Interview with Brian Robert Moore, translator from Italian to English

(Translated from the Italian)

Were your experiences in the publishing field in Italy useful for your career as a translator?

Working in publishing allows you to understand certain dynamics that you can’t learn from a textbook, such as the best way to propose a novel to a publisher. In my case, I worked for a few years in Italy with the Gems group. I was passionate about finding books to translate, but I also liked working on texts in a more creative way, for example by translating them. Indeed, in the beginning, I was a freelance translator and I produced samples, that is, extracts from literary texts. It’s a good way to try out different literary styles and genres (thrillers, detective novels, books for children and young adults). This experience made me realize that I really enjoyed translating literary texts.

 

Why did you choose to go to Milan and translate from Italian? 

I started studying Italian at university and immediately felt an affinity with the language. I then spent a semester in Bologna and it was a very formative experience that allowed me to get to know Italian literature better. I had read Calvino and Dante, but when I was in Bologna, and especially in the years that followed in Milan, I discovered many other authors who fascinated me and who had not yet been translated into English. I then thought that I would like to translate them myself.

 

What does it mean to propose an Italian text to an English or American publisher? What are the main difficulties to overcome?

 

There are many obstacles because there are not many publishers who want to publish translated literary works, they are almost all independent, and they publish fewer books than the big publishing houses. There is a lot of interest in Italy at the moment, but perhaps publishers are mainly looking for a realistic kind of book, like family stories that reflect a certain image of Italy. That seems a bit surreal to me, because in America, the most famous and appreciated Italian author of the 20th century is probably Italo Calvino, who is a fantastic and meta-literary author…

For example, it is difficult to propose the translation of an author like Michele Mari, who is highly esteemed in Italy, but whose language is very complex. His books are very funny, but they are also hyper-literary: they are books steeped in other books. And it is equally difficult to suggest an author like Walter Siti – who writes novels that explore modern society from a very personal point of view – given the predominance of a somewhat retro vision of Italian culture. In other words, these are authors who do not reflect what an American or English publisher or even reader has in mind when they think of Italian literature, but for me, Mari and Siti are so interesting for this very reason: precisely because they are original.

Even if American publishers prefer books that “breathe” Italy, particularly in their setting, these less conventional books often end up being really appreciated by English-speaking readers when they do get published.

 

Who are the most popular Italian authors in the United States today?

In addition to Elena Ferrante, Natalia Ginzburg is an important reference. That certainly helped me find a publisher for Lalla Romano. Although they are different authors, I imagine that the publishers saw potential in Lalla Romano given the success of Natalia Ginzburg’s books. Indeed, the first book to be released, A Silence Shared (Pushkin Press, 2023, Tetto Murato, published in Italy in 1957, editor’s note) received very positive reviews and was a finalist for a couple of awards. But we are only at the beginning. Her second book, which I translated and consider her masterpiece, Nei mari estremi (Einaudi, 1987), will soon be published under the title In Farthest Seas (Pushkin Press, 2023, in press). I find it extremely current, contemporary. Among the Italian authors popular in the United States, I would also mention Elsa Morante and Alba De Céspedes.

 

How important are awards and reviews for the success of Italian texts translated into English? 

If I think of the most successful books, such as those by Elena Ferrante, they are not books that have won many awards. But reviews help, as do awards, whether you have won or been a finalist.

Among this year’s winners of the O. Henry Prize, a prize awarded for over a hundred years for short narrative texts, was a short story by Michele Mari that I had translated and that had already been published in the New Yorker. Following this award, it was published in a Vintage anthology, Best Short Stories 2024, which generally sells rather well. If some readers read Mari’s story thanks to this award, they may then go on to read the entire collection Tu, sanguinosa infanzia (You, Bleeding Childhood, And Other Stories, 2023, Einaudi 1997) or the novel Verderame (Einaudi, 2007, Verdigris, And Other Stories, 2024).

Moreover, this is an important result because this year, only two of the twenty short stories that won this prize were in translation, that is, ten percent.

 

Are there any particular difficulties in translating from Italian into English?

Italian, due to the structure of its sentences, is a much more flexible language. It is much easier to put the emphasis where you want it. In English, on the other hand, you have to be careful to put the words in the right order, so that everything sounds natural, and that can become limiting. But in my opinion, the main difficulties depend on the language and style of the specific authors being translated.

 

Can you give us some examples?

Among the authors I have translated, Lalla Romano’s prose seems simple because it is very pared down and essential, but in reality it is extremely poetic and marked by very strong rhythms that must be reproduced in English.

When translating, you have to try to write the book as if the author had written it in English, which means respecting the grammatical and linguistic rules of the target language, while trying to reproduce the rhythm of the original writing, reinventing it.

Michele Mari has written books such as Verderame, full of puns and dialect, a non-spoken but literary dialect that the author created, drawing inspiration from 18th and 19th century literature. To translate this fantastic and literary language, I too created a dialect that was a bit British and Irish, making a pastiche that had little or nothing to do with America. People often think that dialect is used for realistic purposes, as if it were a social operation, but in Italian literature, dialect, especially from Gadda onwards, has also been used in a creative, modernist sense. So, in the case of Verderame, I had to make very personal choices. Any given translator would have translated this book in a completely different way to any other translator.

I didn’t want to use notes: when there were puns, I tried to recreate them in English. For example, I recreated an anagram very similar to the original. I didn’t use notes because I didn’t want to put a barrier between the plot, the puns and the reader. But this is not always the case. For Nei mari estremi by Lalla Romano, we decided with the publisher to put notes at the end of the text, because there are numerous references to her story, her life, her works, and several literary figures of 20th-century Italian literature. It is such an essential, poetic book that we decided not to include any numbers or symbols that would interrupt the reading: the notes are there, but they are only at the end.

Indeed, I think that sometimes notes can be an obstacle for the reader: for example, I think that in Verderame, the most important thing is not to grasp the precise meaning of each word, but rather to perceive the expressiveness of the character who speaks in dialect. And I believe that even for questions of context, it is sometimes not necessary to understand everything.

 

Did you have to compare notes with the author to translate the puns in Verderame? 

I sent a list of the puns that I had recreated in English and the author approved it. He trusted me to translate the dialect. In any case, it would have been difficult for me to translate this book without the author’s collaboration and approval.

 

Are the titles of your translations generally agreed with the publisher? 

For the moment, the titles I have proposed have almost always been approved by the publisher, sometimes after discussion or after the elaboration of second proposals. What I like best is the translation of the title of Walter Siti’s Troppi paradisi (Einaudi, 2006), Paradise Overload (forthcoming from Archipelago Books). The literal translation, “too many paradises”, doesn’t sound very natural, while “overload” has a very media-like meaning that reflects the atmosphere of the book. It also sounds a bit like Milton’s Paradise Lost.

 

Is it difficult to be a translator from Italian to English? 

I know that in Italy the economic situation of translators is quite dramatic. For us, translators from Italian to English, there is very little work. Compared to other languages, there seem to be a lot of books translated from Italian, but objectively, there are still not many. I have tried to focus on authors that I liked, with the idea of translating several works, especially because it is always difficult to start from scratch and propose a new author. And it is in part thanks to this that I have worked on writers who are among my favourites.

In addition, I have often benefited from grants, scholarships and funding for translators, even at the beginning of my career. For example, Tetto Murato won a PEN Grant, and to translate Troppi paradisi, I received a fellowship from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). It was therefore easier to find a publisher for these books.