Ferrante Fever: a worldwide literary phenomenon and her translator’s visibility

‘Ferrante fever’ stands metaphorically for the outbreak of the highly contagious enthusiasm which has been spreading over the past few years, particularly among women, for the books written by an Italian novelist who, as known, publishes under the nom de plume of Elena Ferrante. Though speculations about her identity, often media-averse, are continually being made and debunked, Anita Raja, the Rome-based translator and wife of Neapolitan novelist Domenico Starnone, is among those long rumored to be Ferrante. Figures from Ferrante fever’s ‘medical bulletin’ account for her book sales of about 5.5 million copies worldwide, with publication rights sold in 44 countries, ranging from Estonia to Turkey, and including Cina and Indonesia (The New York Times, December 7, 2016). However, it is thanks to Ann Goldstein’s exquisite English translations that Elena Ferrante has achieved such enormous success, particularly in the Anglophone market, where sales have currently reached almost three million. On the other hand, translating Ferrante has made Ann Goldstein – a long-time editor at the New Yorker magazine – exceptionally famous and given her a celebrity status that translators rarely achieve. The author’s choice to remain anonymous has, paradoxically, given unprecedented visibility to her English translator, who often participates in book tours and interviews left unattended by the author. However, though Goldstein steadfastly affirms that she is ignorant of Ferrante’s identity and communicates with the novelist only by email, she admits (2016), she has «become the face of Elena Ferrante, […] her representative in the world, at the moment». Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – four novels published serially for reasons of length and duration, between 2011 and 2014, which include My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Story of the Lost Child (2014) – is a sort of feminist bildungsroman whose backbone is the life-long, complicated friendship between Lenù and Lila, where emotional lives and private events continuously intermingle with public matters, so that the personal becomes political, and viceversa. Moving from Lenù and Lila’s childhood in the impoverished outskirts of postwar 1950s Naples, the four books develop alongside the socio-political history of Italy, through the economic boom of the 1960s and the political turmoil of the 1970s, to the two friends’old age in the present day. From the very start of their friendship Lenù and Lila plan to swim against the tide and transcend their boundaries of place and gender, both from a physical and a metaphorical perspective. The tetralogy, where the city of Naples is depicted as a character in its own right, is thus deeply entrenched not just in an Italian socio-geographical context but in a specifically Neapolitan one, where culture-bound elements and socio-historical references and descriptions are deeply intertwined in the plot(s). The earthquake, which took place in the south of Italy in November 1980, turns into a symbol of “smarginatura”, the physical sensation of “dissolving boundaries” which haunts Lila’s whole life. Given these factors, translation poses an especially thorny challenge, one that Ann Goldstein has resoundingly overcome. Today she is considered worldwide one of the preeminent translators of Italian literature, and some critics have even wondered if Goldstein’s translation “might be better than the original” (Merelli 2015, online). Mainly drawing on Berman’s (1984, 1992) and Venuti’s (1992, 1995/2008, 1998, 2004) major theoretical works on translation, our paper aims at highlighting the challenge and trials of Goldstein’s translations through an analysis of some qualitative examples. In Berman’s words, translation is l’épreuve de l’ étranger (trial) “in a double sense […] first, it establishes a relationship between the Self-Same and the Foreign by aiming to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness. […]. In the second place translation is a trial for the foreign as well, since the foreign work is uprooted from its own language-ground. And this trial, often an exile, can also exhibit the most singular power of the translating act, to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its most deeply buried, most self-same, but equally the most ‘distant’ from itself” (in Venuti 2004: 277). Renderings of the interdependent, complementary relationship present in all types of characters/situations of the tetralogy, moving from Lina’s and Lenu’s inverse stories and personalities (“It was as if […] the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other,” Lenù recalls in My Brilliant Friend, “and there is no reconciliation to this paradox.”) to the two languages spoken: standard Italian and Neapolitan dialect will also be investigated. This all-pervading dichotomy is also represented in the complex feelings between men and women and echoed in the relationship between translator and translated, which, according to the Italian feminist Luisa Muraro – who has interviewed and influenced Ferrante – would enact a practice of affidamento, of “entrusting” between women that would be the basis for new socio-cultural dynamics meant to dismantle patriarchy (The Guardian, 5 October 2016).