     
    She won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for New Finnish Grammar in June 2012.  Find out more.

     

     

     

  • Translation as a Creative Process

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, award-winning Italian writer and European Commission official Diego Marani considers the role of the author in the translation process

    For any writer, being translated is always flattering. But it is also a delicate passage, because the translation implies a transformation of the text an author cannot control. Even with a good knowledge of the target language, no writer is able to express a pertinent judgement on the translation of his book and is in some way condemned to have a passive role in the process. Many writers are very jealous of their texts and cannot accept not to have any control on the translation. They often adopt an intrusive attitude towards the translator and pretend to interfere in his work, even when they have a very superficial knowledge of the language. They think in this way to preserve the authenticity of their text and to protect it from alterations. Alteration of the original: this is the obsession of all writers! They forget that their sacred original text is but one of the many possibilities they had, the compromise between what they felt and what they were able to say. The translation of a book should be seen in this light, as a mediation between the original and the target culture. There is no other translation possible. To translate is not to pour out from one language into another. It is a kind of chemical process where the text must be reduced to its essential components and reassembled into the target language.For my part, I tend to have a completely different approach when one of my books is translated. I consider the translator a “second author” of my book, engaged in a creative process as deep and delicate as mine. He too must decide which of the  many possible ways best  conveys my meaning into his own language. I am ready to place my trust in him. He will have a perception of my text which I cannot have, he will see similarities between my language and his own which I cannot see.I am very much aware that sometimes, in order to obtain the same effects and atmosphere of a text in the target language, you have to modify the original. The translator needs to recreate connections that would be lost with a rigid translation. He has to take into account the cultural background of both languages. He will be the only one, able to grasp the music of a text, and I expect him to recreate in his translation a rhythm as similar as possible to the original. We must not forget that languages are first of all spoken, only afterwards written. Even if we read in silence, there is a music in our page like in a musical stave. I attach great importance to what my page sounds like. I often recite my texts after having written them. I need to hear also the sound of the language: it must fit with the rest. The smoothness of the words, the way they stick together, the pace of narration are as important as the plot. They are one of the ingredients of my writing. What I can do in order to help the translator is not to check words in a language I do not know and presume meanings I cannot completely grasp, but rather give him the most exhaustive information on the spirit of the text, the ideas that lie behind it, my thoughts and my feelings on the matter. Then there has to be trust. Though in a different way, we are both artists. The creativity of the translator lies exactly in this, that he grasps what I mean and has the ability to extract it from my page and graft it in the living tissue of another language.

    About the Author

    Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He works as a senior linguist for the European Union in Brussels.Every week he writes a column for a Swiss newspaper about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus.In Italian he has published six novels, including the highly acclaimed New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs, published in the UK by Dedalus Books.English PEN’s Writers in Translation Programme supported Diego’s latest novel The Last of the Vostyachs in 2012Judith Landry, the translator of  New Finnish Grammar was awarded the Oxford- Weidenfeld Prize for Translation in May 2012.