Maureen Freely Translator, Novelist & Advocate Interview

BookBlast interview with Maureen Freely, the American novelist, journalist, professor and co-founder of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

Georgia de Chamberet (GDC): Your early life bridged distinct worlds, moving from New Jersey to Istanbul as an eight-year-old, when your father took a job teaching physics at Robert College. What are your earliest memories of family life in the city, and which neighbourhood did you live in?

Maureen Freely (MF): My earliest, earliest memory of Istanbul is coming in from the airport. It was absolutely terrifying. I’d never seen so many different kinds of people. We went past the Byzantine walls, and there were women hanging laundry, and little boys running from car to car, trying to sell us flowers and so much noise. I wanted to go home. But then we got to Robert College campus which was on a hilltop on the European side of the Bosphorus, and it was all right. It looked pretty much like Princeton, up there on the hilltop next to Rumelihisarı Fortress.

I also remember the trips that we had to take by ferry every Saturday with my father who had fallen in love with the city. He wanted us all to see it. He just assumed we all loved everything that he loved for the same reasons. It was terrifying, but amazing. The trip down the Bosphorus was always beautiful. Arriving in the old city of Istanbul was something I still see sometimes in my nightmares because there were no traffic lights!

I remember our very strange school, which was small. It was an international school, American, connected to Robert College. We faculty children were outnumbered by the consulate children, and the missionary children, and the corporate children, and the children of the spooks.

The most powerful memory is just being in our apartment overlooking the Bosphorus. It was ferries and passenger ships and cargo ships all day long from Varna, Odessa, Batum. And all night long, the Soviet Navy from Sevastopol. We had a front seat view!

Georgia de Chamberet (GDC): How did growing up as an American in 1960s Turkey during the Cold War shape your relationship with storytelling and ideas?

Maureen Freely (MF): What was going on during the Cold War was very seldom reported. I’ve mentioned the Soviet Navy. I haven’t mentioned that a number of my classmates’ fathers were dedicated Cold Warriors, and they really, really didn’t like the Robert College faculty. We were viewed as un-American.

I should say that both my parents were storytellers, very powerful storytellers. Some might call them fabulous. I would only use that term in the most positive way. They wrapped romance around everything, especially the truth — you make it look the way you want it to look. I was brought up by second-generation Irish Catholic working-class, or almost working-class, Americans. Living on the campus of an elite Protestant American WASP college, serving the Christian, Jewish and Muslim heritage elites of the city in a country that had announced itself as secular, but was still mostly and devoutly Muslim in its drive to become a new republic. It had erased all the dark chapters from its past and rewritten its history, enforcing it ferociously in schools and newspapers and everywhere else. Just about every story I heard about Istanbul growing up was partisan, if not an outright lie. And everything I’ve written about Istanbul begins with a beautiful picture that I totally believe in, despite of my reservations. Then halfway through the writing process, my picture turns out to be deeply false. For me, fiction writing is a very particular thing. It’s a way of getting to the truth.

(GDC) Since your parents were great storytellers, I assume they were also great readers. So what kinds of books were in your family home, and who were your early formative influences that made you fall in love with language, and fiction in translation?

(MF) Robert College had a famously good library. My father’s interest in the city began with the books he found there, and most particularly those of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, I found out much later, was responsible for the most difficult, endless walks he took us on during our Saturday mornings when I wanted to play with my friends.

All of the American children’s classics were in our school library which was also really good. We had a wonderful librarian who used to sit down with us and ask us what we thought of the last book we’d read and what we might consider reading next. I’m still friends with her daughter, who’s also a good storyteller. We also had a good bookstore in the little Bosphorus town of Bebek. It was well stocked with Penguins and Puffins, so I was a reader of English books from the UK from very early on. I had a really strong picture of what England must be like and I fell in love with it. I didn’t have that many friends back then, so I had time for books.

I lived inside Noel Streatfeild’s The Ballet Shoes, even Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. And anything I found on my mother’s bedside table. That that could have been Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr — all were new to her because we hadn’t had those in the US. Also the travellers from the Robert College Library — Richard Burton, Howard Carter, Julia Pardo’s illustrated Beauties of the Bosphorus which is a classic.

