On Humor, Eccentricity, and Sound in Family Lexicon: A Conversation with Ginzburg Translator Jenny McPhee” by Eric Gudas and Jenny McPhee

So for example, Schwartz’s “’How mean you are, Giro,’ the women said to him, and he answered ‘People who aren’t mean get eaten by dogs.’” (8) becomes Davis’s “’You’re so mean, Giró,’ the women said. And he’d retort, ‘If you’re good you get eaten alive.’” (39) Davis’s “…and winter begins.” (3) Becomes Schwartz’s “…and winter sets in.” (35) Or the epigraph from Virgil, “Deus nobis haec otia fecit.,” which Schwartz translates as “God has granted us this respite” becomes with Davis, “God has given us this moment of peace.” In one the word otia is peace and in the other respite. If both translations are read together however, the true expanse of the word can begin to be gauged. The reader is reminded all peace is finite, all peace is just a season. And the reader is also reminded that a moment of respite can become larger than itself, can open into memory, can become, in a sense, peace. Though the trauma and grief of Leone Ginzburg’s death colored her life and work forever, Ginzburg remained unremittingly dedicated to her craft and to speaking out against injustice and equivocation. Her novels and plays focus on large moral issues as played out ruefully, often with tragicomic results, in the lives of individual characters. But the essays are where she speaks in her most candid voice. It is the intimate yet elusive tone of that voice, along with the challenge of trying to hear it in English, that has long intrigued me. A glowing light of modern Italian literature … Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase … As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.” – New York Times One of Italy’s finest postwar writers. . . . If Elena Ferrante is a master of the sprawling, unputdownable epic, Ginzburg is a miniaturist. Her themes are buried in gestures, fragments, absences—not in what is said, but in what is not said. . . . Her masterpiece—the hyperbole is warranted—is Family Lexicon.”—Negar Azimi, BookforumGinzburg remarked in one of her essays that she would like to write a book called Vicende, “Event.” “Events” would be more appropriate, or “Vicissitudes.” She’s done precisely that in both these novellas — it’s one damn thing after another, a chronicle of interwoven lives. But Famiglia has the more sophisticated shape.

Despite the disingenuously modest stance of several of the essays (“I don’t know anything about politics,” for example, as the opening of the astute “An Invisible Government”), hers was a life spent at the center of Italian culture; she even served for one term in Parliament. She enjoyed a close circle of literary friends whose work she did not hesitate to criticize sternly when she saw fit—Alberto Moravia, for one, or Giulio Einaudi, as evidenced in “No Fairies, No Wizards.”The Light of Turin: Natalia Ginzburg’s Cityscape” by Roberto Carretta, translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova

This special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” (February 2021) responds to the renewed interest in her writing in the Anglophone world and posits that Ginzburg’s texts capture many of our own struggles today. As Katrin Wehling-Giorgi comments in her contribution: Ginzburg does not spare herself in rebuilding this season gone for her reader. She is unflinching and clear-eyed in her portrayal of herself; the Natalia in the essay, experiences joy and contentment, but also boredom, anger, and simmering resentment. She is frank in sharing how the exile sat heavy on her. She admits freely that no matter the sparkling wonder of the weft, the warp was a numbing mundane, a wearing domesticity. “We would light our green stove with the long pipe running across the ceiling; we used to gather in the rom with the stove—we cooked and ate there, my husband wrote at the big oval table and the children scattered their toys on the floor. A picture of an eagle was painted on the ceiling, and I would stare at the eagle, thinking that that was exile. Exile was the eagle, it was the humming green stove, it was the vast silent countryside and the motionless snow” (36). The dressmaker divided the world into two camps: those who comb their hair and those who don’t. (38)The atmosphere of the book is so clear and immediate that reading it is like being there or seeing a film.”— The Christian Science Monitor Ginzburg’s death in 1991 was the occasion for an outpouring of critical praise and affectionate personal reminiscence in the Italian press. In her native country she has long been recognized as one of its greatest twentieth-century writers, and the most eloquent, incisive, and provocative chronicler of the war years and the postwar ambience (notably in All Our Yesterdays and Voices in the Evening). Mostly what she provoked was love and allegiance, but there was occasional exasperation at the outspoken, intransigent quality of her thought and moral judgments (precisely what I find most endearing). The critic Enzo Siciliano, while expressing awe for Ginzburg’s “grasping things without any intellectual filters,” also notes that this “very peremptory and direct way of presenting her ideas” could alienate readers accustomed to a more temperate mode of argument.