Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano and Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale: the afterlife of two ‘glocal’ series

ABSTRACT

This article brings together perspectives from world literature and translation studies to compare the international reception of two ‘glocal’ literary cases: Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano books, and Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy L’amica geniale. The national and international success of these series raises important questions for scholars of translation studies, multilingualism, world literature and literary markets, and sheds light on the significance of different kinds of multilingualism in fiction and of their treatment in translation. The article addresses the following questions: how do monolingual book markets contain and discipline multilingual fiction? What happens when multilingual fiction travels through translation? How do we explain the present openness of the Anglo-American market to translated fiction with an emphasis on the vernacular? The author argues that while both Camilleri and Ferrante foreground cultural difference and linguistic incommensurability, the way in which they portray the experience of diglossia had an important impact in determining their national and international success as well as the route through which they achieved international visibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Translatability
• multilingualism
• monolingual paradigm
• dialect
• literary markets
• Camilleri
• Ferrante

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the creation of author-brands in the contemporary Italian context see Bassi (2015).

2. See Camilleri’s interview with Fabio Gambaro (2002): ‘Today … all Italians speak the same language, but it is a flat language, uniform and colonized by the Anglo-Saxon technological lexicon. In dialect, on the other hand, we can still find a vital lymph for our language and culture.’

3. See the interview released for La Stampa on 12 May 2000: ‘Many Sicilians tell me: we have never heard these words. But of course, because they belonged to the poor countryside; they are the words of the old farmer to whom I gave “milit” cigarettes immediately after the war, in exchange of fabulous stories of brigands. The stories have gone, I am left with the words that the little bourgeoisie does not know how to use, but that Pirandello knew well when he translated the classics into Italian’.

4. Lennon himself is drawing on the categories developed by Yaseen Noorani (2013).

5. In several articles and interviews, Camilleri mentions that the inspiration for his writing came from a speech uttered by his mother, in which warm words in Sicilian made way for parental threats in standard Italian (1999; 93, 2011; 134).

6. The Sacco Gang and the Revolution of the Moon have been published by Europa in 2017, in a translation by Stephen Sartarelli.

7. In Vittoz’s view, the fact that Lyonnais is almost extinct makes it sound to most readers like an invented language.

‘The vitality of Lyonnais … is almost nil. Its interest lies in the richness of its lexicon. I foregrounded this aspect, avoiding syntactic calques that would be fully authorized but would risk being perceived as a shameful ‘French fault’. We emphasize in this occasion the paralyzing reverence to which we were educated towards the language of the academy (Vittoz 2002, 82).

8. For example, in La mossa del cavallo, in which Camilleri uses several dialects, Kahn used plain German for Genoese and Italian, and reproduced the Sicilian original followed by a German translation. In other cases, such as in Il re di Girgenti, he recreated the effect of archaic Sicilian by going back to the archaic German used by the writer Jean Paul (Kahn 2004, 180–186).

9. Camilleri’s translators into Catalan are Pep Julià, Xavier Riu, Anna Casassas and Pau Vidal.

10. For a detailed analysis of Sartarelli’s strategies, see Gutkowsky 2009.

11. I am using the publications dates as provided by Unesco’s Index Translationum. No record is yet available for the Neapolitan tetralogy.

12. An example is Sidney’s 2016 Writers festival, in which the moderator begins by stating: ‘We don’t have the author tonight. She decided from the beginning that she would not reveal her identity. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym …. Only her Italian publishers know who she really is. We are, however, very fortunate to have Anne Goldstein, who has translated all Ferrante’s books into fluid and pungent English, making them such a pleasure to read.’ https://www.swf.org.au/audio-podcasts/.

13. Ferrante’s first two novels were translated in France by Jean-Noël Schiafano, Italo Passamonti, and Elsa Damien; in Spain, by Juana Bignozzi and Nieve Lopez Burelli; in Germany, by Stefan Wendt and Anja Nattefort.

14. See Mensch’s 2016 article on Der Spiegel: ‘Krieger’s translation sounds more poetic, literary and less clumsy, stubborn than the English translation’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [611–2015–0258];

Notes on contributors

Elisa Segnini

Elisa Segnini is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research interests include the translation, circulation and international reception of Italian fiction and the poetics and politics of multilingual texts.