roughghosts » Italian

When the murky waters that obscure any tangible connection between an author and his or her “unnamed protagonist” are intentionally stirred in the opening lines of a text, it is a not-so-subt...

https://roughghosts.com/2024/04/10/in-search-of-a-shadow-indian-nocturne-by-antonio-tabucchi/

from here ways parted breathing was growing in the collapse, something sweet a hollow of time all the eyes that I have opened are the branches I have lost. Ever since I started reading Italian po...

https://roughghosts.com/2023/09/06/i-remain-in-the-baptism-of-this-window-all-the-eyes-that-i-have-opened-by-franca-mancinelli/

Fortezza Bastiani was neither imposing with its low walls nor beautiful in any way. Its towers and ramparts weren’t picturesque. Absolutely nothing alleviated its starkness or recalled the swee...

https://roughghosts.com/2023/07/30/holding-the-fort-the-stronghold-by-dino-buzzati/

Today it’s twenty-five years since I killed my sister. Nobody has ever said it out loud, but I can hear other people’s thoughts loud and clear. And the unmanageable ones have a special sound:...

https://roughghosts.com/2022/09/03/so-much-space-to-fill-thirsty-sea-by-erica-mou/

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and se...

https://roughghosts.com/2022/08/05/reading-women-in-translation-looking-back-over-the-past-twelve-months/

Some novels greet you at the door—or in this case, just beyond the baggage claim—engage your attention, and hold you, sentence by sentence, through the past and the present, until you reach y...

https://roughghosts.com/2021/07/19/a-map-of-your-absence-if-you-kept-a-record-of-sins-by-andrea-bajani/

Each August is Women in Translation Month, a time set aside to promote women writers from around the world who write in languages other than English and, of course, encourage increased translatio...

https://roughghosts.com/2019/07/29/women-in-translation-month-2019-some-off-the-radar-reading-suggestions-and-my-own-modest-proposal/

Here’s the river which widens my gaze, which flows through my forehead. Each time I await it. I know when it’s coming because the rails make a different noise on the bridge. Next to my seat i...

https://roughghosts.com/2018/12/02/rivers-and-railways-and-portals-to-other-ways-of-being-the-little-book-of-passage-by-franca-mancinelli/

To be born is a fact. To be born in one period rather than another, as I’ve already said; and of this or that father, and in this or that condition; to be male or female; in Lapland or in centr...

https://roughghosts.com/2018/11/10/a-chronicle-of-madness-one-no-one-and-one-hundred-thousand-by-luigi-pirandello/

You don’t tell the story of your own life, there’s no time. Life began the moment in which we got on board. The beginning is the Proleterka. SS Proleterka was the last of Fleur Jaeggy’s cur...

https://roughghosts.com/2018/03/31/the-truth-has-no-ornaments-ss-proleterka-by-fleur-jaeggy/