While “Italian writers” to many in the United States brings to mind Dante and Ferrante with nothing in between, it is unthinkable to omit the hundreds of other authors who come from that southern European country. One such author is Natalia Ginzburg, who wrote about family and fascism during the turbulent years of World War II and after. One of her books, Lessico famigliare (translated as Family Lexicon in its latest version), is being released next Tuesday, April 25, in a new translation by CALA’s own Jenny McPhee.
Eric Gudas recently reviewed the book in “‘I Know That Story!’: On Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘Family Lexicon'” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. As a summary of the plot, Gudas writes:
In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home.
The book itself, of course, is not as simple as that. As the title suggests, the book places value on the modes of familial communication. In this review Gudas mentions that Family Lexicon comprises “fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems.”
It is books like these that make translation such an interesting art; when the English words must be chosen carefully to ensure they do not shift the intent of the original Italian. For anyone else interested in this process, CALA is hosting “Translation, Women, & Literature: A Panel Celebrating the Life and Work of Natalia Ginzburg.” The event, which will be next Friday, April 28, at NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, hosts a panel of six including Jenny McPhee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, and others. To RSVP to that event, you can click here.
For those who can’t make it to that event or simply want to dive deeper, CALA also offers a number of literature, writing and translation courses. Just a few relevant classes are listed below:
- Italian I
- Italian II
- Introduction to Translation
- Reading Dante’s Inferno
- Literature for the 21st Century
As always you can find more courses and information on our website. And of course, you can (and should) pre-order Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon now.