All posts tagged: Italian

The Swan

By MARZIA GRILLO

Translated by LOURDES CONTRERAS AND JULIA PELOSI-THORPE

Piece appears below in English and the original Italian.

 

Co-translating Marzia Grillo’s captivating short fiction “The Swan” (“Il cigno”) into English from Italian was an experimental process in which drafts ricocheted between the two of us over many months. This is in some ways typical for our collaboration… but, as we transform each piece, our approach morphs in fun directions, contingent on the fabric of our lives in a given moment. With “The Swan,” Julia fell in love with Grillo’s debut short story collection, The Sun’s Point of View (Il punto di vista del sole) in a Venetian bookstore and mocked up first and second versions on several high-velocity Italian trains in early 2022. Then, the project lapsed. Later that year, she and Lourdes met, were enchanted by one another, decided to co-translate, and Lourdes revived Julia’s draft. “The Swan” takes the reader into the middle of a lake in Lazio one afternoon, where, on a pedalo, a man proposes marriage for the nineteenth time to his unwilling girlfriend. The story is the first of the thirteen works of creative autofiction that make up the loving, disturbing world of The Sun’s Point of View. In a nexus of scenes across Grillo’s Rome, her immersive prose vivifies tormented characters who are moved deeply to desire (and destroy) themselves and others. As real and imagined figures fight for secure understandings of a reality that is suffused by a constant fog of instability, we the translators relish the challenge to locate in English what we can of the dark sparkle of Grillo’s dialogue, twisted narrative arcs, the emotional impetus of their intrigues, and their web of thematic resonances.

— Lourdes Contreras and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

The Swan
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Translation: Two Poems by Edith Bruck

By EDITH BRUCK

Translated by JEANNE BONNER

Poems appear below in English and the original Italian.

Translator’s Note

What I find indelible about Edith Bruck’s work is the subtle ways she introduces the topic of the Holocaust. A poem like “Pretty Soon” provides a glimpse of the author’s mindset – she managed to survive Auschwitz, and she hasn’t wasted a moment since her liberation as a teenager. She’s been incredibly prolific as a writer, and has traveled the world. But winning her freedom is an event forever married to the worst event ever: losing both of her parents in concentration camps. The challenge is to render that subtlety, which in the original is effortless. This is her life – it’s what she’s always known. 

This thematic back and forth is also present in “There Were Eight of Us.” There were eight of us – but not anymore. One brother was swallowed up by the Holocaust, to use a phrase Bruck often employs in other work.

Translation: Two Poems by Edith Bruck
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Operation Avalanche

By ROSSELLA MILONE

Translated from the Italian by LAURA MASINI and LINDA WORRELL 

“I am living permanently in my dream, 
from which I make brief forays into reality.”

—Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

 

  1.  

Erminia danced the Charleston. My friend Gianluca told me how, almost every evening, his grandmother would pause on the threshold of the French doors that opened onto the terrace and trace out the steps. Her arms swinging, legs twisting, a toe to the front, then to the back, a heel swiveling to the side, a toe to the front again. She confined her movements to the doorway as though she wanted to go unnoticed, and yet somehow she demanded the attention of anyone nearby. Whenever I was at Gianluca’s, I always saw her singing softly to herself.

Operation Avalanche
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Poems in Translation from Bestia di gioia

Poetry by MARIANGELA GUALTIERI
Translated from the Italian by OLIVIA E. SEARS

Poems appear in both Italian and English.

 

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Mariangela Gualtieri is a poet of great incandescence. Whether confronting existential questions or questions of daily existence, she writes with searing honesty and compassion. A veteran of the theater, Gualtieri’s voice can be thunderous and oracular, but also painfully intimate.

Poems in Translation from Bestia di gioia
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Omnipresence: A Poetry and Imagine Installation in Castiglione del Terziere, Italy

Poems by LORIS JACOPO BOLLINI and art by ANDREA POGGIPOLLINI, with an introduction by MARTHA COOLEY

 

Andrea Poggipollini is a Bologna-based artist who works in multiple media.  His summer-long installation “Omnipresence” in the medieval borgo (walled village) of Castiglione del Terziere in Lunigiana, Tuscany, featured sculpture, photography, video, and excerpts from poems by Loris Jacopo Bononi. Bononi, an Italian writer (earlier in his career, a doctor), writes poetry and prose; his work has been lauded by Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. He is the author of Trilogia (Diario postumo, Miserere dei, and Il poeta muore), Libri e Destini, and other texts.

Viewers walked through the borgo to encounter Poggipollini’s and Bononi’s collaboration in unexpected places: on placards on walls high and low, windows, on the ground, and in cellars. Among the installation’s elements were life-sized sculptures of human figures in black or white—kneeling, standing, sitting—which materialized as unexpectedly as phantoms on stone walls, in a bell-tower, and on the balcony of the village’s once-grandest house, now abandoned. In a passageway between two buildings were photographs by Poggipollini of sculptures he’d previously made, to which Bononi’s poetry-excerpts are an implicit response.

The photographs of Poggipollini’s work are echoes of echoes of echoes, one might say.

Omnipresence: A Poetry and Imagine Installation in Castiglione del Terziere, Italy
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