Man Booker Shortlist: Translating Elena Ferrante

This month the winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize will be announced. Weekend is featuring all six of the shortlisted books before the winner is made public. Unusually the $72,000 prizemoney is divided equally between the writer and translator.

This week’s book is The Story Of The Lost Child by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. It’s the final part of a series known as the Neapolitan Quartet, about the sixty-year friendship between Elena, a successful writer, and her childhood friend Lila.

Weekend’s Julian Worricker spoke to the book’s translator Ann Goldstein, who says she has never met Ferrante herself. But her acquaintance with her work goes way back.

Man Booker Shortlist: Elena Ferrante On Using A Pseudonym

This month the winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize will be announced. Weekend is featuring all six of the shortlisted books before the winner is made public.

This week we look at one of the hot favourites: The Story Of The Lost Child by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. It’s the final part of a series known as the Neapolitan Quartet, about the sixty-year friendship between Elena, a successful writer, and Lila, her friend from childhood. Elena Ferrante refuses to have a public profile, but she does communicate via email and agreed to an exchange with the BBC. Her answers have been voiced by an actress.

Her writing is extremely intimate and emotionally honest. But she herself is pseudonymous. Weekend’s Julian Worricker asked why she keeps such a distance between life and work?

These days, plenty of people know Elena Ferrante, but not so many have heard of Januarius, patron saint of her native Naples. New Yorkers will recognize the Italian name,San Gennaro, from his festival in Little Italy, the last Saturday in April (tomorrow). Yet over by the Tyrrhenian Sea, this 4th-century martyr may have a greater physical presence than Ferrante herself.

Back when Gennaro’s head was still tumbling away from its body, the story goes, some acolyte stooped to collect vials of his blood. The reliquaries are kept in Naples, and twice a year, the Duomo is packed for the miracle of liquefaction. The more freely the stuff flows, in its gilded containers, the more it buoys up the prayers of the locals, the Napoli D.O.C. Better yet, they get two chances at a miracle, one in September and one late in April.

At some point Ferrante—then still using her actual name—must’ve been among the believers. These days she may no longer live in town, but the city remains an abiding subject for her, integral to her power. So too, as her quartet follows Lenù and Lila around Naples, as it steeps in the beauties and toxins, it generates hunger for more. Readers can take Ferrante tours, now, and they’ve begun seeking other books written in the shadow of Vesuvius.

Piacere mio, my pleasure. I’ll limit my suggestions to titles available in English and pertinent to the novelist’s generation.

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Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector up for Best Translated Book award

Alison Flood

The Story of the Lost Child and a posthumous collection of the great Brazilian author’s short stories among 10 finalists

The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, already in the running for the 2016 Man Booker International prize, has made the shortlist for the Best Translated Book award.

Worth $5,000 (£3,500) to both its winning authors and translators, the prize is run by the Three Percent blog at the University of Rochester, and underwritten by Amazon.com’s literary partnership programmes. Ferrante was picked by judges for The Story of the Lost Child, the final novel in her Neapolitan series, which also made the Man Booker International prize shortlist last week. Translated by Ann Goldstein, the novel was called “the first work worthy of the Nobel prize to have come out of Italy for many decades” by the Observer.

Another title shortlisted for the Man Booker International also makes the 10-strong list: A General Theory of Oblivion by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn. The novel tells of a woman who bricks herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence and lives there for 30 years.

The late Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories is also a finalist for the fiction award, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson. Published last summer for the first time in English, the 85-story collection is “proof that she was – in the company of Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo and her 19th-century countryman Machado de Assis – one of the true originals of Latin American literature”, according to the New York Times.

Judge Amanda Nelson of Book Riot said that “one of the most remarkable things about this collection is that it is so complete”, and that Lispector “is simply better at portraying women than pretty much any other candidate”.

“Lispector gives us the inner lives of women from childhood through very old age,” said Nelson. “Her women are real, they wrestle with marriage, they struggle with motherhood, they make art, they are bored, they have affairs, get old, play the ‘cool girl’ game long before Gillian Flynn’s Amy gave it a name in Gone Girl. Lispector’s stories all in one place say: we have always been here.”

Three Percent also revealed the six poetry collections up for its best translated poetry prize, with China’s Liu Xia picked for Empty Chairs, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. Liu is the wife of the imprisoned Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. In one of her poems, June 2nd, 1989 (for Xiaobo), she writes of how:

I didn’t have a chance
to say a word before you became
a character in the news,
everyone looking up to you
as I was worn down
at the edge of the crowd
just smoking
and watching the sky.

A new myth, maybe, was forming
there, but the sun was so bright
I couldn’t see it.

Alongside Liu’s work, a book collecting the work of eight Afghan women poets from Herat, Load Poems Like Guns, is shortlisted. The collection, edited and translated from the Persian by Farzana Marie, includes poetry by Nadia Anjuman, who wrote about the oppression of Afghan woman and was murdered by her husband in 2005. Judge, translator and publisher Deborah Smith said: “Two things about this book blew me away – one was the strength of the writing itself, and another was the astonishing work of its translator”.