Chiara Palazzolo and the undead
Chiara Palazzolo (1961-2012) is best known for fantasy literature, especially a Gothic trilogy based on Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s innovative readings of the Roman Inquistion trials. In his Night Battles (I benandanti) Ginzburg argued that a group of 16th century Friulian peasants prosecuted for heresy were survivors of pre-Christian shamanistic cults at odds with the established church. Palazzolo adapted Ginsburg’s heretics and his band of benandanti (“good travelers”) to contemporary adolescent society in her trilogy, volume one, Non Mi Uccidere (Don’t Kill Me, from which the extract was taken). and sequels Strappami il cuore and Ti porterò nel sangue.
After nineteen year old Mirta dies of an overdose along with her boyfriend Robin, she awakes to learn she is one of the “undead,” following long conversations with the ghost of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She and her fellow undead are pursued by a organization called the Benandanti, determined to hunt them down and drive them out because they eat the flesh of the living to survive. Eventually she will betray her lover Sara and the other undead in order to gain her freedom. Set in Perugia, Matera, the Salento and elsewhere in provincial Italy, the novels contrast a bien pensant society with the dark impulses beneath its surface. A Gothic coming of age tale about a callow young woman in an indifferent and insipid contemporary world who must endure many trials to learn to think for herself.
Palazzolo was born in Floridia (Siracusa), Sicily, and after enrolling in university in Rome, lived in the capital. Her first two novels, not genre works, met with critical and popular success. After the trilogy, she published one more novel, Nel bosco di Aus, about witchcraft, before her untimely death in 2012.
An extract from Don’t Kill Me, in my translation, appears in the recently published Italian Literature in Translation, Volume III: Women, L. Lipperini, ed., Italian Cultural Institute in London. 2020, pp 156-195.
Go Tell It to the Emperor: Collected Poems by Pier Luigi Cappello
Translated from Italian by Todd Portnowitz,
Spuyten Duyvil, 2019
Reviewed in Reading in Translation, Jan 6, 2020
The poet Pierluigi Cappello was born in Gemona del Friuli in 1967 and died in 2017 in Cassacco, a town 20 km away. In his fifty years in Italy’s far northeast he never lived beyond a 30 km radius of Gemona, a city whose name still evokes a devastating 1976 earthquake that killed 1000 people and reduced many of the region’s neat, pretty buildings to rubble. Nine years old at the time of the earthquake, Pierluigi and his family were evacuated to rural Chiusaforte, a village in the mountains near the Austrian and Slovenian borders that modern Italy had all but forgotten. In his poem “Campo Ceclis, 1978,” the place sounds something like an Appalachia of the Balkan borderlands, hardscrabble and beautiful. It was the wellspring of his imagination: he once called it “my Macondo”:
two chrome-plated wheel rims, tires worn right down
to their metal innards
an old Bianchi chassis
bedsprings with the heart blasted out
uncounted numbers of empty demijohns
Slavic disorder, a tin keg
a dead engine on a sawhorse
wet rust [1]
Guido Morselli, a life
Linda Terziroli’s Un Pacchetto di Gauloises (Castelvecchi, 2019) is the first full length biographical treatment of the eccentric 20th century novelist Guido Morselli we have in Italian, and it represents ten years of research by a persistant scholar on the great loner and outsider novelist.
Terziroli visited archives around Italy in search of documentation on obscure chapters of Morselli’s life (his army service in Calabria between 1943 and 1945) and interviewed 
dozens of people who knew him–or knew those who knew him– and a few who knew him well, among them his brother, a professor who first taught in the United States in 1947 and lived there his entire adult life. Documenting the author’s life was complicated by Morselli’s own habits of extreme privacy and solitude (his term “anthropophobe”, phobic about the human race, is surely self-descriptive) and by the fact he never published any of his eight novels in his lifetime–and therefore there is little correspondence, and only posthumous reviews, press reports and reminiscences of the kind that help to round out a writer’s life story.
Un Pacchetto di Gauloises does not attempt to trace either a chronological or complete life of Morselli nor does it comment much on his works. Terziroli presents the fruits of her research in themed chapters, beginning with meticulous account of the author’s suicide in 1973, and ending with observations on two things dear to him: a volume of Leopardi’s Canti and a packet of cigarettes–the Gauloises he evokes in the last sentence of the last book he wrote, Dissipatio H.G. just a few months before his death.
