Tempo curvo a Krems

A book I’d like to translate

Every month newitalianbooks asks a translator to suggest an Italian book

that has not yet been published in his or her language.

This month, Anne Milano Appel, who translates from Italian, presents :

Claudio Magris

Tempo curvo a Krems

Milan, Garzanti, 2019

Tempo curvo a Krems, a noteworthy volume by the incomparable Claudio Magris, addresses the very relevant theme of aging and time, particularly apt for today’s aging society. The five selections that make up the volume embody the fundamental poetics of Magris the narrator with his untiring observation of life: “True, authentic life, filled with meaning; lived also in time,” as he writes. It is a “tempo curvo” or curved time, that upends the idea of cause and effect, past and future, and becomes an eternal moment.

In one of the pieces, Magris looks back at a beautiful, unattainable older girl from his high school years and experiences a kind of time shift: “Future and past tenses, a single point, a single time… A present infinitive? Perhaps we perform in two cabarets, one linear and one circular.” Ever modest and self-effacing he worries: “Had I therefore become Svevo’s ‘vecchione’, the old man who only many years later catches up with a young woman he’d glimpsed one evening, only in memory settling an account left unresolved.” All the time the speaker at the conference Magris is attending keeps repeating that “today and yesterday, now and tomorrow, before and after exist only in the brain, a capricious dictator that puts the before here and the after there.” As the White Rabbit says to Alice, “When, then, now? Forever, which is sometimes only a second.” Suffused with rationality and erudition, the writing in these pieces is nonetheless never devoid of sentiment, sensitivity, and equability.

Little by little the lives of the five characters come to appear more modulated, as each of them comes to terms with the fragility of old age and the inevitable passage of time, which leaves its signs on the membranes and on the heart. The distinction between fiction and reality is blurred, with the awareness that “pages also age like living things; they become dog-eared, they get creased, they wither. Like my skin…”

A translated excerpt from the book appears in Harper’s Magazine, June 2021: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/curving-time-in-krems-claudio-magris/.

Anne Milano Appel has translated texts by a number of leading Italian authors – among them Claudio Magris, Primo Levi, Giovanni Arpino, Goliarda Sapienza, Luce d’Eramo, Roberto Saviano, Paolo Maurensig, Antonio Scurati – for US and UK publishers. Her shorter works have appeared in a variety of literary venues. Her awards include the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation, and the Northern California Book Award for Translation.

Her work on Claudio Magris includes the translations Blindly, in 2010, 2012; You Will Therefore Understand, in 2011; Blameless, in 2017; Journeying, in 2018, and Snapshots, in 2019, nearly all from Yale University Press. Shorter pieces by Magris, and essays and articles about him have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Literary Hub, Granta, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Journal of Italian Translation, Absinthe: New European Writing, Yale Books Unbound, Yale Press Log, and Forum Italicum. These include “Writing as Witness: A Conversation with Claudio Magris,” “On Translating Magris: ‘Closelaboration’ with a Difference,” “A conversation with Claudio Magris,” and “Mirror Images of Remembrance in Marisa Madieri’s La conchiglia and Claudio Magris’s Lei dunque capirà” –

Translating professionally since 1996, she is a former library administrator, and has a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature. Her website is: https://amilanoappel.com/.