For this Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant and introspective short story by Olga Campofreda, translated from the Italian by Federica Silvi. A woman returns to her hometown for a simple mission: attending her cousin’s wedding. But her journey provokes uneasy reflections, as she tracks the trajectory of her cousin’s life, which has adhered to the conventional “good girl” narrative ingrained in their community, and measures its distance from her own. As much as she cherishes her life of openness and freedom, her homecoming resurrects the ghosts of other possibilities—and worse, the fear of not being able to maintain her new identity under the suffocating pressure of the past. Campofreda’s prose brims with quiet tension, exploring the friction between the selves we create for ourselves and the ones we can’t escape.
In the end, no one cheered. The plane glimmered in the sunset-red windows of the business district’s skyscrapers, then landed smoothly in Naples, but none of the usual hand-clapping followed. A single, half-hearted burst had all but died down by the time the wheels touched the ground. Some might blame it on the low season: at this time of year, all the passengers are foreigners, taking advantage of lower prices to visit the islands and hike on the Amalfi Coast. It’s the outfits that give them away, the summer clothes they start wearing before it’s even hot, the shorts and linen vests they bring out as good omens for the weather in the days to come. In the holiday dream world they purchased, there’s nothing but sunshine. They’ll find it even when it eludes them: a power they can only wield in the places they’re seeing for the first time.
“Are you from here?” the delicate woman sitting next to me asked, in English.
Her husband had woken her when Vesuvius appeared out of the window. She kept pressing her finger on the glass in its direction, ecstatic, a white-haired child.
“Are you from Naples?”
I nodded; she replied with a contented sigh, then turned away to gape at the scenery some more. READ MORE…