About the Translators
Many of the stories in this publication have been newly translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and the following contributors
Howard Curtis has translated more than a hundred books, mostly fiction, from Italian, French and Spanish. Among the Italian writers he has translated are Luigi Pirandello, Beppe Fenoglio, Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Gianrico Carofiglio, Pietro Grossi, Filippo Bologna, Fabio Geda, Andrej Longo, Paolo Sorrentino and Marco Malvaldi.
Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His new translation of La congnizione del dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda is published by Penguin Books under the title The Experience of Pain. Other recent translations include works by Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, Antonio Moresco and Paolo Volponi.
Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elena Ferrante, Italo Calvino and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Jenny McPhee is the author of the novels The Centre of Things, No Ordinary Matter and A Man of No Moon. Her translations include books by Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Giacomo Leopardi, Curzio Malaparte, Paolo Maurensig and Pope John Paul II. She teaches in the MS in Translation program at New York University.
Michael F. Moore has translated, most recently, The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi, Agostino, by Alberto Moravia and The Animal Gazer, by Edgardo Franzosini. He has just completed a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic, The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni. A translator and interpreter at the Italian Mission to the UN, he also teaches literary translation at Columbia University.
Erica Segre and Simon Carnell are co-translators of three books by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, as well as of books by Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio van Straten, Antonio Erediatato and Paolo Cognetti. Their translations of Italian poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and in The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems. Erica Segre is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where she teaches Latin American Literature and Visual Art. Simon Carnell is the author of Hare.
Sara Teardo is a lecturer at the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University and holds a PhD from Rutgers University. She has published on Italian women writers and translation. In 2013, in collaboration with Princeton colleague Susan Stewart, she edited and translated Laudomia Bonanni’s posthumous novel The Reprisal (Chicago University Press).
THE BEGINNING
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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2019
Introduction, selection and editorial material copyright © Jhumpa Lahiri, 2019
The copyright information on pages 485–490 constitutes an extension to this page
The moral right of the editor, authors and translators has been asserted
Painting: 2016 © Nathalie Du Pasquier
Cover design: Tom Etherington
ISBN: 978-0-141-98562-6
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The Mother
1 A military non-commissioned officer: From the district gendarmerie.
2 Senseless space: Devoid of sensory apparatus and therefore of sensitivity.
3 Peoples: The word ‘people’, ‘peoples’ is still used today in certain better areas of Lombardy to mean, more or less, ‘civilized progeny, ancestry of Roman origin, community of beings instructed in the Gospel and Roman teachings’. Sometimes ‘good people’ = ‘bona gens’. A reverse process to that for which the Romans and Pagans were called ‘gentiles’, which meant ‘idolatrous foreigners’, by the Hebrews and by Paul: in the somewhat drawling violence with which the word emerges from the throats of fellow countrymen in such a way as to induce a wealth of meanings and a visceral memory of centuries and events long past, and the trauma of a whole Ambrosian-Tridentine ‘civilization’: namely of a conversion, of a collective baptism during the years of Theodelinda, who founded churches and temples dedicated to John the Baptist (Monza, Florence), and of a gradual acquisition of the new language and ritual. The ‘fara’, a Lombard family or community established in a specific village or area, gradually become ‘gens’, ‘bona gens’.
4 [Historical]: A shutter: The house had ordinary folding shutters: and some shutters ‘à coulisse’.
5 Underground darkness: The house was built on a slope, where the land falls away: and the foot of the staircase was therefore below the level of the ground above it.
6 The strategists of the republic: South American Republic, 1916.
7 Recently, he had been to Modetia: Founded in 1695 below the last undulating moraines of Mount Serruchón, by several immigrants from Monza; who named the new city with the Latin name of the city they had left behind.
8 In the old book, smelling of old French ink, with bonnets, lace and Maître Corbeau: One volume for Molière and La Fontaine, the other for Corneille and Racine.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 52
