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“... the mystery around her led some people to insist that she must be a man. Her English translator, Ann Goldstein, who sends queries via her Italian publisher and has never been permitted to talk to or email the author, appeared in the Italian papers to say that ‘it would take a man of extraordinary sensitivity to penetrate so deeply into the mind of a ...”

“... in the US in Isabel Quigly’s 1959 translation. Now the book appears in a new translation by Ann Goldstein. Comparing their versions, one is struck by how differently two people can read the same text. Morante begins her story with Arturo remembering his childish enthusiasm for his own name. The chapter is called ‘King and Star of the Sky’. Here ...”

“... last two sections that the selection in A Tranquil Star is drawn, in what one of its translators, Ann Goldstein, has described as ‘a sort of antipasto’ for a projected English language edition of the complete Levi in 2010. The Levi we meet in A Tranquil Star is not the ‘well-mannered cicerone of hell’, in Cynthia Ozick’s memorable phrase, who ...”

“... Are​ Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women. We returned to life too quickly as we spoke: who was your Lila, the childhood friend who effortlessly dazzled everyone? Or – a question not happily answered – were you Lila? S. said she had got back in touch with an estranged friend to give her the first volume in the series; K ...”

“... a newly-acquired language as well as a tension between cultures. In Other Words was translated by Ann Goldstein, who tends to preserve the supposed flavour of the Italian in lexical and syntactical calques, so that the prose often seems less accomplished than we have come to expect of Lahiri. The Clothing of Books, by contrast, was translated into lucid ...”

“... A woman’s husband​ leaves her, she’s determined not to lose it, she loses it, she gets herself back together: that’s the plot of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). Olga, the narrator, a mother and stalled writer who’s 38 at the time of these events, knows that words like ‘angry’ are often used to diminish and dismiss legitimate grievances, and understands the staginess of ‘those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living ...”

“... work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won startling numbers of ...”

“... Do​ you understand what a pleasure it is not to have to begin with this little biographical section? Sometimes a writer goes to school somewhere, and you have to know which years. Sometimes a writer gets married three times, or is a sex freak, or stabs people at parties. The cry BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHO ELENA FERRANTE IS, EXCEPT FOR THOSE OF US WHO LOOKED UP HER REAL ESTATE RECORDS! is met from me only with the words: ‘Thank God ...”

“... systematically unravelled by the God who feeds his chosen agents contradictory messages. Baruch Goldstein, who was responsible for the massacre of Arab worshippers in Hebron in 1994, is, like the late Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, a martyr for those Jews who believe that the divine manifests itself in real estate. The suicide-bombers of Hamas take things a ...”