A visit to Palermo’s La Stanza di Carta (The Paper Room), which carries rare books. Image – Getty: Alexander Farnsworth
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Recent and relevant to Frankfurt’s 2024 Guest of Honor Italy program:
Frankfurter Buchmesse’s 2024 Rights Center Sells Out
CEO Stefano Mauri on Italy’s GeMS and Debut Fiction
Italy: A New Ubik Bookstore on Sicily’s Island of Ortigia
Rights Edition: Giunti’s Frankfurt-Bound ‘Come l’arancio amaro’
Italy’s Cesare De Michelis Prize: A Partnership With Frankfurt
On Trapping Pigeons, and Mel Brooks
As Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20) prepares to welcome its Guest of Honor Italy program—for a second time, the first being in 1988—our Rights Edition readers will want to recall several markers of the Italian market’s growing presence in international literary translation and publication rights business.
Quickly to review:
- In 2001, the first year these figures were compiled, the Italian market reported 1,800 international translation and publication rights sales overseas. By 2022, the most recent year that full figures are available, that number had ballooned to 7,889 sales.
- In 1988, the cover-price valuations of Italian books, both for adults and for the children’s market, came to €361 million; by 2023, that figure had risen to €1.8 billion, a 400-percent gain.
- And between 1988 and 2023, the number of adult and children’s titles published in Italy rose from 23,750 to 68,791, a gain of 190 percent.
- Italy is a book publishing marketplace that arrived at Frankfurt in 1988 with 2,315 publishers. This year, when the world’s largest book-business trade show opens in October, Guest of Honor Italy will have become a country with 5,184 publishers, a rise of 124 percent.
With such impressive growth numbers at hand, Publishing Perspectives has had a chance to put several questions to Paola Passarelli, the director-general of libraries and copyright at the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Related article: Frankfurter Buchmesse’s 2024 Rights Center Sells Out. Image: FBM, Anett Weirauch
Certainly, Frankfurt goers who have a chance to meet Passarelli will find that she’s a firm champion of translators and their work—the very foundation of the international publication rights trade, after all, that will be humming in this year’s sold-out Literary Agents and Scouts Center at Frankfurter Buchmesse.
In the past, Passarelli has been known, for example, to quote José Saramago, saying, “While the writer makes literature national, the translator makes it universal.”
But she’s more: As it turns out, we’ve discovered that Passarelli brings a sparkling, pleasure to a conversation about translation and those charming, or maddening, gaps we all encounter between languages. You quickly catch the high regard she has for the translator’s arts, when you ask her about challenges faced by translators relative to Italian books, especially in terms of the sorts of idioms common to each culture—such as the common English phrase crack the window, meaning to open it a bit, not break the glass.
Paola Passarelli
“Well, let’s start by ‘rompendo gli indugi e facendo piazza pulita dei luoghi comuni’ (i.e. …), she says, immediately clued-in as to what we’re talking about. What she has just said might be translated into English as breaking the ice and clearing away the clichés.
“This is a plausible phrase in Italian,” Passarelli says, “but almost untranslatable into any other language. In fact, we don’t want to “break” anything, but only free ourselves from doubts and hesitations, and we don’t have a “square” to “clean,” but rather a mental horizon to clear.
“The abstract concept incorporated and subsumed by the concrete term,” she says, “is a challenge for any translation, and with reference to any pair of languages. Italian, as we know, is extraordinarily rich in them, also as a result of what it has inherited from the mother of all Romance languages, Latin.
“In general, I’d say, it’s not so much the presence of an idiomatic or specific expression of a language that makes it difficult to translate, and I could give you the example of the hundreds of mottos and proverbs that no language can translate literally and that each translator—aware of the cultural and semantic context in which a given expression is placed—can place in the reality of his own language only by making a preliminary effort to understand the genesis and meaning, sometimes historical, of a certain expression.
“For example,” Passarelli says, “an expression that’s quite well translated into English is the one for which we say ‘prendere due piccioni con una fava’ when we manage to obtain two results with a single effort. However, although there’s an analogous expression in English “to kill two birds with a stone”—and the translation is perfect in an operational, finalistic sense—the immediate rendering in English or any other language inevitably loses the implicit reference to a typically Italian historical tradition.
The metaphorical meaning of the expression that we still use today originates from a method of hunting wild pigeons, in which a bean tied to a very thin thread fixed to the ground was used as bait: the pigeon that devours it remains imprisoned in it almost like a fish on a hook, because the bean is large and does not come out of its crop.
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“So we, in Italy, do not catch any two birds by hitting them with a stone, in an effort to emulate Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood who takes out several enemies with a single shot of arrows, but we practically woo the pigeon, this specific bird and not other species of birds, like a fish that takes the bait. In short, our expression implies something sneaky and intentional, while the English one seems to indicate a technical and ballistic ability.
“In English,” Passarelli says, “to give another example, you cannot literally translate the expression ‘in bocca al lupo’ (‘in the wolf’s mouth’) which does not want to wish a cruel end for the person to whom it is addressed, but quite the opposite. The saying would have originated from the language of hunters as a wish of “good luck,” addressed by antiphrasis (with the opposite meaning to the literal one) to the hunters themselves, and, by extension, to those who are preparing to face a risky or difficult test.
