Ferito a morte

Raffaele La Capria, Ferito a morte, 1961

© elena.biagi@mondadori.it

Every month , newitalianbooks asks a translator to suggest a book that they would like to translate into their own language (a book that has never been translated or that they believe should be retranslated). This month, two translators from Italian into German, questioned without each other’s knowledge, both suggested the same book: Ferito a morte by Raffaele La Capria. A truly singular coincidence!

We publish below the two files articles sent to us by Martin Hallmannsecker and Verena von Koskull, respectively.

Long before Elena Ferrante, Naples was immortalised in a literary work that won its 39-year-old author the Premio Strega in 1961. In it, Raffaele La Capria takes us back to a sweltering summer in the 1950s. His young protagonist Massimo faces the momentous decision of leaving his hometown on Vesuvius and going to Rome to find a job. But a working life in the capital seems infinitely far away to him, he drifts through the day, goes on boat trips and dives, meets with friends at the exclusive boat club and reminisces about past loves. One thing is clear: Once you have fallen under the spell of Naples, the Gulf and its islands, which are the real stars of the novel, it is difficult to escape them. With his impressionistic prose, which sparkles like sunbeams on the waves, La Capria conjures up a dazzling world in which Jay Gatsby or Tom Ripley could turn the corner at any moment.

Martin Hallmannsecker has translated several novels, short story collections and non-fiction books by authors including Giovanni Boccaccio, Luigi Pirandello, Carlo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Domenico Starnone, Alessio Forgione, Mattia Insolia and Mario Desiati. In 2017, he was awarded the Young Translator Prize of the German-Italian Translation Prize.

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At the risk of violating the rule of only presenting books that have not yet been published in my native language, Raffaele La Capria’s Ferito a morte is at the top of my translator’s wish list.

The novel won the Premio Strega in 1961 and was also translated into German in 1963, but apart from a tattered edition on eBay and a few scant mentions of the author’s death two years ago, when he was almost a hundred years old, there is no trace of the German edition to be found on the internet.

What drew my attention to the Neapolitan author was an amateur video, which I saw recently, made by a friend of La Capria’s who visited him 20 years ago and, with the discreet lens of his video camera, accompanied him for several days in Naples and Capri: an impressive and truly moving personality.

Ferito a morte, which is now considered one of the great classics of Italian literature, defies any classical form of the novel. The summer’s day spent by a few idle young Neapolitans in the mid-1950s, between the legendary Bar Middleton and the yacht club by the sea, unfolds in a dream-like, associative, fragmentary narrative that dissolves the chronology of memory and experience and captures a Naples that ‘kills you or stuns you, or both at once’ – sparkling, radiantly clear and deep as the sea in the shadow of the volcano.

Verena von Koskull is a literary translator from Italian and English. She has translated Carlo Levi, Alba de Céspedes, Gianrico Carofiglio, Helena Janeczek, Goliarda Sapienza, Antonio Scurati, Igiaba Scego, Gian Marco Griffi and Edoardo Albinati, among many others, into German.