I raced through Ties , a novel by Domenico Starnone, all of 144 pages of the volume including a long introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, who translated it into English from the original Italian, without realising the full context in which I’d eventually come to place it. Ties was on the wish list on my Kindle on account of the Lahiri connection, given the fascinating journey she embarked upon a few years ago, moving to Rome, learning Italian, immersing herself enough so she did not read in any other language — and eventually did not write in any other either. More on her linguistic journey later, but it was the translator’s imprint that brought me to Ties.
A brilliant novel
Having begun the book, it was clear that Starnone was an uncommonly fine novelist, pulling off a narrative, as Lahiri explained in the interaction, about containers, about deception, about the bonds that hold families together and also about the suspicions and silences that strain those bonds. Writes Lahiri, “In spite of all the solid walls, the reassuring structures we seek out and build around us, there is nowhere, Starnone seems to suggest, to feel safe.” Ties tells the story of Vanda, abandoned along with her young son and daughter in 1970s Naples by her professorial husband for the love of a younger woman. It starts as a series of letters from Vanda, angry, distraught and also trying to keep a grip on her existence, to Aldo, her husband. They will come back together eventually, and these letters will be found by him in equally distraught circumstances at a time nearer our present in their Rome apartment, and the reader will re-examine the present in the light of those letters, and equally reassess the letters in the light of what’s transpiring later.
Things come to an unsettling juncture when they return from a small vacation to find their apartment ransacked, everything strewn around but nothing of value removed. The mystery will be solved to the reader’s, if not Aldo and Vanda’s, satisfaction — but, and this is curiously satisfying, with many loose ends untied. It is a slim story about the unknowableness of the ties that bind and those that separate.
Lacci , the original in Italian, won the first Bridge Prize for fiction, “awarded each year to a contemporary Italian novel or short collection that will be translated into English, and to an American work of fiction that will be translated into Italian”. As it happened, Lahiri was on a panel discussion with Starnone at the Italian embassy in the U.S., after which he asked if she’d translate the novel. She said she would.
She had read the book when it first came out, in 2014, and: “…fell in love with it. I had not yet translated anything from Italian to English. In fact, I was resistant to the idea. I was immersed in Italian, in a joyous state of self-exile from the language (English) and the country (the United States) that have marked me most significantly. But the impact of this novel overwhelmed me and my desire, as soon as I read it, was to translate it someday.” The time spent on translation was one during which she had a “broken heart”, though we are not told why. But it took her out her full immersion in Italian: “There is the challenge of transplanting into a different language what already thrives, beautifully, in another. In order to translate Ties I had to purposefully distance myself from Italian, the language I have come to love most, dismantling it, render it invisible.”
Lahiri will surely write about the process in greater depth, pulling the threads from her 2016 book, In Other Words , her memoir about exile from the U.S. and from English. It was written in Italian and translated into English by Ann Goldstein. The cover of that book did not carry Goldstein’s name with the prominence that Ties does Lahiri’s — but Goldstein was a particularly well-known translator by then, having rendered into English Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan novels among others. That association had even given air to rumours that Ferrante was Goldstein herself.
Joining the dots
In the time since, an investigative reporter has revealed the identity of the ‘real’ Ferrante, an Italian translator called Anita Raja. Raja, in turn, is married to Domenico Starnone! And a little research — just a Google search actually! — brought me to a Guardian report from 2014 about Starnone refuting rumours that he, in fact, was ‘Elena Ferrante’, given the similarities between his new novel and a 2002 Ferrante book, I giorni dell’abbandono (or The Days of Abandonment in its English, Goldstein-translated version). At that point, he said, “Let’s say I am Ferrante, or that my wife is. Explain to me one thing: given that it is so rare, in this mud puddle that is Italy, to have international reach, why would we not make the most of it? What would induce us to remain in the shadow?”
Those questions are theirs to answer, or not. But as I work backwards, and start reading The Days of Abandonment , it’s heart-warming to recall Edith Grossman’s answer to the title of her book, Why Translation Matters : “I believe it matters for the same reasons and in the same way that literature matters — because it is crucial to our sense of ourselves as human.”