(GDC) Throughout your career, you’ve alternated between journalism and writing novels. Would you say your fiction and non-fiction writing influence each other? And where does translation fit in?

(MF) I’ve done so many things backwards in my life. I published my first novel at the age of twenty-six. I didn’t make much money from it, or from the one that followed. I went into literary reviewing for British newspapers around the time I got divorced. I needed a little bit of income. One thing led to another, and I eventually got a lot of freelance journalism by going from literary journalism into social issues; what used to be called women’s issues. From there I got into questions around Turkey and freedom of expression.

I was brought up travelling with my family three or four months of the year. Whenever my father wasn’t teaching, we travelled. I always wanted to travel on the page as well and never wanted to get stuck in a particular form. So going back and forth between forms has always been a thing for me, so long as it’s not poetry, not screenwriting.

Whatever I learned in fiction, I took with me. For example, having published two novels by the time I went into journalism, I was intrigued by the way my very clever journalist friends talked about ‘story’, because I thought about ‘story’ in a different way. For them something either was, or was not, a story, and I would ask why. In journalism you have to make snap decisions, so they knew instinctively what was and wasn’t a story, but I didn’t. That got me thinking. Of course what I covered as a journalist went back into my writing.

As far as translation was concerned, I was translating for my family from the age of nine, when we went to Greece for the first time. I made a few friends and learned a few summer words, so my parents assumed I could pick up the language and speak fluently because of that. I learned French in school. Turkish came much later since the lovely students on campus, who were very nice to us all wouldn’t speak to us in Turkish. They said we wouldn’t need it. They were either protective of their language, or perhaps a little ashamed of it, both maybe, I don’t know. They spoke Turkish only to each other. I would listen, and it was puzzling me, because I couldn’t figure out where words began and ended. I finally did learn Turkish through Latin; it was actually Latin that helped me decipher Turkish, because you get a sense of grammar, and the shape, the elegance of grammar and what it’s there for, and so on. So, I picked up words here and there, but it wasn’t until I went to an American Lycée for Turkish girls at the age of fifteen that I regularly heard it.

Speaking Turkish on campus was forbidden which made it feel, to me, like a private language. Every time the teacher left the room, that’s what the Turkish girls spoke. Bear in mind that the Turkish students on the Robert College campus had done a year of English prep before coming in. So, they all had English and were instructed in English. They were highly educated elite people. I didn’t get a chance to meet anybody else because Turkish girls didn’t go outside to play. Even Turkish boys from the bourgeois class upwards didn’t go outside to play. Obviously, I wasn’t going to sit down and talk to the packs of boys who used to chase me saying rude things!

My first real chance was when I had a lot of classmates with whom I was sitting all day, and they were talking about all the things that I was interested in, you know. Boys, clothes, the clothes I couldn’t have, music, and all of the expressions, so I just listened and listened, and then halfway through that year I got a boyfriend. By then, I could understand a lot. I pretended to my boyfriend that I couldn’t really understand anything, so I got to listen to what he and his friends were saying. My acquisition of Turkish was passive, but was also led by the ear. That is what happens when I translate.

(GDC) Given that your father was both a teacher and a writer, was pursuing a career as a novelist and an academic an obvious path for you, or did you did you want to be a writer from the very start?

(MF) I always wanted to write and I was always writing. But I was keenly aware of the fact that I had no idea what to write about, and I was dissuaded somewhat by all of those beautiful young men, almost always from Oxbridge, who’d turn up wherever we were living — Skiros, Naxos, Thassos — and they would go to a pretty taverna in the afternoon, open up their notebooks and would write! I thought of them as the boys with the sunset notebooks. It may or may not be that they went on to become renowned writers, but I didn’t want to be one of those people who puts on writerly airs. The only way I could try to make sense of the different parts of my life was by writing.

As far as teaching was concerned, I knew one thing when I graduated from uni: I was never going to teach. Ever. Ever. But then I got my first teaching job when my then-husband decided he had to write his novel on a Mexican beach, and he and his boss gave me his job at University of Texas, El Paso. I was very nervous, but I found out, without any preparation, that I loved it. After that I sought out teaching positions. I realised that I had grown up in a seminar!

(GDC) You are widely known for bringing major Turkish authors into English, from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, to modern and historical figures like Sevgi Soysal, Suat Derviş and Sabahattin Ali. How do you adapt your voice as a translator to capture these bold writers speaking up against social or political constraints across different eras?

