Bio

Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Price’s work was awarded the 2013 Gutekunst Prize, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the European Literature Network, Specimen, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Of the more than 40 books Alta has translated from Italian and German, novelist Juli Zeh’s New Year was a finalist for both the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize and the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Price’s most recent translations include Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (Astra House, 2022), Zeh’s About People (World Editions, 2023), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s What I Saw, Heard, Learned… (Seagull Books, 2023), and Alberto Giacometti’s selected family letters, Time Passes too Soon (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024). Price’s translation of Svenja Leiber’s novel Kazimira is forthcoming (Seagull Books, 2025).

Project Description

To support the translation of the novel Tongue Mother by Maddalena Fingerle from Italian. Fingerle's debut novel, Tongue Mother, is a provocative exploration of language's power and the complexities of identity. Released in 2021 to critical acclaim, the book is a first-person narrative set in the city of Bolzano, South Tyrol, an autonomous region of Italy that was a part of Austria until the end of World War I. It tells the story of Paolo Prescher, a young man born and raised in Bolzano who is incensed by "dirty words"—people's hypocritical, dishonest use of language. He flees to Berlin and meets Mira, who helps him "clean up" his experience of language with such success that he is ultimately able to return home. Fingerle (b. 1993) gives voice to this contested cultural borderland, linguistically situated between Italian and German. Her characters speak from these margins, offering new perspective on collective present-day notions of homeland, identity, neurodivergence, and belonging.