\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen I heard that\u00a0a\u00a0major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti\u2019s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I\u00a0was enthusiastic. Durastanti\u2019s book \u2013 a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as\u00a0the hearing daughter of two deaf\u00a0parents \u2013 was the first literary novel\u00a0of\u00a0an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature.<\/p>\n A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country\u2019s poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy\u2019s boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi\u2019s wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region\u2019s border: Basilicata was never saved.<\/p>\n Its breathtaking limestone canyons\u00a0and ancient Greek temples notwithstanding, the region offers little in terms of recognisable, picturesque Italianness \u2013 the Tuscan hills, Venetian canals and clothesline-strewn Neapolitan alleys which, I felt, Italian novels were often expected to offer if they wanted to appeal to an international audience. Strangers I\u00a0Know <\/em>seemed poised to broaden the range of what we understand as an Italian story \u2013 because it was also an American one, and because it eschewed all stereotypes about Italy.<\/p>\n A recent pilot\u00a0had to be rewritten: the\u00a0Italian backdrop was too unfamiliar. Why not set it in Ireland?\u00a0<\/p>\n Not for long. After a pilot was written and slated for production, the broadcaster asked for a rewrite. The Italian backdrop, they said, was too unfamiliar. Why not set it in Ireland? It would be easier for audiences to relate to, and in its crucial aspects (Catholic, poor) it was kind of the same. The project was ultimately shelved.<\/p>\n The history of the novel is deeply entwined with European nationalisms and national identities. Walter Scott\u2019s historical novels drew from (and consolidated) Scotland\u2019s history into\u00a0a\u00a0shared mythology; Alessandro Manzoni\u2019s The Betrothed is still studied in Italian schools as the crucible that forged a unified language from a plethora of local variants; Goethe, Austen, Dostoevsky and Balzac all captured what they felt was the nature of a specific place and time, offering nations a mirror in which to see or imagine their national ethos.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Picturesque Italianness\u2019 \u2026 The TV adaptation of Elena Ferrante\u2019s My Brilliant Friend.<\/span> Photograph: Home Box Office (HBO)\/2020 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO\u00ae and all related programs are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.<\/p>\n As books were translated and read across borders, a slightly paradoxical notion of two-layered reading emerged: novels offered, on the one hand, a very precise depiction of a\u00a0specific<\/em> place and time and national spirit; but through the specifics, something general<\/em> could be glimpsed outside the national confines \u2013 about what it feels like to be a person, which\u00a0to me sounds like a serviceable approximation of what the art of the novel is about. This gave rise to an idea of literature as a kind of exchange or\u00a0conversation between national literatures, each with their allotted seats at the canon \u2013 Fernando Pessoa or Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen or \u00c9mile Zola: of course, they were almost exclusively male seats.<\/p>\n The imperialistic premise in this idea of literature as an egalitarian conversation between national traditions is blatant: as Milan Kundera remarked, what it took for a country to be awarded its own national literature \u2013 instead of being grouped into an ill-assorted umbrella term such as \u201cMitteleuropa\u201d \u2013 was a colonial past. And yet that was still the way literature was taught and read, in Italy,\u00a0until a couple of decades ago. We\u00a0read Gustave Flaubert and Georges Perec. We read Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. We read Thomas Mann and Ernesto S\u00e1bato.<\/p>\n And then we didn\u2019t. The consolidation of the English-language publishing industry in the 1980s and 90s gave its most successful writers a\u00a0worldwide reach and a critical impact that no authors from other countries could aspire to. The Italian contemporary canon, at the beginning of the millennium, was composed of David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen; the country\u2019s first creative writing programme, established in the mid-90s, owes its\u00a0name to Holden Caulfield; its students (some of whom have been my\u00a0students) learn technique by reading Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, who show; not Anna Maria Ortese and Elsa Morante, who tell. Their Italian syntax and style \u2013 as measured in Eleonora Gallitelli\u2019s groundbreaking computational studies \u2013 are more influenced by\u00a0English than the Italian of translators\u00a0working from English.