Of providence and pious hags

Graziella ‘Lalla’ Romano (1906-2001) is one writer to discover, or re-discover when you are Italian. At the ERB we are greatly enjoying her A Silence Shared?(Tetto Murato), translated by Brian Robert Moore, and published by PUSHKIN PRESS LIMITED . Romano rejected the terms memoir or autobiography. Her writing is clear, just: clear, and it carries these, what Moore calls ? subtly strange, even entrancing rhythms to it. In?A Silence Shared (first published in 1957), set in Cuneo and the surrounding countryside, she changes some of the details of her life during the war, and narrates from the perspective of Giulia, a sort of alter ego. The novel centers on two couples. It begins during World War II but moves into, and is narrated from, the postwar world, a world of gossipy widows and contested memories.? Here we are publishing a story that forms the opening sequence of A Silence Shared and below you'll find a Q&A with its translator.

… ?they? had arrived in town with their baby daughter who was only a few months old. The baby did not ?even? have a necklace with a medallion of the Madonna around her neck, so the wet nurse secretly pinned a medallion to her shirt. The baby ended up swallowing the medallion. The doctor couldn’t figure out the problem and kept tormenting the child, who was eventually saved, when she was on the verge of dying, by a doctor in Turin.

A Q&A with translator Brian Robert Moore

When did you first encounter Lalla Romano?

I first read Romano while I was living in Milan and working in publishing there. My interest was sparked in part by her publishing history itself, and by some of the notable authors who had played different roles in championing and publishing her work: Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, all of whom were involved in one way or another in the publishing house Einaudi. But the more I read Romano, the more I felt she was a particularly contemporary voice, whose unflinching and deeply personal work could fit just as comfortably in the context of today’s literary landscape. Romano didn’t perceive any difference between fiction and nonfiction; even if nearly all of her books explore her lived experience through memory, she rejected the terms memoir or autobiography, because she saw memory itself as invention, fantasy. This is especially clear in?A Silence Shared?(Tetto Murato?in Italian), in which she overtly changes some of the details of her life during the war, and narrates from the perspective of Giulia, a sort of alter ego.

It was the first book I read by Romano and it remained a favorite of mine, and I finally had the chance to start translating it during the pandemic. It spoke to me more than ever, then, especially for how Romano captures drama in stillness. By focusing on two couples in an isolated setting during the war, the novel evokes a kind of time outside of time, in which the norms of everyday life are put on hold while the characters fixate on what will come ?after?—if there ever will be an after.

What sort of writer is Lalla Romano? And, of course, an impossible-measurement question: how translatable is she?

Romano has a rather minimalist style, but she is a spectacular prose stylist. She wrote that a novel’s charm—the way it grips us—is born out of its rhythm, and the writing in?A Silence Shared?has these subtly strange, even entrancing rhythms to it, which I wanted to maintain. Of course, a rhythm or sentence structure being unconventional in one language doesn’t make it equally so in another, and I therefore had to try to feel what rhythms, what pauses and emphases felt right in English. One thing she sought to do as a writer was to create quiet and stillness around the words, so that the spare words themselves become more impactful; or as she put it: ?The words have to be few, between spaces and silences: that way they live.?

Often for me it was less a question of literally translating Romano’s Italian sentences into English than of imagining what Romano would write if she?did?write in English; in a way, this is always the case when you’re trying to maintain an author’s style in translation, but I especially felt it in this case. I sensed that one could produce a seemingly accurate and even very readable translation of Romano and yet lose her presence entirely if the particular nature of her voice wasn’t carried over somehow. Spare and essential prose can be more difficult to translate, since there’s nowhere to hide, and I think that Romano often intentionally allows for various shades of meaning to coexist in what she writes, even in a single phrase or word. She even seems to make a point of this at the beginning of the novel: after Giulia finally meets Ada, this stranger whom she feels so drawn to, and the two start to build a relationship, Giulia wonders to herself about the meaning behind Ada’s quick and enigmatic lines of dialogue.

Was it intimidating that Romano has translated books herself?

As difficult as she is to translate, I actually found it comforting that Romano was a translator herself, and that she had translated some particularly difficult and intimidating authors, too. Specifically, she translated Flaubert’s?Three Tales?and?Sentimental Education, and a couple of other books from the French. She was even going to translate Emily Dickinson after being asked to by Einaudi, but the project never went through. One reason that translation was never completed, I imagine, is that Romano saw translating as incredibly demanding work. She described translating?Sentimental Education?in particular as an obsessive and all-consuming process: she would get up in the middle of the night because the right word had come to her, and she even ended up having to abandon one of her own books to finish the translation. And yet, from her prose, she comes across as one of the most assured Italian writers of the last century—she never described writing her own books as similarly disruptive or anxiety-inducing. In the end, I suppose it’s not easy for anyone.?

You write in your preface: ?Translation, this interpretive art, is truly at the heart of the book.??Can you explain?

I see translation as key to the novel on both a literal and figurative level. The book depicts the period in which Romano translated Flaubert’s?Three Tales, an experience she credited as having turned her into a prose writer and novelist; before, she had been a painter and had written mostly poetry, but translating Flaubert led her to discover that ?prose and poetry are, rather, the same thing.??A Silence Shared, which I consider to be one of her most poetic novels, seems to me a culminating moment after that realization. In fact, Romano references this autobiographical detail directly in the first few pages, writing that she—or Giulia—had a ?classic to translate.?

At the same time, I find translation to be central in a more abstract sense: translation as a process of transferring meaning, of facilitating understanding across different forms of communication and different mediums. The novel focuses on the deep affinities that arise between these two couples—especially between Giulia and Ada’s husband, Paolo, an incredibly reserved partisan who has to go into hiding due to a mysterious illness—but there is very little speaking that takes place on the page. The novel, for me, is more interested in communication that exists through silence and the unsaid. I’m still amazed by how Romano allows us to feel so acutely the intensity of their relationship and of their impossible love for each other, even without ?giving much away?, you could say. (And it’s worth noting, as we find out towards the end of the novel, that Paolo is a translator too.)

Where would you position Lalla Romano in Italian literary history? And how does she speak to new readers outside of Italy now?

?Romano is definitely a classic author, and she was one of the few women writers to reach such acclaim and to win the Strega Prize in the second half of the 20th century—but the individual novels themselves have become more like cult classics in Italy. The Italian critic Paolo Di Stefano wrote, ?If she were French, she would enjoy the same popularity as the two exceptional Marguerites: Yourcenar and Duras,? and I think there’s a fair amount of truth to that.

?I do believe now is a time in which her books could finally be appreciated more outside of Italy and in the anglophone world, as they deserve to be. The way her books come together to form a mosaic of a whole life—I think it creates an interesting dialogue with the work of other contemporary authors, including Annie Ernaux. She was also before her time in how she mixed both photography and text to create a narrative in several of her books, years before other, more famous contemporary authors, such as Sebald, began to do something similar. At the same time, she was an early champion of Italian authors who have really lasted, like Fleur Jaeggy, for one. In this way, we, as readers, often enjoy Romano’s legacy and impact even when we don’t realize it.

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