The 2022 Italian Prose in Translation Award Shortlist

The Judges’ Citations

The Book of All Books

By Roberto Calasso

Translated from Italian by Tim Parks

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Tim Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Book of All Books into English is sometimes meditative, frequently confounding, and has perhaps a stark feeling of reading the Bible. Parks renders a translation that powerfully and gently guides the reader through a text loaded with biblical tension, regardless of the reader’s familiarity with the Old Testament. In Calasso, we find the tension between an avenging God requiring obedience without question, questions of sacrifice, and so much grace. Most meaningfully, Parks’s translation masters the art of invisibility. Unless one is keenly aware that it is a translation, there are no gaps to question that it could have been originally written in English. A translation that draws you in and pushes you to ask new questions.

Meeting in Positano

By Goliarda Sapienza

Translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore

Other Press

Those familiar with Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon or the sisterly squabbles of Aldo Palazzeschi's Le sorelle Materassi will find in Goliarda Sapienza's latest volume a somewhat (excuse the repetition) familiar feeling, the portrayal of a world that once was, but is no more, and yet whose soul still permeates key strata of Italian society. Brian Robert Moore's goldsmith-like approach to its translation carries us right to the heart of these dynamics, the way emotions are interwoven into words, social diktats embodied by family mantras, and the seemingly (yet deceptively) empty space in between them. A feast for all readers, but especially those at work on bringing women's stories, as well as their gazes on their own movements, to the forestage of world literature.

Nives

By Sacha Naspini

Translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford

Europa Editions

The chickens have indeed come home to roost in this taut drama of an evening phone call that takes a series of wrong turns throughout a single night. Where is the place of desire, what is the role of sacrifice, when is it right to bottle things up, and when to let them out? These questions come brilliantly to life in Sacha Naspini’s theatrical novel, artfully translated into English by Clarissa Botsford with the same driving rhythm as the original. Nives and her prescient hen Giacomina feel like Laurel and Hardy until they suddenly plunge the other characters into a Huis Clos scenario that holds you tight until the damage is done. A novel and a translation that doesn’t let up until you set the book down.

Penelope

By Silvana La Spina

Translated from Italian by Anna Chiafele and Lisa Pike

Bordighera Press

Anna Chiafele and Lisa Pike’s co-translation, which flows like an original, delivers a poignant re-elaboration of Penelope’s mythical figure. Connecting the reader to a fabric as old as time, the translators weave Silvana La Spina’s evocative tongue into a sensitive journey that turns Ulysses’s myth on its head and brings to the forefront a feminine tale whose power resides not in station or duty, but in the progressive self-discovery of one’s own inner universe and desire. A tumultuous read that gives voice to one of Western history’s most univocally told figures, and opens up our understanding of her in the style of Mary Renault or Ursula Le Guin.

Self-Portrait

By Carla Lonzi

Translated from Italian by Allison Grimaldi Donahue

Divided Publishing

We are all fortunate that Allison Grimaldi Donahue has given us the gift of one of those books that fall into the category of “I should have always known about this, but no one ever told me.” The dead-on translation of Carla Lonzi’s strange, challenging, and genre-bending Self-Portrait bravely fulfils the translator’s stated objective of keeping the “spoken nature of the text…to allow English to perform Italian voices,” and we hope that others will emulate Grimaldi Donahue’s enjoyment in the flexibility of language. How else could Lonzi’s revolutionary brand of art criticism be rendered? A ‘60s-generation book that speaks powerfully to us today about art, power, feminism, and intellectual life has finally found its English version. Meno male!