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Translation

Little Miss Bigmouth

Little Miss Bigmouth

Summer has always been problematic for me.

When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.

The Last Winter

The Last Winter

You know, that thing with the little holes?

We hadn’t spent time together in a while. I was already away at college and no longer had much contact with him, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t know him very well—or was that just a feeling I had now, fifty years later, as his image gradually fades from my mind and I could no longer tell you if he was right- or left-handed.

How to Not Sell Out

How to Not Sell Out

Three accounts of the same conversation

Soon after meeting P in 2011, I read his first book. The overall mood was utopian, yet pragmatic. Fable-like methods were used to depict bleak truths while avoiding finger-pointing: Once upon a time, farmers cleared a forest; the water table fell, so they dug a well, and it fell some more, et cetera. Red herrings abounded. One memorable paragraph lamented the extinction of Steller’s sea cow, a sluggish 30-foot behemoth that could have provided truly socialist quantities of meat and milk.

Elham’s Suitor

Elham’s Suitor

He’s sobbing again

I open my eyes. The Colonel stares back at me like a buck’s head mounted on the wall. An abstract painting, blood streams from the old man’s throat down onto Parvin’s Che Guevara poster and over the star on Che’s forehead, where it gets lost in the black shadows on his face to reemerge out of Che’s left nostril.

L’Autore Invisible

L’Autore Invisible

Ralph Ellison in Italian

Translators themselves want to seem inconspicuous, like imperial clerks toiling away in a dark garret, resolving geopolitical issues by working out the finer terms in the draft of a big treaty. The collective need for invisibility creates a language that’s even, parsed out, correct — a language that escorts books out of their country and dresses them up as responsible travelers.