Posts featuring Ornela Vorpsi

The Full Meaning of Events: An Interview with Antonella Lettieri

. . . failing to fully understand the other might just be the most human experience of all.

“They were still days when I wasn’t like I wanted to be but I wanted to be like I believed I could become, or at least that’s what I kept telling everyone” says Manu, the polarizing protagonist of Enrico Remmert’s “The War of the Murazzi”. Excerpted in Asymptote’s Summer 2023 issue, the story tracks the city of Turin as its identity shifts from Italian homogeneity to a hub of immigration during the 1990’s—a multicultural turn rendered both joyful and sinister in Manu’s cloven gaze, in which the hypocritical impulses towards political optimism and casual violence are mapped from the level of the individual onto that of society in a riveting character study. In an award-winning English translation, Antonella Lettieri preserves Remmert’s literary pyrotechnics and the layers of complexity in his unreliable narrator’s voice. 

I had the distinct pleasure of corresponding with Lettieri via email: our conversation ranged from the differentiation of ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’ in the act of translation to the tensions between humanism, cynicism, and so much more that ripple under the surface of Remmert’s text.

Willem Marx (WM): In a recently published book review, you write that one of the joys of literature in translation is “imagining the book that was and the books that could have been”. I’m struck by the way you center the role of imagination. How does imagination play into your translation practice? 

Antonella Lettieri (AL): Every time I read literature in translation I cannot help but wonder about the original, whether I speak the source language or not; I’m sure this is a very common experience, but for me it is always a great source of enjoyment. This was particularly true in the case of the book I was reviewing: Thirsty Sea (translated by Clarissa Botsford and published by Héloïse Press), which poses a great challenge to the translator because of its ample use of wordplay and double meanings—as the brilliant Clarissa explains in her interesting translator’s note. 

When it comes to translation, I find that ‘creativity’ is perhaps a more useful notion than ‘imagination.’ Reading always requires a creative effort (it is an act of co-creation with the author) and I think that this is even more the case for the kind of close reading required of translators. If we start to understand both reading and translating as acts of creation, perhaps we can put behind us fraught notions of loyalty and fidelity, and start realising that re-reading and re-translating are key efforts in keeping a text alive over time.

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Barren Landscape: Who is Afraid of Albanian Women?

For many Albanian women, the domestic is a space of terror and violence; what could be more heroic than surviving and writing in spite of that?

How is it that a formal literary curriculum can almost completely erase the works of a group of proficient, formidable writers? In this essay, Barbara Halla, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Albania, asks this question of her country’s educational system, while also discussing and revealing the extensive work of Albania’s female writers. 

I could make a long list of my grievances about the Albanian educational system, but I have generally appreciated the breadth of my literary education. In four years of high school, I was assigned some eighty books to read, spanning Western literature from Antiquity (starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh) to Shakespeare, Hugo, Hemingway, and Márquez.

I no longer retain the official list of my required reading, but it is not hard to find a contemporary equivalent. I graduated from high school in 2011, and in eight years, the list selected by the Ministry of Education does not seem to have changed much, which I find questionable. While I am grateful for my literary education, with the years I have become acutely aware of its flaws, the most egregious of which is the complete dismissal of women writers, especially Albanian women. Dozens of books, an entire year dedicated to Albanian literature during my senior year, and yet I graduated without having heard the name of a single Albanian woman writer. It was almost as if they didn’t exist.

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In Ismail Kadare’s Shadow: Searching for More in Albanian Literature

There is beauty in this multilingual cohort of writers and the way they break linguistic boundaries to tell their stories and talk about identity.

In the past seven months I have written five dispatches covering Albanian literary news for Asymptote. Only one of these dispatches does not mention Ismail Kadare. It feels impossible to avoid him. Kadare is the only Albanian author speculated as a potential winner for the Nobel in Literature (when the Nobel still meant honour and prestige). He has been recognised with a medal by the French Legion of Honour and won Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. Kadare is also one of the few Albanian authors to be published in Asymptote. While other Albanian writers struggle to find translators, two different titles by Kadare were published in English this year alone: A Girl in Exile (translated by John Hodgson) and Essays in World Literature (translated by Ani Kokobobo).

It would perhaps be improper to complain of Kadare’s success and his place in world literature.  He has contributed immensely to the field, writing novels that portray Albanian history from Medieval times to the present, while also producing essays and studies in the field of Albanology. Not to mention the recognition he has brought to Albania abroad, where for many to speak of Albania is inherently to speak of Kadare. But Kadare’s success is unique in Albanian literary history. And with its singularity come certain dangers and drawbacks, common to all national cultures that are represented through the often-homogenous lens of a single figure.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Albania, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Spring is creeping in and we have just launched a very special and very exciting new issue full of amazing literary voices from around the world, including Jon FosseDubravka Ugrešić, and Lee Chang-dong. Check out the Spring 2018 issue here! In the meantime, we are here with the latest literary news from around the world. This week we report from Albania, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Albania:

Classic and contemporary Albanian literature is heavily focused on male authors and the male experience, a status-quo challenged recently by “Literature and the City.” Throughout April and May, journalists Beti Njuma and Alda Bardhyli will organize the second installment of this event consisting of a series of discussions and interviews exploring trends in contemporary Albanian literature. This year the encounters will highlight the work and world of Albanian women, through discussions with authors including Flutura Açka, Lindita Arapi, Ardian Vehbiu, Edmond Tupe, and Fatos Lubonja. A particularly exciting event was the conversation conducted with Ornela Vorpsi, a prolific author who writes in French and Italian but who remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone sphere. So far, only one of her books has been translated into English by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck: The Country Where No One Ever Dies.

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