Frederika Randall
Photo courtesy of Frederika Randall
Bio
Frederika Randall grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in Italy for nearly 35 years. A writer and translator from Italian, she has published essays, reviews, and translations in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, the Italian weekly Internazionale, Asymptote, Massachusetts Review, and Best European Fiction, among many others. She translated Ippolito Nievo’s epic novel Confessions of An Italian; Luigi Meneghello’s memoir Deliver Us; The Communist and Dissipatio HG by Guido Morselli (the latter forthcoming, NYRB 2020); novels by contemporary authors Ottavio Cappellani, Helena Janeczek, and Giacomo Sartori; and stories by Igiaba Scego, Davide Orecchio, and Ruska Jorjoliani. She has also translated historian Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, and Primo Levi’s Resistance. Awards include a 2009 PEN-Heim grant for Deliver Us, the 2011 Cundill Prize for Padre Pio (with Luzzatto), and the shortlist for the IPTA prize, 2017.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Italian of A Very Old Man by Italo Svevo. Recognized as one of Italy's most outstanding modernist writers, Svevo (1861-1928)—the pen name of Aron Ettore Schmitz—was the author of novels, plays, short stories, and autobiographical writings. In 1905, he learned English through private lessons from author James Joyce, who had come to Italy to teach. Widely known for his novel The Confessions of Zeno, a story told in the form of a memoir that the protagonist is writing at his psychoanalyst's behest, this project will translate five extensive fragments of a late unfinished novel that was written in the final years of Svevo's life and is told by the same unreliable first-person narrator, Zeno Cosini.
By chance—or maybe because standard Italian prose often struggles to encompass colloquial language—my project has involved a lot of thinking about vernaculars. The National Endowment for the Arts grant thus comes as a particularly timely honor: it’s an opportunity to pause for a moment to investigate why Italo Svevo’s acclaimed novels were initially received so coolly in Italy. A question that in turn leads to questions about how spoken language has been represented in standard Italian diction, and to what degree the written language is permeable to colloquialisms and neologisms. While English is quite porous to street slang and local argot, my hunch was that Italian, still not universally spoken instead of the local dialects until well into the 20th century, has been less friendly to colloquial voices.
Svevo (1861-1928), although he wrote in Italian, did not write like an Italian, especially not one of his period. A native of cosmopolitan, multilingual Trieste, he spoke Triestino, a Venetian dialect, at home, studied in German at school in Bavaria, and worked in his Italian father-in-law’s marine paint business. In his novels, he sometimes makes fun of the guardians of literary Italian, speakers of Tuscan, so different from his city’s hard-nosed, Triestino-speaking traders. In his day, literary Italians considered him a clumsy stylist with all the grace of a boorish businessman. Fortunately, James Joyce disagreed. To Joyce’s Anglophone ear, the voice narrating A Very Old Man, sounded very modern: imperfect, even mediocre, opinionated, ambivalent, prevaricating. The themes too—deceit and self-deception; the fragility and foolishness of the good bourgeois gentleman and paterfamilias—were strikingly modern. Perhaps it had to be someone like Svevo, for whom Italian was a third language, to break though the timidity of elegant style and write evocatively about the anxieties of his age.