(MF) Every translator works in their own distinct way, taking everything with them that they’ve already learned about life, language and the world. I didn’t pause to reflect on my own process until my university colleagues forced me because they wanted to know my strategies. I had to explain and it’s been good to be obliged to do so.

The way we teach at the University of Warwick, as do most writers working in writing programmes, is practice-based, practice-led. Whatever my students are writing, I encourage them to write first and then look at what they’ve done. So, that’s what I’ve done with translating. What I now understand is that having started out as a novelist, I’ve entered each book as a novelist, thinking deep down at the bottom of the sea of words. I hear the voice, then I try to figure out which narrative techniques and other techniques the author might have used to create the artistic effects I felt on first reading. I then go back up to the surface to work out how I can bring that voice to life in English. I also look at the architecture of the book.

When I was translating Snow — the first novel I ever translated — there was a point in the middle of it when I saw the architecture of the book and it was so amazing. I was in awe. It was like being, I should say a mosque, not a cathedral, but it felt like a great building from another age that that I hadn’t been able to see until that moment. So, I usually spend many weeks on the first pages, because it takes a long time to figure out how to deploy all the techniques as I was saying. And as in my own novels, the voice that goes on to tell the story in the novel I’m translating in this new language knows more about what’s going on than I do, cognitively, if you like, until I go back, because there’s lots and lots of revision.

More than anything, translation has been an education. While I’m translating, I’m no longer a foreigner standing on the outside, having to deal with all of those questions and insecurities and frustrations of being on the other side of the fence; learning what it’s like to live there. That is how I’ve learned what it means, what it really means, to live in a country where expression is severely curbed. And of course, almost all of my writers, if I dare to call them that, have been prosecuted, persecuted, tortured, incarcerated, or assassinated. So, I feel these things viscerally when I translate, and I take it with me into everything else.

(GDC) Your translations of Snow and The Museum of Innocence served as bridge texts for other translators and publishers, with your choices effectively setting the overall tone. How closely did you collaborate with Orhan Pamuk when translating his texts, and how did your relationship with him evolve over time?

(MF) Orhan and I were friends. I briefly went out with his brother when I was fifteen, but only very briefly, and then he and I became friends as well. So Orhan sought me out when he started being published in English. I was invited to all of those launches and we did interviews. During that time, the first part of our friendship, he was so polite and appreciative. He was the one who suggested that I try my hand at translating his novels. He told me that If I did Snow, four pages a day would only take me two months. Famous last words!

I wanted to stop journalism. I had children who were coming into their last years at primary school, about to go into secondary and I wanted to be at home more. I I thought I would have a quieter life. And I had always wanted to do something, to melt or kick in the wall that shut Turkish culture out of conversations with the rest of the world. I felt it an insult to those brilliant novelists, artists, writers.

When we moved to Turkey in 1960 there were two contemporary books on offer. One of them is called A Village in Anatolia by Mahmoud Makal, about a very backward village, translated by Sir Wyndham Deedes, a British civil administrator, soldier; well-meaning in his fashion. There was also a beautiful translation of Mehmed My Hawk by Yachar Kemal. It was an exceptional translation by an Anglo-American polyglot, poet, art critic and literary translator, Edouard Roditi, born in Paris to Sephardic Jewish parents originally from Constantinople. After that, there was nothing. Just a few books would turn up here and there, often done by the translator Aron Aji, Director of Translation Programmes at the University of Iowa. Once again, he was Sephardic Jewish Turkish, from Izmir. I was always sent them to review.

I picked up Orhan’s The White Castle to review because I thought it was really funny that the kid brother of my former boyfriend was writing. He had been published, and had had two, or was it three translations, two translators, before I entered the picture. He certainly argued with one of them; he probably argued with both. Our arguments began right away. Day after day after day, but I learned a lot. It’s all about control. In the beginning it was fine because he has a good sense of humour, and I’m only six weeks younger than him. We’re from the same place and it didn’t occur to me that I should be intimidated. His English was better as a reader than as a speaker.

