Ann goldstein translator biography samples

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It’s so deeply emotional… yeah, emotional I guess is the word. You should be able to read. But it was the opposite extreme. There’s No Turning Back (1938) sold out fast. It’s a great book that no one has read in Italian or English. His work has appeared in The LA Review of Books, Input Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Chicago Reader, among others.

The artist Saul Steinberg had a friend called Aldo Buzzi. I guess I would read it in English. And so [Steinberg] gave Bob Gottlieb a book by Buzzi, and Bob didn’t read Italian, so he came to me and he said, can you take a look at this, because I need to say something to Saul. So I started reading it and was very fascinated by it.

And it just occurred to me that I could translate it, just for myself.

I don’t mean word for word.

I feel that’s the way I get closer to the writer is just by staying close to the text; by not trying too hard; not inserting myself. For example, they are first person narrators, which always, at least for me, makes me feel like I know the writer better.

Ian J.

Battaglia

It’s funny hearing you say that; I think especially the Neapolitan Quartet gets labeled as autofiction a lot and I think, huh?

Maybe just because Ferrante often writes about women writers in Naples.

Ann Goldstein

That’s true.

To me it was a really powerful theme, as well as a fascination or something. It’s intense and it pulls you right in, right into this woman’s mind, and it takes you along and it’s frightening. A pivotal milestone came in 2008 with her receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship, which supported her ongoing translation projects and affirmed her growing reputation in the field.

The prolific and reclusive Italian writer has been writing since 1992, but reached international fame with My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Quartet of novels. Even though, of course, we don’t live in Naples, we didn’t grow up in this kind of situation.

The emotional intensity is so high throughout the Neapolitan Quartet; there’s very few moments where you can take a breath or relax, even among hundreds and hundreds of pages. So when you say Sono, you’re saying I am; you don’t have to say Io sono.

So for example, if you have a series of sentences in which a person is doing a whole bunch of different things, you don’t have to repeat he or she; it gets rid of a lot of things like that.

For many of the translators I know the way they got started translating was just accidental.

The editor of the New Yorker at that point was Bob Gottlieb. How is that conveyed in the Italian?

Ann Goldstein

That’s one of the interesting things about Ferrante; that she doesn’t write in dialect at all.

Here and there, there’s a word or something.