by Antonella Lettieri

Maria Grazia Calandrone was born in Milan in 1964, following her mother’s affair with an older man. A few years earlier, Lucia – that is, Maria Grazia’s biological mother – had been forced by her own father to marry a notoriously violent and often drunk man from her village in a rural corner of Molise, in southern Italy. The match was meant to increase the family’s means with a handkerchief of land but it utterly disregarded both the young woman’s wishes in the matter and all concerns regarding her well-being and safety.

Divorce was still illegal in Italy – the law permitting divorce was passed in 1970 and upheld through a referendum in 1974 – and at that time, victims of domestic violence had no legal recourse against their abusers. Lucia was rescued from the despair of her wretched life when she fell in love with Giuseppe and became pregnant with Maria Grazia. However, her pregnancy made the situation of the two lovers utterly untenable in her home village, and so they decided to migrate to Milan in search of a better life – as many other Southerners did in the years of the so-called ‘economic boom’.

Unfortunately, their ordeal did not end there. In fact, not only was divorce still illegal in Italy but adultery also carried criminal charges and a sentence of two years in prison, though only when committed by the woman. Forced into a clandestine life by their pending criminal charges and unable to find regular work even in that ‘land of plenty’ that was Milan during the sixties, Lucia and Giuseppe found themselves forced to welcome their newborn daughter amid mounting anxiety over their futures.

When Maria Grazia was only eight months old, Lucia and Giuseppe finally realised that they had run out of road: no longer able to make ends meet, they took a train to Rome, left Maria Grazia on a blanket in Villa Borghese, and committed suicide by jumping into the Tiber. The baby was rescued and put up for adoption as soon as her parents’ death was ascertained. When Giacomo and Consolazione Calandrone adopted her shortly after, she became Maria Grazia Calandrone.

Though Lucia and Giuseppe’s story certainly had a tragic ending, it also found a happy epilogue in Calandrone’s own life and her success as one of Italy’s most renowned contemporary poets and writers. Growing up, Calandrone knew very little about her biological parents, apart from the fact that they had abandoned her as a baby to then commit suicide. After overcoming a reluctance that had lasted many decades, Calandrone eventually decided to tackle in her writing that poignant news item that saw her as one of its protagonists. The result of her investigation into the cold case of her biological parents’ death is Your Little Matter, which came out in my translation into English in June 2024 through Foundry Editions.

Calandrone’s shift from poetry to prose over the last few years has taken place in an utter state of grace, and her three latest works of narrative non-fiction – first, a memoir on her adoptive mother (2021); then, Your Little Matter (which was originally published in Italian in 2022); and most recently, a work of non-fiction (2024) investigating a murder case that has startling parallels with her mother’s story ­­– all share an unexampled approach to non-fiction that seamlessly blends archival research, investigative journalism, and an astonishingly poetic prose in order to tell a most personal story while at the same time painting a picture of Italian society at large.

The result is a chimeric work of prose that crosses traditional definitions of genre and eludes exact categorisation. Much of the book is told in the first person, but crucially not from lived experience, since Calandrone had not yet been born at the time when most of the events recounted were unfolding. Her research showed that the archives are clearly uninterested in the little matter of a young woman driven to suicide by society, and reveal more gaps than they do facts. However, Calandrone fills these gaps in her mother’s story with her extraordinary capacity for lyrical imagination and with unparalleled empathy and compassion for a woman forced to abandon her own daughter by a nation that had already abandoned her.

Thus, Lucia’s story is worth telling not only because it was silenced at the time of her life and death, but also because it acts as a litmus test to talk about the domestic oppression of women, internal migration from the South to the North of Italy, and the promises of an economic boom that yet left many struggling – all issues that, perhaps to a different degree and in different ways, are still as endemic to contemporary Italy as they were during the sixties.

Having grown up in the south of Italy myself, though a couple of decades later, I immediately recognised many of the dynamics that the book describes – especially with regard to gender roles – as the driving forces behind some of the stories that have been handed down to me by the two generations of women that precede me – though luckily without much of the violence and oppression that Lucia experienced in her short life. It seems no negligible coincidence to me that Lucia was born in the same year as my grandmother and that Calandrone herself is only two years younger than my own mother.

This sense of recognition drew me to Your Little Matter with an irresistible gravitational pull, to the point that I became the self-appointed champion of this book’s translation into English. After pitching it around for a few months, it serendipitously found a perfect home with Foundry Editions, a new independent publisher that focuses on literature in translation originating from the basin of the Mediterranean.

This perceived kinship, though, also came with a huge sense of responsibility on my part, both towards Lucia’s heart-breaking story and Calandrone’s extraordinary writing. In translating the words and the events, it became imperative for me to do justice to both, as well as to all the women who have come before me and have not had the same opportunity to live life on their own terms that I have.

I believe that this sense of responsibility was also heightened by that uncanny act of ventriloquism that is the translation of the first person in a memoir – a subject that, as far as I am aware, is still little discussed in translation circles. How odd it is to say – or rather write – ‘I’ and not mean me! Of course much writing, and therefore much translating, takes place in the first person, but the non-fictional and, to a degree, unfiltered nature of the ‘I’ in this book is, I believe, something quite different. As I wrote in my Translator’s Note to the book, ‘Working on a memoir occupies a very special space in the domain of translation: in order to become the author’s voice in another language, the translator must take on a very special form of “I”, transforming into the author while also striving to preserve clear boundaries between two different identities, sensibilities, and creativities.’

What helped in this task of imperfect transmigration of souls was reading Calandrone’s other works and many of the books that she quotes or mentions in the text, as well as listening to the music and watching the films that she references. This process, apart from being utterly enjoyable because it gave me a chance to discover, or rediscover, excellent works of art, also helped me immerse myself in a recent cultural history of Italy that I know mostly by hearsay rather than by lived experience.

Retracing Calandrone’s own cultural research into a decade in which she was already born but too little to remember much at all offered me a clearer understanding of her writing process, thus encouraging that feeling of a melding of identities. At the same time, though, as I reacted to these works of art in my own personal way – as it is natural and unavoidable – I was also able to mark clearer boundaries between that ‘I’ and me.

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Your Little Matter: My Mother, a News Item

• by Maria Grazia Calandrone
• Translated from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri
• Original title: Dove non mi hai portata (2022)
• 312 pages
• Publisher: Foundry Editions (2024)
• ISBN: 78-1-7384463-2-2
• Treat your bookshelf to a taste of Italy! Order the book here.

• 2023 Strega Prize shortlist
• European Literature Network review
• Reading in Translation review
• Maria Grazia Calandrone’s profile by Clare Longrigg in The Guardian

This work has been translated with support from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Centro per il libro e la lettura.

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