I loved the book, yet felt that something was very difficult about translating from Turkish to English. I’d grown up around these Anglophone Turkish elites that sounded so eloquent in Turkish, but rather less so in English. I just wanted to see if I could do the book justice. The most important thing for Snow was to cast the same trance that I felt from the storytelling in Turkish, that was the idea I had from the beginning. We sat down to look at the translation. I had no training as a translator, so I knew that the English translation would be the most looked at, so why not go through it together? I never thought about the money and that my texts would be bridge translations in so many places, say a language of Southeast Asia, or Chinese, so I don’t get anything.

Like a lot of writers, Orhan is brilliant, but very protective of Turkish grammar, which just doesn’t travel over. It’s all back to front; it’s a completely different thing. I would say to him let’s find another solution, something else and other times I’d say, ‘You win this one’. And we’d laugh. Our relationship was combative and educational until the Museum of Innocence. I got through it. I honoured the book.

I love being edited by George Andreou, the Greek-American editor at Knopf who now heads the Harvard University Press. He’s wonderful. And I’ve had such wonderful editors at the indies — Archipelago, Transit Books, Other Press . . .

(GDC) When translating texts focused on political Islam and extremism, how did you manage to contain your own reactions as a self-confessed atheist, and did you face a backlash?

(MF) As far as politics is concerned, and religious belief, with one exception, no problem whatsoever. I grew up around so many different, devout followers of so many different religions, and so many different political positions, that debate is what’s normal for me. What I really hate is being in a country club where everybody agrees with everybody, and they are all so comfortable. I do really believe in the importance of mutual respect. The one exception was just after I started translating Orhan, and I didn’t realize what kind of spotlight would be on me forever after.

A journalist from a secular newspaper I thought was fine asked me what I thought about the headscarf issue, which was a live issue at the time, as women were not let into university or government spaces if they were wearing headscarves, even though no restrictions were put on men from Islamist backgrounds. This is what really bothered me. I just said, ‘I think it should be the women themselves who have a right to decide how they live, and they should and be able to go wherever’.

This newspaper twisted my words and ran a big headline with my pictures saying I’d said ‘Goddamn the families who are forcing their daughters to wear headscarves’.

There was nothing I could do. After that I got targeted by various very, very extreme Islamist newspapers. They clogged my inboxes. I kept quiet, there was nothing else I could do. But at the time, I was translating the chapter in Snow in which the assassin is haranguing the Director of the Institute of Education about his beliefs and headscarves: what I was translating was almost exactly what I was getting from newspapers. That’s synchronicity. I learned from that what it’s like to be in a space occupied by a very controversial, very famous person.

I wish I could understand how all these religious people come to believe in a deity. Because I got schooled in atheism so early, I just don’t know how they do it. I’m mystified, fascinated, admiring almost, as I can’t do it, but I can consent when I’m translating in their voice. There is something rather idolatrous about it.

(GDC) Turkish structure works almost backwards compared to English. How do you tackle the challenges of translating a language from such a different root family so it reads naturally on the page in English?

(MF) First of all, we all do lose in translation, so what can we add, what can we gain, through that trip? Just a short summary of how Turkish is different from English. It’s an agglutinative language, so a root noun will often have five, six, seven suffixes, appended in a particular order, and there’s vowel harmony, so the vowels change according to the vowel in the root noun. It has many more tenses. It distinguishes between what you have witnessed with your own eyes and what you have from hearsay. It loves the passive voice and verbal nouns. The verb is put at the end. Turkish has one word for he, she and it. And it is very, very musical; flows beautifully. In literary Turkish, it can set up various clauses that appear to be complementing each other. You seem to be building up to a certain conclusion, then at the end, you can twist it. So, that’s another reason why it’s often a loss if you put the verb where the English sentence wants it. The most important thing is for the music I hear in Turkish to somehow come through in the cadences of the sentences; making sure that the trance works. Translating Turkish has changed my own prose in English, because I’d been stuck inside a clipped newspaper column voice. It opened up possibilities of longer thoughts, longer sentences, and it also taught me to be much mor, attuned to the sounds of words. As I said, I learned Turkish by listening, so I’m more attuned to the sounds of words in English now, too.

(GDC) How did your direct experience as a translator shape your tenure as President of English PEN 2014-21, particularly when defending writers facing censorship or political persecution?

