The first edition of the Festival du livre de Paris was a real success.

There are numerous historical and cultural ties linking Montenegro and Italy. These ties originate from various periods of the history of Montenegro. A few facts can help to highlight the diversity of these ties. For four centuries a considerable part of the Montenegrin coastline was controlled by the Republic of Venice (La Serenissima), which resulted in Italian being the official language of the administration until 1918; the Montenegrin Princess Jelena Petrović married Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoia towards the end of the nineteenth century; and then there was the Italian presence in Montenegro during the Second World War. These historical events have also left their traces in the cultural life of Montenegro, which helps explain the publication of a large number of Italian texts translated into Montenegrin.

Laurence Van Goethem adores both the theatre and translating, and has worked for many years in the field of theatre publishing in Brussels. She has been working very closely for almost 10 years with Marco Martinelli, the co-founder of the Teatro delle Albe, translating his theatre texts and works of non-fiction.

Translation is contagious, but, at the same time, it is also seditious. It is contagious because translators identify a captivating “virus” in a specific linguistic and cultural context, and then rack their brains to pass this virus on to others in a different context; it is seditious because those people who preach the (sacred) inviolability of the space in which they belong must constantly be on the alert to defend against dreaded contamination. But the truth is that a people’s/nation’s vitality corresponds to the vitality of the culture it expresses, namely to the extent to which it is able to (ex)change in response to external stimuli. How could one explain, otherwise, the parallel and mutual developments of all the European families through the periods of the Enlightenment, then Romanticism, right up to the present day.

Katherine Gregor has translated Italian classics, such as Luigi Pirandello and Carlo Goldoni, and Francesca Melandri, Stefania Auci and Alberto Angela among contemporary authors. She was born in Rome, where she lived on and off for twelve years, spending six years also in France before moving to England in 1988. She is currently based in Norwich. She translates from Italian and French, writes plays and fiction of her own and the blog Scribe Doll (https://scribedoll.com). She also created and wrote for two years the monthly column The Italianist (http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/tag/katherine-gregor/), which focuses on Italian books not yet translated into English.

Italian literature is enjoying ‘a moment’, to echo the words of Jhumpa Lahiri, the Italophile author, translator and academic, in an exclusive interview for this magazine. There are several more exclusives in this, our tenth Riveter magazine, which sets out to reflect this ‘moment’: the excitement and success surrounding Italian prose and poetry in translation and publishing today.

An investigation in four parts