The pause should not surprise you. It was time to reassemble. I'm reading In the Margins, and realizing how much harder it is to write as a woman. Most of my ideas are original. I do write from a multiplicity of egos as Virginia Woolf suggested. But I haven't tried my hand at fiction, yet.
I wonder what would have happened if I had adopted an elusive and enigmatic persona like Elena Ferrante. Freed from a physical context that invites assumptions, I might have taken more risks early on. But back then I had 50,000 regular readers.
“Although I was a woman, I couldn't write as a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition.”
Balancing the compliant and the impetuous was a struggle. It was a relief and a revelation to put these exact words to what I felt. This tension is topical to Ferrante's latest book: a collection of four essays, each a slightly nuanced view that “writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written.”
Ferrante wrote the first three chapters —“Pain and Pen,” “Aquamarine,” “Histories, I” — as lectures to be given at the University of Bologna on three successive days in the autumn of 2020. Covid-19 forced the organizers of the seminar to cancel. Actress Manuela Mandracchia stepped in to interpret the speeches at Bologna's Teatro Arena del Sole in November of 2021.
In the first and third essay, Ferrante talks about the inevitability of the form, which is, in Samuel Beckett's words, “the only thing we can't do without in literature and any other place.” But it's possible for an author to abide to and deny the rules of the form.
For example, Gertrude Stein “takes a highly structured genre like autobiography and deforms it” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. You'll find a treatment of history of Paris in the early 20th century around the wars. At the time, Paris was the cultural capital of the Western world.
Artists and writers met in Gertrude Stein's Salon. Stein writes about herself. But she also writes about Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Juan Gris, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and so many others. Ferrante says Stein “upends the traditional relations between invented story, autobiographical truth, and biographical truth.”
As I write these words, I also “have to accept the fact that no word is truly” mine.
Referencing many authors who came before our time is par for the course for writers. We do traffic in words. In the book, Ferrante references many significant authors —Virginia Woolf, Adriana Cavarero, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, Italo Svevo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and others— who support her solid arguments on truthful writing and fervent reading being connected.
My writing has been improving with practice. But I noticed the biggest improvement when I stepped up my book reading. When I started re-reading the classics and discovering the body of work of influential authors I had overlooked, that's when I made the necessary conceptual leaps in my own work.
I'm glad I picked up In the Margins this past week. It resonates with the renewed urgency I feel to take thought forward. The fourth essay, “Dante's Rib” is especially dear to me. She composed it at the invitation of the Association of Italianists (ADI) and concluded the conference Dante and Other Classics on April 29, 2021.
I thank my lucky stars and early choices for the privilege of reading Dante's work with experts and teachers for four years. Dante Alighieri was one of the founders of the modern-day Italian language. His works set the precedent for other important writers that followed. Petrarch and Boccaccio added their own genius and established the basis of modern European literature.
Like me, Ferrante first read Dante at sixteen. Since then the poet's work influenced heavily her way of thinking and writing. According to Ferrante, Dante was the ideal reader as he “entered the others' worlds so inanimately that he was able to capture their secrets of meaning and beauty, and achieve through them a writing of his own.”
My take is that Dante's writing demonstrates how it's possible to innovate by creating a rich dialogue with the past. His work is not a hybrid, which inevitably puts together things that don't fit. Rather, it's a beautiful synthesis of contrasting forces.
Ferrante writes that his conception of Beatrice's character, Dante's muse and inspiration for writing the Divine Comedy, was way ahead of its time. Up to that point, women were mainly portrayed as silent creatures with little or no tendency to the more noble aspects of cultural and spiritual life.
In Dante's work and Ferrante's words, Beatrice is a symbol of a woman who “has an understanding of God and speculative language” and her character summarizes “what is possible for women.” I'm also grateful to Dante for doing that. 2021 marked 700 years since his death. Ferrante's essay joined a chorus of celebrations throughout Italy.
Before 1321, Dante imagined what is possible for women. The world is still wrestling with the idea of women writers who are not feminists or stereotyped to specific genders. Culture mediates the rate at which we size opportunities created by development and democratization. Progress for women continues to be disappointing.
One last note on translation. I worked as an interpreter and a translator (written text) for six years. The first involves the simultaneous interpretation of speech—behind the scenes with a headset and mike. It's more focused on meaning and context. The second, with the luxury of dictionaries, involves form and meaning—it's hard in a different way.
Last year, I read Alessandro Barbero's Dante, a biography. Barbero is the rare engaging historian who can relate stories and cover a lot of ground though different perspectives. I love Barbero's talks and have often cited his research in my articles. I read his book in translation. While it was technically correct, his voice didn't carry over.
Ann Goldstein is Ferrante's New-York-based permanent translator. There's a reason why she's been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. Her interpretation of Ferrante's original texts is flawless. You don't lose the finesse and beauty of Ferrante's writing.
In addition to transmitting their vision and the view of the world they witness, all writers are interpreters and translators of the mood and voice of their time. The enduring authors, the classics, endure the pain to hold the pen to go beyond technical exercise. So do enduring readers.
Yes, the authors and readers of business and research reports are also interpreters.