(MF) Once again, as I said, I did everything backwards, this time at English PEN. I was president for the first three or four years, and then I really wanted Philippe Sands to step in. And we had changed the Articles so that the president was no longer the chair. So, I went from being the president to being the chair, and then everybody forgot I’d ever been president.

The president is a figurehead, playing no part in policy or strategy. They’re the person who goes on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The chair is the person who is responsible for running the board and keeping order.

At the time, I was happy to walk in completely blind and be parachuted in to the board because I loved what PEN had always done, in Turkey in particular, in contrast to other NGOs that are forced to go in on a kind of project basis, so it’s KPIs and all that kind of thing. English PEN is all about writers helping writers, and writers being interested in what prosecuted, persecuted writers in another country are actually writing and enduring.

A golden example of this is the journey that English PEN vice-president Harold Pinter and American playwright Arthur Miller made to Turkey in 1985 to protest the incarceration of various prominent writers, journalists, actors and intellectuals. Because of the big brouhaha that Harold magnificently started with his confrontation at a reception at the US Ambassador’s residence, it actually made the news. It was the first time since the Turkish military coup in 1980 that there had been any real news on what was happening in Turkey. That was great, but also, they stayed in touch with the people and families they visited.

English PEN builds on its decades of real relationships in Turkey, refusing to take the missionary position along the lines of, ‘Oh, those poor people over there. Oh, we’re so lucky because we have no censorship in this country’. So much for denial and complacency!

We went out of our way during my tenure to make sure that when we made a formal protest on behalf of an imprisoned writer, we had writers from all over the world as signatories. When I arrived, English PEN had only recently become a registered charity. Now I’m fully aware of what that means. It is on very good financial foundations, but that took time. I’m very, very proud of what English PEN has continued to do.

(GDC) You started working with the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick in 1996. In 2017 you co-founded the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation to address the ‘gender translation gap’. What was the initial catalyst for founding the prize, and nearly a decade on, how much has the landscape improved; what major barriers still remain for women in translation?

(MF) It was my colleague, Chantal Wright, who founded the prize. She had been looking for an institution to take up the idea along with several other contemporaries. There had been various studies that demonstrated women’s positions on shortlists and longlists for the major prizes in the UK and the US were shockingly low. I had been at an event in New York when one of these studies was being discussed in the Q&A and it was a horrible moment when I realised I had been on some of the offending panels, so I felt a certain responsibility to be part of the solution. Susan Bassnett, the godmother of translation studies, was at Warwick; she still is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes was Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures when I was Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies. We had a meeting and pulled together everybody who was interested in translation in the Faculty of Arts. Susan, who is such a catalyst said, ‘Let’s do something to mark our collaboration,’ and I pointed at Chantal, saying, ‘Talk!’ so she did as she had the proposal ready because we’d already tried to sell it to the university. Susan said, ‘Who’s going to put in the seed money?’ Alison and I had tiny budgets, so we put in a tiny amount of seed money right there. Susan announced she’d be one of the judges in the first year, and got hold of Boyd Tonkin and Amanda Hopkinson, asking them to join her. They were paid nothing or a shoestring or two.

That year there were just over fifty submissions. Nine years on, this year there’ve been almost one hundred and sixty. Fantastic. So, it has grown year on year. We’re concerned about the reach in terms of languages and cultures, not just the number of entries. Though the prize is for translations of books written by women, the translator can be any gender, or be swimming between the two. The original reason there has been such a disparity is that there are barriers in the countries of origin, and I know anecdotally, that this is even the case in parts of Europe, with very sophisticated literatures. So we are trying to do the best we can on the shoestrings that we have though we have a few more shoestrings now.

We do as much as we can to make common cause with other institutions, hubs and non-profits, as well as the publishers, hoping that this is an incentive for them to look for more great literature by women. What we’re hoping to do with your help at BookBlast is to amplify our reach and do more for our readers, giving them more information. We want meaningful connection with them so that both the longlisted and shortlisted books live on in their memories, leading them to more reading. As well as talking to other people who run prizes, we want to become even more integrated into the collaborative literary sector and the wider prizes landscape. We want to collaborate, not overlap. It is important for us to make common cause with readers, bloggers, as well as others in the industry who are championing women in translation, and to ‘join up the dots’ as you like to say at BookBlast. We talked about this a lot when I was chair of the Translators Association for a few years. I need to try to describe how these new networks work so that institutions catch on.

