Other Words: JCU Welcomes Italian-American Author Claudia Durastanti
On March 8, 2022, the JCU Department of English Language and Literature welcomed Italian-American author Claudia Durastanti to discuss her novel, La Straniera (La Nave di Teseo, 2019), recently translated into English as Strangers I Know (Riverhead, 2022). This event was the second in Other Words, a series of events in which contemporary writers discuss their relationship with literatures in English.
Claudia Durastanti
A successful author in both English and Italian, Durastanti, who resides in Rome, is also an accomplished translator. She cofounded the Italian Literature Festival in London and has been the Italian Fellow in Literature at the American Academy of Rome. She is the Italian translator of Joshua Cohen, Donna Haraway, Ocean Vuong and the most recent edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her novel La Straniera has been translated into 21 languages and was one of the finalists for the Premio Strega in 2019.
An example of autofiction or a novel about the self, in La Straniera, Durastanti comes to terms with her unique family dynamic: two deaf immigrant Italian parents. The novel explores what families are and how they shape who people become. “The title was a tribute to the outsiders, the strangers,” said Durastanti. “It is also about actors of migration. When my mother moved back to southern Italy from New York, people would wonder where this stranger came from when they heard her fragmented speech. I always expected her to correct them and say she was not a stranger, but a deaf person. I was a moralistic child and thought that you had to stick to the mainstream version of yourself if you wanted to belong, so I think it is interesting to play with this blurred balance between memoir and fiction.”
Growing up with deaf parents, Durastanti was exposed to different forms of communication, one of which was the half mute, half hearing language of her parents. She realizes that this influenced the way she structures sentences, but she also credits her grandparents for the “black market of languages” that helped develop her voice in writing. “As a migrant, it is a resource to pretend to not fully understand English,” she said. “I was exposed to this kind of ambiguous, transitional language where you don’t really blend into the English and you don’t really remember the Italian you left. It is very complicated grey area, which was the main influence on my writing.”
When asked about translating, Durastanti said that she believes transforming parts of a text during a translation is not mutilating it. “Accuracy is a fallacy,” she said. “It is important to have a critical awareness that translations will never be the same as the original language.” Currently, she is translating Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and enjoys that she gets to be creative with the complexity of the English. “Not all bilingual translators have the same approach as I do, because I am not focusing on what is lost, but what I am acquiring. Transformation or transfiguration is not necessarily bad.”
The next talk, by Riccardo Capoferro, will take place on April 5.
