–OpEd–
BERLIN — In early November 2023, The New Yorker published a long article titled “The novelist who inspired Elena Ferrante“. Who was she? Surprisingly, it was Elsa Morante, whose Lies and Sorcery has just been released in unabridged English.
The rediscovery of a canonical author as if she were a well-kept secret may raise eyebrows, but it should not come as a surprise: recently the same happened, just to give two examples, with another two female authors: Natalia Ginzburg and Marina Jarre, translated in eight and seven countries, respectively, following U.S. editions.
This should not be surprising especially since the same happens in Italy with canonical works from other countries. The Copenhagen Trilogy published in the 1960s by Tove Ditlevsen, one of Denmark’s greatest writers, was published by Fazi in translation by Alessandro Storti only after its English release. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian came out for Adelphi edited by Milena Zemira Ciccimarra ten years after its success in South Korea, as a consequence of its “discovery” in the United States.
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It is an effect of the universal ambition of Anglo-American culture. According to the 2023 best-selling book rankings, U.S. literature is the most important in the world. And while in many ways, it may no longer be as central as it was 20 years ago, when the whole world was reading David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, there is a sense in which it still is: it is increasingly found to be a point of contact between other national literatures.
This is undoubtedly a positive phenomenon: publishers — especially independent publishers — cannot have expertise on all the world’s cultures. Through English language alone, U.S. publishing connects distant literatures, like a collector or like a center from which all the pathways leading to various suburbs pass.On the other hand, the selection of what to publish in the United States reflects the interests of the U.S. public, which are not necessarily the same as Italy’s, for example — a literature that perceives itself as universal will be more inclined to impose its canons on others.
Universal ambition of U.S. literature
Just as German Romanticism, the dominant culture of the West at the time, theorized that translations improved the originals because they purified them of the accidents of language, so U.S. publishing has developed an interventionist and “ameliorative” tendency that appears far removed from the Italian approach to translation.
In the United States translated literature is a niche that seeks an aura of sophistication.
Sometimes, however, it must be acknowledged, this trend has excellent results. Adelphi, a Milan-based Italian publishing house founded in 1962, decided to translate The Vegetarian from the U.S. edition rather than from the Korean. The choice — surprising for such a scrupulous publisher — was justified by the fact that the English version was particularly effective and limpid. Even according to author Kang, it was more elegant even than the original.
Similarly, for years classicist Emily Wilson has been pursuing a visionary and highly ambitious work of Homeric retranslations, with an approach at once that aims to modernize while remaining faithful — something that is hard to imagine in a literal culture such as Italy’s.
Imposing on the original
But a free approach can also produce ambiguous results. Writer and translator Tim Parks has devoted much study to the English-language translations of Natalia Ginzburg, which he has often found to be somewhat bombastic, lacking the lightness and irony that characterize her work.
According to Parks, this is because in the United States translated literature is a niche that seeks an aura of sophistication, even at the cost of imposing it on the original text (which is what happened to Kang, though with a different outcome).
Sometimes, on the other hand, freedom leads to the normalization of an anomalous, special text: the recent English version of We Want Everything by Italy’s Nanni Balestrini adds punctuation and capitalization to the author’s live language. But the informality of Balestrini’s novels was not an experimental quirk: it stemmed from the political project of restoring orality in literature; it was a way of giving voice to the voiceless. In English this has been lost.
This is not just purist nitpicking. If U.S. translations are the channel through which Italian literature is discovered in Denmark, and Danish literature in Italy, an interventionist approach changes the way masterpieces from one country will be read in others. If the only pathway between two suburbs goes through the center, then it risks becoming a bottleneck.
Europa editions
But there are other pathways as well, and some start right from Italy.
L’Orma, an independent publishing house in Rome that came to fame for publishing Annie Ernaux long before she won the Nobel Prize, opened a French sister, Éditions L’Orma, two years ago, devoted to the cultural multiplicity that defines European identity. In this it seems to want to follow the example of Europa Editions, a publishing house with offices in London and New York, which has one of the highest growth rates in the world, according to Publishers Weekly.
The universal ambition of the English language risks downgrading other national cultures.
Europa Editions — founded by the owners of E/O Editions because they could not find a U.S. publisher for Elena Ferrante — is credited with the international presence of great authors from all over the world, particularly Italians.
But in addition to the catalog, it is their editorial work that reflects a more properly European approach, scrupulous at the textual level and yet marked by the idea that literature in translation can be much more than a small, highly refined niche. This is the norm in Italy or France, but not in English-speaking countries.
If — as Japanese author Mizumura Minae wrote in The Fall of Language in the Age of English — the universal ambition of the English language risks downgrading other national cultures to “local”, projects of this kind offer alternative models, both in terms of merit and method: concentric rather than radial, wider pathways.