(GDC) Which other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer, or are you solitaire?

(MF) I’m friends with loads and loads and loads of writers since I’ve been in the business for so many decades. I think that those of us who have prevailed have to be humble, and keep taking great joy in writing and doing lots of different types of things, and not waiting for somebody to say, ‘Here’s an armchair, here’s a footstool, sit down and we’ll do the rest for you’, but just roll up your sleeves and do it.

If I had to think about my writer friends . . . one of them is Nicci Gerrard, an old, old friend who is so wise and encouraging. There are many more writers like that and the people I work with. But I’ll just mention Blake Morrison who was my editor, and is my lifelong friend. Of course, translators are so much fun and modest because when they translate, they’re doing it for somebody else. Translators are the best company.

(GDC) When mentoring young writers at Warwick, what do you find harder to teach: developing a distinct style or finding a genuine voice?

(MF) It’s voice that discovers, shapes and nurtures its own distinct style; so it’s all about voice. The main challenge for me when students arrive is to unteach them especially if they’re eighteen, but even if they come later on, for the MA, they’ve learned to plan, think it through, analyse and they’ve lost all sense of play. It’s just one stage of the process, but it’s the first stage and therefore all-important. There’s a lot of hard work in writing and revising but if you eliminate that first stage of being spontaneous, knowing how to play, trust in play is lost. So, what I have traditionally done is throw a lot of exercises at them for which they don’t have a chance to prepare and we just see what happens. That way we have a lot of fun, and then I say, ‘Look at what you’ve done!’

For example, I’ll have them write about the most boring thing they did over the past twenty-four hours — brushing their teeth, or not getting up to the alarm, or overhearing something standing in a queue. The whole point in class is to make it as boring as possible. They do it, and it’s funny. Then I tell them, ‘Do you realise you’re writing in your natural voice right now, because you’re not trying?’ Then, I have them go home and write about that same subject in the wrong mode, like the 10 o’clock news, or like an advertisement, and it’s a different voice. They come back and they’re really funny, and I tell them, ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? Now you’ve done a parody!’ Because they just had fun, they could do it just like that. I know all these voices. So, it’s practice-based. It is all about voice. Then it’s all about revision which does not mean correction. It means looking at what you have on the page and thinking about its possibilities, and then redrafting it, to go deeper.

I put down something that seems to have some charge to it, I’ll have written a lot and I’ll go back, but that’s the part I will focus on. It’s reshaping and just letting the idea develop on the page from draft to draft.

(GDC) Having mentored countless writers and translators at Warwick, what fundamental piece of advice do you offer those attempting to navigate the precarious world of international literary publishing today?

(MF) The first thing I’d say is there’s a lot of talent out there, but not everybody needs to make a life in writing to survive. I do, for reasons that are probably clear. The first thing I say to a student with abundant talent at the end of their time with us is that they don’t have to pursue a life in writing unless they have to. Or do not do it immediately, but go and make a lot of money somewhere, do anything, run a business — and come back to it, since they know how to write, they can do it later. And do another MA if they want to have a protective umbrella overhead.

By the time my undergraduates leave, I want them to understand how their imagination works, because no two imaginations work the same way, so they take that with them. They’re going to have to make a living somehow or other, so if they do go and work in the city, or become a lawyer, or whatever, and they decide to write later, they’ll know much more about the world and the world of work than they do at the start of their working life.

If they decide to keep writing, I warn them about how difficult it is, and how important it is, no matter what, to find a way to take joy in it every day. That takes a lot of imagination, but it’s absolutely essential. And to love finding and reading books and getting all wrapped up in the story is important. One of my favourite translated authors is Tezer Özlü, whose profound unhappiness during her childhood and adolescence fed into her novel, Cold Nights of Childhood. She makes her own style that breaks out of all of conventions. Her favourite author was Cesare Pavese whom I think she read in translation. Of course, he was a translator, and what he translated from American fiction, Steinbeck and others, was a challenge to Italian letters at the time.

I want more world literature beyond the very tightly run Anglophone market. Much as I love reading, I love talking about books even more. With daughters, with sons, with students and with friends like you.

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