Aaron Robertson
Photo by Yvonne Cha
Bio
Aaron Robertson is a writer, translator, and editor from Detroit. Before joining Spiegel & Grau in 2020, he was an editor at Literary Hub. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s novel Beyond Babylon (Two Lines Press, 2019) was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. He is a board member of the American Literary Translators Association. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Detroit Metro Times, the Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, and more. His debut nonfiction book, a memoiristic history of African American utopianism, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Italian of the novel The Big A by Giulia Caminito. The Big A, Caminito's (b. 1988) debut novel, received a number of awards, including the Bagutta Prize for Debut Novel, the Giuseppe Berto Prize, and the Brancati Prize. The novel examines colonial and post-colonial confrontations between Italy and Africa in the aftermath of World War II and touches on the challenges of social re-integration for African Italian nationals. Loosely inspired by the author's own family history, The Big A begins near the end of World War II during the Allied bombings of Milan, and follows the story of a young girl, Giada, who is living with a cruel aunt and her family, dreaming of reuniting soon with her mother who is operating a bar out of Asmara. After working in a dreary textile factory, Giada decides to make a trip to see her mother in Africa—"the Big A"—which she imagines as a fantastical place. This English translation will be the first translation of any of Caminito's work into any language.
The affirmation of friends, family, and interested observers serves a practical purpose for anyone involved in the creative arts: when your confidence or energy wavers, you can draw on such encouragement as one might take out an insurance policy. In the few years that I’ve been translating, working to bring stories about the consequences of Italian colonialism in Africa into English, I’ve been able to rely on a kind, tight-knit support circle. I’m pleased and grateful that I can add the National Endowment for the Arts to this group. I may have to stop prefacing the work I do with disclaimers like, “You won’t believe how niche this is.” The recent success of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, and the dogged work of women across the African Italian diaspora like Igiaba Scego, Camilla Hawthorne, Bellamy, and so many others has brought new attention to critical matters of race, gender, and class in Italy and beyond.