“Ferrante Fever and the visible role of her translator”

It is thanks to Ann Goldstein’s “elegant, burnished English” (Wood 2013) that Elena Ferrante has achieved such an enormous success, particularly in the Anglophone market, where sales have reached almost three million at the time of writing. On the other hand, translating Ferrante has made Goldstein exceptionally famous. “Translators rarely achieve celebrity status. But as Ms. Ferrante’s star has risen, so too has Ms. Goldstein’s. In a way, disregarding Venuti’s statements about translator’s invisibility when he claims that “Readers usually respond to the translation of a foreign text […] as if the text had been written originally in their language, as if it were not a translation (1986: 179), Goldstein is today an extremely visible translator. Ferrante’s choice to remain anonymous has in fact given unprecedented visibility to her English translator, and nowadays Ann Goldstein is now “one of the most sought-after translators of Italian literature” (Maloney 2016).