The figure that emerges from this collection of testimonianze (you might say eyewitness accounts) is a thorough intellectual who read widely and was well informed, and a prickly, diffident man with few intimates, but capable of kindness and generosity especially to children, the caretakers and farmers who looked after his house and fields, and a few of the villagers near his retreat at Gavirate in northern Lombardy.
Paradoxically, perhaps, the fact that the story sketched out here makes no pretense of omniscience contributes an element of modernity. I found myself wondering why more biographers don’t arrange their material by themes (ranging here from the caffè in Varese where he met friends, to the writers and intellectuals who influenced him or with whom he corresponded, to a chapter on the Sasso di Gavirate wine he produced, a great favorite with high prelates of the Church in Rome). It’s an acknowledgement that even a thoroughly documented life is partial and in some sense fictional. And an appropriate form to depict a multifaceted figure like Morselli: “farmer” as he always listed his profession on official documents, anthropophobe, thinker, and writer.
Andrea Camilleri
“Success,” growls Mr. Camilleri with the tarry croak of a man deeply acquainted with the pleasures of a cigarette. “Success is beside the point, you know. It leaves matters unchanged. It’s just one more very good thing to add to the pleasures of old age,” he says, defining those pleasures as “having a grip on objective reality” and “my four grandchildren. At my age, success is fundamentally indecorous.”
Sicilian novelist Andrea Camilleri, who died on July 17, 2019 at 93 years of age, was possibly Italy’s best-loved writer, not to mention the best-sellling. For days after his death, there was virtually no end of celebrations and commemorations.
Until a few weeks previously he was still appearing on TV, although by then blind, in recorded segments made to accompany his latest Inspector Montalbano series, combining a bit of background on the episode with piquant criticisms of the powers that be, and the things they believe in. Born in 1925 and old enough to remember Il Duce, he never hesitated to denounce fascists and their fellow travelers in any of their guises.
I interviewed Camilleri about Sicilian identity and his surprising success nearly 20 years ago, when his novels suddenly shot up the best seller lists. It’s amazing to think that this mature writer, then 73, was still going strong early this month.
I hope some day some ambitious translator will find a way to translate Camilleri’s Sicilian vernacular into English. That language, which plays on the grammar of Sicilian dialect (but is not strictly Sicilian dialect) and relies on a small vocabulary of non Italian words, helps draw the character of those islanders: shrewd, suspicious, sometimes dour, insiders. It’s one of the things Italian readers love best about his novels. But the difficulties of finding a similar argot in English proved too much for publisher and translator, and so the novels have essentially been stripped back to their plots. It wouldn’t do to replace the Sicilian with some English language local speech–Yorkshire, or Brooklynese. Every dialect has its own identity; that’s the whole point, in a way. They’re not interchangeable at all, they’re declaring their specificity. But one day, perhaps a translator with imagination will simply invent an English equivalent out of whole cloth.
Read the 1998 article: Camilleri Puts Mystery Into Italian Life
The turbo and the chiaro
Balancing transparency and obscurity in a translation, an essay I wrote about discovering “what you didn’t even know was there.” Asymptote, spring 2019
In canto two of Dante’s “Paradiso,” Beatrice speaks of lo turbo e ‘l chiaro, rules that govern the heavens. Opposites: il turbo suggests obscurity or opacity and il chiaro, clarity or transparency. Translation, argued the Italian memoirist, professor, and translator Luigi Meneghello (1922–2007), is the business of negotiating between obscurity and clarity. Every written text is a mixture of Dante’s turbo and chiaro, he said, qualities that reflect the workings of the human mind.
[E]very text has clear parts and obscure parts, not only
superficially … but throughout its structure, because of the
way our minds work. I think the meaning of any text is
intrinsically difficult to determine. That is, no one, not
even the author, is sure what it means, everything that it means.
For me, translation shifts a text’s internal equilibriums . . .
which are stable in your immediate, direct comprehension,
and yet as soon as you begin to translate, something
emerges that you didn’t even know was there.
FR