Posts featuring Andrea Marcolongo

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

News this week from Sweden and Central Europe!

This week, we bring you news from Sweden and Central Europe! In Sweden, Eva Wissting reports on the annual Stockholm literature fair and recent acclaim for writer Merete Mazzarella, while Julia Sherwood highlights lively readings across Central Europe from the 2021 European Literature Days and Visegrad Café program. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

The annual literary fair, Stockholms Litteraturmässa, was held last weekend, for the fourth time, after having been cancelled two years in a row due to renovations two years ago and last year because of COVID restrictions. The fair, which is a single day event with no entrance fee, is meant to highlight the diversity of Swedish publishers. This year, it included an exhibit of around fifty publishers and magazines. There were also author talks and lectures on subjects ranging from democracy, climate, translation ethics, to literature about real events, as well as storytime events for the younger visitors and poetry readings. The theme of “the printed book” was meant to reflect current affairs in the publishing industry and was chosen because it can no longer be taken for granted that literature is read in its conventional printed book form.

Last week, the Swedish Academy announced that it is awarding Merete Mazzarella the 2021 Finlandspris (Finland Prize), which amounts to just over ten thousand US dollars, for her work in the Swedish-speaking cultural life of Finland. Swedish is the first language of about five percent of the Finnish population and one of the two official languages in the country. Mazzarella, who was born in 1945 in Helsinki, is a literary scholar and a writer who has published over thirty books since her debut in 1979. Her most recent book, Från höst till höst (From autumn to autumn), is an essayistic journal about living as an elderly person through the pandemic and its restrictions. Her books have been translated to Finnish, Danish, and German. Previous recipients of the award include author and journalist Kjell Westö (The Wednesday Club).

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Epic Reasons to Love Greek: An Interview with Andrea Marcolongo

The study of a language that challenges us the way that Greek does teaches us the trade of living . . .

Andrea Marcolongo’s motivation for writing The Ingenious Language is refreshingly straightforward: the Italian writer, translator, and classical scholar wants everyone to fall in love with ancient Greek. Casting aside the rigid pedagogical practices and elitism traditionally associated with classical studies, Marcolongo focuses on the personal, exploring the “extraordinary” challenges, ecstasies, and opportunities ancient Greek offers to all who engage with it. Written for “those who have never studied it and are curious, those who have studied Greek and forgotten it, those who have studied it and hated it, and those who are studying Greek literature in school today,” The Ingenious Language is a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, has been embraced by readers around the world. Masterfully translated from the Italian by Will Schutt and published by Europa Editions, Andrea Marcolongo’s love letter to ancient Greek is now finally available in North America. To celebrate, Asymptote spoke with Marcolongo about falling in love with an ancient language, the “strange” appeal of studying Greek, the myth of Greek color blindness, and the need for a common utopia.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): In the introduction to The Ingenious Language, you mention “falling in love” with ancient Greek as a young girl. Can you tell me why Greek was so appealing to you, why you fell in love?

Andrea Marcolongo (AM): I always say that the love story with Greek is the longest of my life. However, it wasn’t love at first sight: I don’t believe in that. Instead, it was a path of knowledge. I remember myself as a young girl waiting for the yellow bus to go to high school with a big Greek dictionary in my hands. It was a challenge, first of all, to learn an alphabet that I didn’t know, and then a challenge to myself, my openness to the world.

Obviously, every language is “ingenious” in its own way because it expresses thinking of those who use it every day. The adjective “ingenious” which gives the title to my book derives from three different languages: the Greek, where it comes from the verb root “to create” and means, as in Aristophanes, “creative mind,” the Latin, in which it refers to the “genium” which, according to mythology, is a small being that accompanied man throughout the course of life to make him happy, and then the French, in which “génial” means fun, or beautiful. I played with these same words in three different languages as a way of explaining why I, Andrea, a thirty-year-old woman, love Greek. I love it because it is a free and human language. Free, because its quirks—maybe even those that drove us crazy at school—were not made obligatory by grammar, but left to the free choice of those who used Greek daily to speak and write. It is, therefore, a human language because it leaves people the responsibility of choosing not only what to say, but also how to say it. And in doing so, Greek also allows the speaker the freedom to express who they are. READ MORE…