by Wendell Ricketts In 2009, the mononymous Italian singer-songwriter known as Povia came within a hair’s breadth of winning that year’s Sanremo contest, the annual “festival of Italian song,” a much-celebrated competition named for the coastal town in Liguria where it takes place. Sanremo is sort of a cross between The Lawrence Welk Show and … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.25: The Two Lucas
by Elena Borelli Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is celebrated as a pioneer of modern Italian poetry, and has been hailed by Seamus Heaney as “one of the greatest poets of all times”. Reflecting the spirit of late 19th-century Italy, his works are influenced by French Symbolism and Decadentism, while also drawing from Italy’s rich classical tradition. … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.24: Convivial Poems by Giovanni Pascoli and the Podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul”
by Scott Belluz “The Americans dreaming of Italy and the Italians dreaming of America have finished their aperitifs by now.” Masneri, Michele. Paradiso (S. Belluz, Trans). Adelphi, 2024. I chuckled when I read this line from Michele Masneri’s latest novel, in which he describes the scene at an outdoor café where his protagonist Federico, a … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.22: Translation as Travel Escapism: A Cautionary Tale
by Paolo Grossi newitalianbooks.it is the web portal dedicated to the promotion of Italian books worldwide, comparable to similar European websites such as the German litrix.de and new-books-in-german.com, the French booksfromfrance.fr, the Spanish newspanishbooks.com, the Dutch letterfonds.nl, etc. newitalianbooks.it was born in 2020, on my initiative, in a bilingual, Italian-English edition, thanks to the support … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.20: newitalianbooks.it: Your Portal to the World of Italian Publishing
by Anne Milano Appel I first came upon Daniele Del Giudice in a bookstore window in Rome, while waiting for a bus on Via Vittorio Emanuele. In the window was a copy of his Staccando l'ombra da terra and I went in and bought it. As I read it, I got a sense that this … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.19: My White Whale: Translating Daniele Del Giudice
by Richard Dixon The World Machine is a vivid novelistic portrayal of rural life in postwar Italy. Its narrator, a small-time farmer, is one of life’s misfits, a young man who generally manages to play his cards wrongly. He is the keeper of a great truth: that people are machines built by other beings who … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.14: The Nature of Reality and the Human Condition in 1950s Rural Italy, in Paolo Volponi’s The World Machine
by Will Schutt The Pluto that appears in the title of the Swiss Italian poet Fabio Pusterla’s selected poetry in English is not the planet. It isn’t the Disney character, either. It is Hades’ Roman counterpart, the god of the underworld. That fact might suggest that many of the poems in Brief Homage to Pluto … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n. 12: On Fabio Pusterla’s Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems
by Katherine Gregor To read Part One of this article, click here. If Italian dialectal idioms are sometimes hard to convey into standard Italian, translating them into English would make Hercules throw in the towel. When considering how to translate dialect I rejected the option of using a UK regional dialect as an alternative because … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.11: The Sorrows and Joys of Translating Italian Dialects: Part Two
by Katherine Gregor I was struggling with the copious passages in regional dialect in a novel I was translating from Italian, so I asked my publishers to put me in touch with the author so that she could help me with those expressions I couldn't find translated or explained on line. They kindly obliged. A … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.10: The Sorrows and Joys of Translating Italian Dialects: Part One
by Leah Janeczko In various posts in our Italian Lit Month blog, you’ll find links to Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel that features videos of translators reading passages from their works. Though only four years old, this “voice of translated literature” has already become a household name in the translator community and has gained nearly … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n. 8: Translators Aloud and Its Italian Playlist
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 