<\/p>\n This didn\u2019t happen only in Europe. As discussed in Minae Mizumura\u2019s The Fall of Language in the Age of English \u2013 an essayistic memoir about the author\u2019s having to choose between being an American and a Japanese writer, and choosing the latter, and regretting it \u2013 at the turn of the millennium the idea of national literatures, modelled as a system of literary discourses on a somewhat equal footing, no longer held. Instead,\u00a0we moved into a world in which one of those traditions had expanded beyond the national, becoming de facto universal.<\/p>\n There is nothing intrinsically lamentable about this, which can be seen as a way out of nationalisms. But\u00a0there can be only one universal; and as the anglophone tradition ascended, other national literatures shrank to become increasingly local. In a system in which English-language literature deals transnationally with general issues, the specifics that had characterised national literatures (Austen\u2019s England, Dostoevsky\u2019s Russia) lose their role and become local colour, picturesque. When a story\u00a0has universal ambitions, such as Durastanti\u2019s Strangers I Know, it thus makes sense to recast it someplace more relatable, in a setting where the\u00a0exoticism won\u2019t get in the way.<\/p>\n Something similar happened to me.\u00a0Years ago, a German publisher declined to translate my second novel \u2013 a story of ambition and financial speculation \u2013 because the Italian backdrop might have confused a German readership used to imagining corporate raiders in New York, or perhaps in Frankfurt. But, he said, the\u00a0chapters in which the protagonist visited his father in Venice were great, so poetic. Had I considered setting a\u00a0book in Venice? Italy, for him, had ceased to be seen as a legitimate context for corporate ambition, as it was in Paolo Volponi\u2019s Le Mosche del Capitale, and become a set of exotic backdrops: Naples, Puglia, Rome, the Tuscan hills, or Venice.<\/p>\n A peripheral circle of local authors are outsourced with producing gondolas, popes, crying madonnas, and pizza<\/p>\n This, in a way, is a division of labour: a way the international market for literature has tried to become more efficient by allocating the general discourse to a set of mostly English-speaking writers, while a peripheral circle of local colleagues are outsourced with producing gondolas, popes, crying madonnas, and pizza.<\/p>\n But the landscape described by Mizumura has drastically rearranged itself over the past few years, and the primacy of anglophone literature seems to have faded. The authors in\u00a0today\u2019s contemporary canon \u2013 celebrated by critics worldwide, and imitated by aspiring novelists \u2013 come from much more varied backgrounds and write in many more languages. Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Annie Ernaux, Han\u00a0Kang and Karl Ove Knausg\u00e5rd are\u00a0the\u00a0Franzens and Wallaces of two\u00a0decades ago.<\/p>\n Of course it is impossible to draw a\u00a0precise line for a general shift of this kind, but \u201cFerrante fever\u201d could be as good a watershed moment as any. Elena Ferrante was a relatively niche writer (both in her country and abroad) whose novels achieved a\u00a0spectacular, worldwide success, reaching the kind of ubiquity previously associated with people performatively reading Infinite Jest to show off. It also sparked a growing international interest in Italian literature, involving both younger writers (such as Durastanti, or myself for that matter) or allegedly \u201cforgotten\u201d classics, such as the works of Elsa Morante and Alba de C\u00e9spedes.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n There could be several reasons for this. The further consolidation of the US publishing industry has made it harder for innovative, ambitious novels to emerge. It could be\u00a0an\u00a0effect of the trendiness of \u201cliterature in translation\u201d in the English-language market \u2013 even though the notion that it would have its own niche is largely unfathomable to non-native English speakers, used since childhood to reading literature in translation and calling it \u201cliterature\u201d.