This week’s story, “The Boundary,” is about a teen-age girl who is the daughter of immigrants. Her parents are the caretakers for a holiday house—in Italy, we assume—and, as the story opens, the girl is showing a new family around at the start of their week’s vacation. You recently spent some years living in Italy. When did you first start thinking of this scenario as the basis for a story?
The story was inspired by time I’ve spent in Capalbio, which is a town on the Tuscan Coast just over the border of Lazio, a quick journey from Rome. I got to know the area thanks to the photographer Marco Delogu, who was my neighbor in Rome and quickly became a good friend. He has a house in Capalbio, where he would spend most weekends, and he invited my family and me to visit now and then. In the summer of 2014, we rented his house for a week and I began to take the notes that would become the story. By then I’d been living in Italy for two years, and had already reflected at length on the situation of immigrants there.
We know that the girl’s parents are immigrants, and that she was born in the country they now live in, but we know little more of them beyond this—how deliberate was this decision? Did you always know what you would reveal and what you would hold back about the family’s situation?
The girl who narrates the story is disconnected from the world her parents came from. She herself knows little about it. Her reality is what surrounds her. It was a deliberate choice not to specify the origin of the family. In fact, I never make clear that the story is set in Italy. It’s fair for the reader to come to that conclusion, but it’s open to interpretation. I prefer that the story is unrooted, that it is free to cross boundaries, if you will. As I’ve said, the story was inspired by my time in Italy, but I am working to free my work from geographic coördinates, and to arrive at a more abstract sense of place.
Both Europe and the U.S. have seen intense debate over the place of immigration in recent years—and a rise in populist political movements. Do you think of “The Boundary” as a political story in any way?
I am alarmed and terrified by the rise of the extreme right in Italy, by intolerance toward foreigners, and by acts of brutal violence perpetrated against them. I follow these events closely in the Italian press. I am equally anguished by the populism in this country that made Trump’s election possible. It really strikes me that the two countries I now shuttle between and consider home are places where xenophobia still thrives. Immigration in Italy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the debate assumes a specific declination given that the notion of an “Italian” remains, racially, quite exclusive, i.e., unequivocally white. Rome, today, is a city full of immigrants from various parts of the world. They work all sorts of jobs, they take care of the elderly, they cook the Italian food served to tourists. They have families and send their children to Italian schools. And yet they are not considered Italian; the model of assimilation and integration that represents the best of the United States does not exist. A huge obstacle is the controversy over “ius soli” (which means “right of the soil”), a law that would allow children born and raised in Italy of foreign-born parents to obtain Italian citizenship. This legislation has still not been passed. And so what I perceive, sadly, is a perplexing resistance to change, clearly manifested in the government’s refusal to grant basic rights to second-generation immigrants. The consequence is that many people, like the young protagonist of my story, have no claim to belong either to Italy or to their parents’ place of origin. In that sense this story is political, yes. But all my work is about identity, about belonging, and therefore all my work may be read politically.
The mother in the vacationing family appears to be a writer, and as the girl is watching the family on vacation the mother may well be watching the girl’s family, in turn. Do you want us to question who might be telling the story?
The girl is the only narrator, and this story is hers. But the mother is a writer, yes, and is taking notes for a story that the girl intuits but will never read. The writer’s work is always partial, confined by one’s perspective. No story is ever the whole story. The older I get, the more acutely I am aware that the vast majority of what is written remains unread.
You wrote “The Boundary” in Italian, and then translated it yourself. In 2016, you published “In Other Words” (an excerpt of which ran in the magazine), which explored your relationship with the Italian language and traced your growing fluency in it. Have you been writing predominantly in Italian since then? Does it change the act of writing for you? Would “The Boundary” have been a different story if you’d written it in English?
I have continued writing in Italian. I have published a number of other stories and essays in Italian journals, and have recently completed a novel that will be published in Italy later this year. I think, see, and feel differently in Italian. I say things more simply but also more directly. And I tend to take more chances. “The Boundary” would surely have been a different story, composed in a different register, had I conceived it in English.
Ann Goldstein (who translates Elena Ferrante, among several other Italian writers) translated “In Other Words.” In this case, you translated the story yourself. What’s it like to return to your own work as a translator? Are you tempted to rewrite as you translate, or do you remain loyal to the original Italian?
I translated a very short story about a year and a half ago from Italian to English. And the process was less traumatic than when I first tried to translate myself almost five years ago, when the experiment of writing in Italian had barely gotten under way. As my written Italian takes root and solidifies, it becomes easier to assess objectively and, as a result, to step in and out of it. Translating myself no longer feels like a step backward, like undoing the great labor of the original or erasing it away. I aim to translate my Italian as accurately as possible. I don’t rewrite, in that I don’t want to revise, or to smooth out the rough edges, or to give the new version the overwhelming advantage of my English. But all translation involves rewriting. To translate is, by definition, to rewrite something in another language.
You have also been translating the work of the Italian novelist Domenico Starnone. Your translation of “Ties” was published last year, and “Trick” is coming out later this year. What drew you to Starnone’s fiction? Do you find the work of translation similar to writing fiction yourself, or quite different?
Translating Starnone has been fundamental to my recent creative journey. His Italian, with its prodigious lexicon and exceptional precision, sheds light from above as I venture to express myself, as a writer in Italian, on a far more modest linguistic plane. I would liken it to a shaft of sunlight perceived underwater; I am conscious of it, but I am proceeding in a different element, in a decidedly murkier dimension. Needless to say, translating Starnone enriches my Italian vocabulary and deepens my understanding of the syntax. It reveals new cadences. But, beyond that, I have the great privilege of scrutinizing the very mechanism of his novels, of probing the structure and supporting tissue. There is no better lesson for a writer. Translation goes beyond reading; the act is visceral as opposed to merely intimate, and it impacts you, it teaches you in a different way. I was drawn to Starnone’s fiction because I met him and we became friends, and so I was curious. As soon as I read “Ties” in Italian, I wanted to translate it, if only to be able to reread it an infinite number of times. It was the first time I wanted to work again in English after barricading myself behind Italian, and this has restored a sense of equilibrium. Translation is more pleasurable to me than writing fiction, given that I am in an intense relationship with a text I profoundly admire, greedy to absorb all that it has to offer. I question what I am producing, but that dialogue with the original text stimulates me, keeps me company, keeps me afloat. Writing is a sustained monologue, a profoundly solitary act. A place where there is no escape from myself and, paradoxically, a place of total freedom.
