“On Translating My Language Is a Jealous Lover”: A Reading and Discussion with Mass Book Award-Winners Victoria Offredi Poletto and Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi

Description

Join the Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center at UMass Downtown for a special event with Victoria Offredi Poletto and Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi. They will read from and discuss their translation of Adrián N. Bravi’s My Language Is a Jealous Lover, which won the 2024 Mass Book Award for Translated Literature. Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere. My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language. This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book. VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO (Senior Lecturer Emerita) and GIOVANNA BELLESIA CONTUZZI (Professor and Chair) have taught and collaborated together in the Department of Italian Studies at Smith College since 1990. They are committed to bringing the voices of migrant and second-generation writers—in particular women writers—to the English-speaking world. Their many translations include Genevieve Makaping's Reversing the Gaze: What if the Other Were You?, Dacia Mariani’s Stowaway on Board, Gabriella Ghermandi's Queen of Flowers and Pearls, and Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother. They are currently working on an anthology collecting and translating materials written in the last thirty years by first and second-generation migrant writers.