La Storia by Elsa Morante:
a new German translation

Tuesday 1 October 2024, 7 p.m. Italian Cultural Institute Berlin

Elsa Morante’s novel La Storia is a classic of 20th century Italian literature. Set in Rome during and after the Second World War, it recounts the struggle for survival of Ida and her two children.

Editor Susanne Schüssler talks to Maja Pflug and Klaudia Ruschkowski, who have produced a new translation of the German-language work, recently published by Wagenbach.

Author and translator Maja Pflug has translated texts by female authors of Italian literature into German, such as Natalia Ginzburg, whose biography she has also written, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante and Donatella Di Pietrantonio. He has received several awards for his work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the German-Italian Translation Prize in 2011. She lives in Italy and Munich.

Klaudia Ruschkowski is an author, playwright, editor and literary translator from Italian and English. She conceives artistic and literary projects, (re)discovers authors and publishes the series Perlen. Italienische Schriftstellerinnen des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts.

Susanne Schüssler studied German philology, communication science and publishing law in Munich and received her doctorate in 1991. Since 2002 she has been editorial director of the Klaus Wagenbach publishing house.