“Today, however,” she says, “since we’re more civilized and have a more accentuated environmentalist spirit, we tend to think that the “wolf’s mouth” is the safest place to be, almost as if we were wolf cubs who are defended by a mother wolf who, to protect her offspring, transports them from one place to another by taking them in her mouth: as cats and dogs do, after all. We could say that we’ve learned from our pets to move from antiphrasis to the imaginative evocation of good fortune. The wolf, today, is us who take care of our offspring.”
‘Even Stereotypes Are Welcome’
In Sicily’s Santa Maria la Scala. Image – Getty: 578Foot
“I can tell you that even stereotypes are welcome,” Passarelli says, “in the sense that they make you familiar with a culture different from your own.
“Breaching a stereotype seems to me a winning, stimulating factor of attraction toward a specific literary creation.”Paola Passarelli
“Even by simplifying that culture, and making you mistakenly believe you know it, they reduce the distance from that culture and can arouse in you a livelier interest.
“Think for example of Italian cuisine”—and we are happy to do that, of course—”with its typical products renowned throughout the world, which crowd the rankings of favorite foods at an international level. Think of Fellini’s films but also of those of Francis Ford Coppola and others who have been strongly inspired by Italian cinema and Italian culture.
“And why should we refuse the stereotypes of the Roman Empire as a dominating and a warrior state, if from those stereotypes themselves and movies like Gladiator that betray objective reality and cast a spell on the general public, this same public can grow and nurture its interest in visiting the places where the ancient Romans placed their palaces and tombs, and with it the curiosity to read the stories written today by those who live today in those places?
“I’ll tell you more: if a novel contains refutations and reversals of stereotypes, don’t you think it will be much more interesting, compelling, stimulating? Breaching a stereotype seems to me a winning, stimulating factor of attraction toward a specific literary creation.”
‘Like Riding a Bicycle on Gravel’
Reading in Torino. Image – Getty: Liukov
When it comes to some of the most successful translations from Italiano to other languages, Passarelli again demonstrates the sort of careful and complex critical thinking she puts into such issues in her work with the ministry of culture.
“The real mystery of Ferrante is not her identity but the strength of her story.“Paola Passarelli
“If you look for books by Italian authors that are the most read abroad, it’s easy to come across rankings that place alongside—and often before—classics like The Divine Comedy and The Prince (or more recent classics like The Adventures of Pinocchio); different and extraordinary works like The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Go Where Your Heart Takes You by Susanna Tamaro, the Camilleri novels, the fables by Gianni Rodari, the comic-strip stories of Geronimo Stilton by Elisabetta Dami; and Elena Ferrante’s stroke of genius in My Brilliant Friend.
“The latter writer in particular—author of four novels published within a year of each other between 2011 and 2014—is a true publishing phenomenon in the United States, where so-called ‘Ferrante Fever’ broke out in 2014 and about which much has been written and which has infected many illustrious personalities, from writers to actors to politicians.
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“The global success of Ferrante, an author whose true identity is still unknown, has also been definitively recognized by the main international newspapers. In 2013, The Economist defined her as ‘the best contemporary novelist you’ve never heard of,’ Foreign Policy included her among the global thinkers of 2014, and in 2016 The Times selected her among the 100 most influential personalities in the world.
“The real mystery of Ferrante is not her identity but the strength of her story: the way in which a story set in the poor suburbs of Naples in the second half of the 20th century has managed to circulate with such vivacity in one of the symbolic places par excellence of innovation and ultramodernity as the United States.
“My opinion is that the reason for all this must be sought both in the novelty of the subject of the tetralogy itself, that is, the evolution over the years of an intense and conflictual friendship between two young women, who individually or together have very little of the conventional and therefore, arousing that wonder necessary to enchant the reader, violate the stereotypes of gender or those on Italian culture, and in an inevitable comparison with contemporary American literature that evidently lacks those characteristics that are appreciated in Ferrante’s work.
“My Brilliant Friend won first place in The New York Times ranking of the 100 best books of the 21st century, with the following accolade: ‘Reading this unforgettable and uncompromising novel is like riding a bicycle on gravel: it is gritty, slippery, and unnerving, all at the same time.’
“I seem to find everything of what I said before,” says Paola Passarelli: “Let’s clear away the stereotypes, and conquer the public’s attention forever.”
A modern Palermo bookstore adjacent to an ancient door. Image – Getty: Alexander Farnsworth
You’ll find more on Guest of Honor Italy at Frankfurter Buchmesse at the program’s special site here.
Also in our Rights Edition:
Rights Roundup: Last Break Before the Season
Rights Edition: Frankfurt’s 2024 ‘Centre for Words’ in Hall 4.1
More from Publishing Perspectives on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on translation and translators is here, more on international translation and publication rights is here, and more on Guest of Honor Italy at Frankfurt this year is here.
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