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Articles by Lawrence Venuti
The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories
Italian short-story writer Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) was an early adopter of Franz Kafka’s idiom. He read much of the Czech writer’s work soon after it was translated into Italian in the early 1930s, and he liked Kafka’s synthesis of old-fashioned fabulism and fable with the grey, deadpan interior tone of modernity. Buzzati combined those Kafkaesque elements with the crisp reportorial approach he used in his day job at the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Crossing “The Tartar Steppe”: A New Buzzati
At a frontier outpost called Fortezza Bastiani, soldiers yearn for glory in a war against legendary invaders who never materialize. This hopeful yet futile wait for a meaningful event suggests nothing much happens but waiting. Yet it propelled Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari to a glorious spot in the modernist canon.
Spokesperson, Intellectual, and… More? On the New and Shifting Role of the Translator
Recent controversies have brought an unusual amount of light—as well as heat—to the obscure field of literary translation. The most contentious episode occurred in 2021, when Amanda Gorman’s poem for the presidential inauguration, The Hill We Climb, set off a search for translators whose race and gender were thought to match the identity of the Black US poet.
The Hyena’s Laugh: I. U. Tarchetti and the Birth of Italian Gothic
DECEMBER 4, 2020 TARCHETTI! WHO WAS TARCHETTI? To Italian readers, he is very much a “minor author” in the landscape of their national literature as it is currently drawn. Although he died in 1869, he can still vie in the cultural marketplace, where his “best” work remains available in cheap paperback editions.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Book Review in Fiction, Short Stories By Iginio Ugo Tarchetti; translated by Lawrence Venuti Archipelago Books 260 pp. Reviewed by Kris Waldherr November 16, 2020 Though worthy, this gothic collection “is more cabinet of curiosities than haunted house.” The birth of gothic literature occurred alongside, and in reaction to, the industrial and scientific revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
How to Read a Translation
Among the many pronouncements that have shaped our understanding of literary translation, perhaps none is more often echoed than John Dryden's preface to his version of the Aeneid. "I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English," asserted Dryden, "as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age." No doubt Dryden's achievement is to have made many of his contemporaries believe that he had impersonated the Latin poet.
What I Didn’t Get a Chance to Say
The 2020 PEN America Literary Awards were conferred in New York last week in a gala ceremony modeled on the Oscars, complete with jazz accompaniment (Ulysses Owens Jr. Band), storied venue (Town Hall), and celebrity host (Seth Myers). You might think that writers, on giving and receiving prizes, would unfailingly make acceptance speeches that are profound or provocative or at least felicitous.
Faded by the Rain
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One summer night
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