Mariateresa Di Lascia is on my mind with Strega season underway!

The Italian literary sphere is in the throes of choosing the best book of the year and that has me thinking of an unusual author (and parliamentarian!) who won the Strega award exactly 30 years ago: Mariateresa Di Lascia. 

The work -- Passaggio in ombra (Italian), "Into the Shadows" (English manuscript) -- presents something that I think is unusual: the perspective of a woman coming undone, told from the woman's point of view. Not a male narrator or author presenting this. 

Di Lascia regrettably died in 1994 after writing a few short stories and completing a lone novel -- this one.

I encountered her work when I was commissioned to write an article for the Literary Hub site about Italian novels that hadn't been translated into English yet -- but should be. 

The novel is a coming-of-age work that is one of many books to light the way for Elena Ferrante (both authors featuring women narrators bucking convention). As I've written before, Di Lascia’s novel analyzes and exalts the interior lives of a group of women buffeted by their limited choices, their unruly desire for freedom and the price they pay for these desires.

I love that the book features an unconventional female narrator. She's not perfect, she's not a devil, she's somewhere in between.

I won a grant from PEN America to jumpstart my translation work on the manuscript but it has yet to find a publisher. 

You can read an excerpt of my translation here.

A line that I love but which isn't in this excerpt is about the narrator's father:

"When he thought about how his life would turn out, what form it would take if indeed it would ever bend itself to a specific shape, he felt something inside of him rebel. As if it would be an unbearable imposition. In those days, he had one lone desire: to preserve for as long as he could -- maybe even forever -- the freedom to have no direction of any kind."

One of the aspects of the work that's so compelling is the array of portraits of women. It's something I wrote about for Ploughshares when I was in the thick of translating the first section of the novel.

https://pshares.org/blog/the-lives-of-women/

It gives us the story not only of the narrator but of the women in her life -- her mother, her aunt, her grandmother -- who navigated a rural, post-war Southern Italian society not ready for gender equity. Di Lascia zeroed in on the mother-daughter relationship, but also tells the tale of a beloved aunt forced to give up a child for adoption -- a decision she never fully accepts. Indeed, one of the most poignant and harrowing moments of the book comes when her aunt reunites with her child; initially, the reader thinks it might be a clandestine meeting with a lover, so intense are the aunt's emotions and so furtive her movements as she plans a reunion others would prefer to suppress.

For Italian literature buffs, the book has the uncanny privilege of mirroring Menzogna e sortilegio by Elsa Morante. Essentially, Di Lascia structured her book so it opens in the exact same way as Morante's masterpiece. 

There's also a volatile father-daughter relationship; indeed Di Lascia didn't stint on men -- they are just as interesting as the female characters. Nuanced, too, even if they are guilty of tormenting the women in their lives. 

I don't know how other translators choose projects but I find certain lines haunt me, and if the haunting doesn't let up, I need to do something about it. Here is one such line, a sentence that frames the beginning of the book, as the narrator begins to tell the tale of her life: 

(Italian): "In questa storia, che mi fu solo raccontata, cerco l'inizio di ogni inganno."

(English): “In this story, which was only told to me, I seek the genesis of all the deception.”

I put her work aside because I received an NEA translation grant to translate stories by Edith Bruck. And now that This Darkness Will Never End has been published, I plan to return to the Di Lascia manuscript and I hope to publish it. 

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