Italian Studies

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with the celebrated translator Ann Goldstein, whose most recent translated work is a novel called Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. Ann Goldstein is a former editor at the New Yorker, where she worked from 1974 to 2017. She began translating Italian literature in the ’90s and in 2005 she translated Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. She went on to translate Ferrante’s entire Neapolitan trilogy, starting with My Brilliant Friend. Goldstein’s latest translation, Forbidden Notebook, is a novel written by the Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes. First published in Italy in the 1950s, the novel centers around a woman who buys a notebook on a whim, and begins to furtively write in it, hiding it and herself from her husband and her children. Through the notebook, she begins to learn more about her desire, her guilt, and the sacrifices she has made for her family, her past, and her future.

Also, Maggie Millner, author of Couplets, returns to recommend The Call-Out: A Novel in Rhyme by Cat Fitzpatrick.

Ann Goldstein on Alba de Cespedes' "Forbidden Notebook"

And now for something completely different...Evan Fleischer riffs on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" in Italian for Electric Literature. For us, he does it out loud. 

Read here, if you like: http://electricliterature.com/howl-in-italian/

Image courtesy of the Alexandrian photographer Amy Elshaarawy. 

Howl In Italian - Evan Fleischer [Electric Literature]

Podcast on Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity, edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Enrica Maria Ferrara is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Before joining UCD as an Assistant Professor of Italian in 2018, I worked as a researcher and a lecturer of Italian Culture in Trinity College Dublin from 2008.

Enrica Maria Ferrara's new edited volume titled “Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020, comprises 13 chapters in which distinguished international scholars expand the Italian canon of posthumanist literature and film. My ultimate goal is to study how human identity has been represented, over the past two centuries, as humans have renegotiated their boundaries with nonhuman animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts. A topic particularly relevant in the current climate considering the impact that the nonhuman agency of the coronavirus and, more in general, of natural disasters has on the porous definition of what it is to be human.

Enrica Maria Ferrara - Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity

Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either “anonymous” or “five names” depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents (“Wu Ming” is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.

How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian Literature and Popular Culture

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The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of lively, intelligent long-form writing on recent publications in every genre, ranging from fiction to politics. The Los Angeles Review of Books seeks to revive and reinvent the book review for the internet age, and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.

Ann Goldstein on Alba de Cespedes' "Forbidden Notebook"

LA Review of Books