<\/p>\n It could also be that different books are being written. Since the turn of the century, writers from all over the world have felt the dual literary citizenship that Minae wrote about: seeing themselves as part of both a local and a universal tradition, reading Anna Maria Ortese at the Scuola Holden. It would have been natural to try to combine the two,\u00a0working into their writing a thin veneer of exoticism to lead readers to\u00a0engage with its deeper ideas.<\/p>\n Readers in Buenos Aires or Naples could very well find a story set in Seoul more relatable than one set in Franzen\u2019s Minnesota<\/p>\n Of course there is much, much more\u00a0to, say, Ferrante\u2019s novels than a\u00a0picturesque Italian backdrop. But the backdrop\u2019s recognisability \u2013 indeed, its very picturesqueness \u2013 has probably played a role in making them relatable to a wider audience. Bola\u00f1o\u2019s The Savage Detectives similarly toys with cliches about Mexico, both subverting them and contextualising them into a\u00a0wider picture. Han Kang\u2019s The Vegetarian plays into a strain of body horror that\u00a0western readers have come to stereotypically associate with east Asian literature \u2013 only to explode it with a psychologically harrowing and\u00a0politically powerful fable about resisting patriarchy.<\/p>\n On the other hand, this increased international interest in non-anglophone literature could have another source: no matter where these books originated, their worldwide success often came as a\u00a0result of their success in English. This was the case with, for instance, both Ferrante and Bola\u00f1o, who only caught on abroad after resonating with\u00a0the English\u2011language market.<\/p>\n It is particularly evident in Han\u2019s case: The Vegetarian was published in\u00a0South Korea in 2007, but gained international acclaim after Deborah Smith\u2019s spectacularly successful translation was published almost a\u00a0decade later. In a particularly significant twist, its Italian edition was\u00a0translated from the English instead of Han\u2019s Korean, not because no translators could be found but because the editor, who read it in English, found Smith\u2019s prose more effective \u2013 more relatable?<\/em> \u2013 than the\u00a0renditions they initially commissioned from the original.<\/p>\n This is not limited to recent, successful novels: two canonical 20th-century Italian authors, Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de C\u00e9spedes, have been translated internationally mostly\u00a0after their English editions. Conversely, classic Danish author Tove Ditlevsen\u2019s trilogy appeared in Italian after its US translation. If anglophone culture no longer beams its literature from the centre to what Umberto Eco called \u201cthe peripheries of the Empire\u201d, it still acts as a transit hub between them, the arbiter of what is allowed to go beyond the confines of the local. My\u00a0own novel, Perfection, has been acquired for translation in languages from Thai to Lithuanian only after its\u00a0reception in English, and its International Booker shortlisting.<\/p>\n This could be seen as another, subtler form of imperialism; and yet it also allows more room for agency. Our peripheries are closer to each other than the long way through the centre makes it seem: readers in Buenos Aires or Naples could very well find a story set in Seoul more relatable than one set in Franzen\u2019s Minnesota.<\/p>\n Durastanti\u2019s latest novel, Missitalia, has a section set in Basilicata, mixing the true story of the women-only gangs that haunted its forests in the 19th century with the parallel-history discovery of oil there. As it is currently being translated into 10 languages (including English), she recently told me that her translators sometimes reach out to ask for help in rendering the region\u2019s atmosphere. \u201cJust think Appalachia,\u201d is an answer she gives.<\/p>\n Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, is published by Fitzcarraldo (\u00a312.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I heard that\u00a0a\u00a0major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti\u2019s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I\u00a0was enthusiastic. Durastanti\u2019s book \u2013 a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as\u00a0the hearing daughter of two deaf\u00a0parents \u2013 was the first literary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[8729,713,2945,2803,8728,8730,96,3661,8731],"class_list":{"0":"post-15136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-anglophone","9":"tag-appeal","10":"tag-fiction","11":"tag-form","12":"tag-imperialism","13":"tag-literature","14":"tag-lost","15":"tag-translation","16":"tag-universal"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}