Translating for my family has often felt like a newly found intimacy between us. Whenever I write something in English, my mum and grandmother, ask me to translate it for them and I do it to the best of my capacities. In the first chapter of Translation as Transhumance, writer, and translator Mirelle Gansel, writes about her father translating family letters from Hungarian into French. It was at this very early phase in her life that – by learning the meaning of dràgàm/ my darling, kedvesem/ my beloved, aranyoskàm/ my little golden girl, édesem/my sweet – a young Mirelle understood the role of translation in her life: a connection to a lost part of her family, the grasping of a language born within her own language and “the conviction that no word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.” This intersectionality between language and voices moved a father and a daughter closer to each other and to the rest of their relatives in Budapest.

The last time I was at my mother’s house, my mom and my grandmother were sitting on the sofa learning English with cards they had drawn themselves: each card had an Italian word written on one side and an English word written on the other. It was an extremely tender scene, an almost infantile game of memorisation. It reminds me of a scene from the book My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante when Lila and Lenù learn English together: In a metal box, Lila kept pieces of paper “on one side of each she had written an Italian word, on the other the English equivalent: matita/pencil, capire/to understand, scarpa/shoe. It was Maestro Ferraro who had advised her to do this, as a useful way of learning vocabulary.” Lenù was learning her way out of Naples by studying Italian, Greek, Latin, and English in school; while Lila, unable to receive a traditional education, was teaching herself the same things. In the book, Lenù notices “a tension in [Lila], the desire to prove that she was equal to whatever [she] was studying.” And this is what really differentiates my mother’s and grandmother’s activity from a childish game sprouting from a simple need for communication – they want to prove themselves, they fear a loss that they didn’t prepare for, as dictated not by personal choices, but economical factors that push emigration and vouch for the assimilation of the English language. While happy and proud about my successes, the family dynamics are haunted by questions like ‘What will happen if I marry someone who doesn’t speak Italian?’ ‘If my children won’t speak their language?’ This is a narrative that my grandmother has already lived through, but that she is trying to change, by enrolling into English classes, to prove herself. Now, she sends me a text every Sunday that reads “Good Sunday my love”, the only four words she thought important enough to remember – with an emphasis on “my love”.

The limits of Gansel’s approach to languages and translation, however, are imposed by her positioning within history. In this story of a family severed by war, Gansel becomes a communication point between two parts that had been separated by history. Further in the book, she discusses her father’s despise of German and his reluctance to speak it, even if it means losing contact with his family. He didn’t just give up on German, but also on the language of his mother, leaving behind the pain of the war, but also the love of his home.

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When my grandmother was born she was called piccirilla by her mother in Naples, and before she could grow out of the name, she became a putina in Bologna.

To better explain the above statement – she was one of the thousands of children that migrated from southern to northern Italy between 1945 and 1950 with the Treno della Felicità (Train of Happiness). In the immediate years after the Second World War, the UDI (Unione Donne Italiane – Italian Women Union) and the PCI (Italian Communist Party), invited the families of northern Italy to host children from the south, a part of the country that had been heavily affected by the war. The train would stop in Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, Liguria, and Marche as in these territories the Communist Party had the largest number of supporters. Between 70.000 and 100.000 children were transported on the Treni della Felicità to be saved from famine and poverty. My grandmother’s childhood was breached by the fear, started by the anti-Communist propaganda, that Communists eat children.

When the train arrived in Bologna, it was snowing. It was the first time that grandma had seen snow and such a white landscape. Coming from the warm South, and unfamiliar with freezing winters, she was bare feet and bare legs, only wearing a dress, a cotton jumper and a pair of leather sandals. Once at the station in Bologna, the litter of children was besieged by a mass of adults and families. As the other children were disappearing from around her, lured into the arms of new mothers and fathers, my grandma stood crying, until she was noticed by Naires. The woman pulled her closer and wrapped her in her shawl, her husband Zeo, gave her his socks. Together they went back to their farm in Bagnolo in Piano, as a family. Naires was already in love with this thin child who clumsily walked around, swimming in Zeo’s big socks. Candid snow covered the Po Valley, and the child stared at it through her condensed breath that was as thick as the mist that covered the valley at dawn. Once they arrived at the house, the little girl was rushed into the chimney room to get warm. When she saw the fire burning, my grandmother, possessed by a rush of irrational fear of being eaten alive, tried to run away. But, Naires calmed her with loving words, then fed and washed her then walked her to her new room. My grandmother was treated like a member of the family from that day on.

There was no malice in the abandonment of this little girl. My grandmother is still grateful to her birth parents, but she still lives in the solitude of the orphan, and the misfit. In the name of social acceptance, many things had to be sacrificed, starting from her accent. Social mobility through language is the subject of a lot of world literature, and certainly a main topic of Southern popular culture and folklore, especially as the South experienced mass migration throughout the years. This element is also present in the modern retelling of post-war Italy. In My Brilliant Friend, as Lenù keeps studying, she moves further away from Neapolitan – a language overwhelmed with the violence and poverty of the character’s childhood – and gets closer to Italian — the language of opportunity. My grandmother, who learnt scholarly Italian from her new family based in a richer region, went through the same transformation.

The price of new languages and opportunities was her family: like many other children, after settling in Bologna, she never went back to Naples. Now permanently based in the north of Italy, she had to confront the social issues caused by her linguistic differences – from being misunderstood to being mocked. Still today my grandmother attempts to hide her Neapolitan origins. However, despite her efforts, Neapolitan still reemerges at times: in the drilling tone, she uses to call her daughters from the window Saaaaaaaaaaabriiiii….. Taaaanì…. Or to swear at people on the streets with phrases like chillu strunz. It’s words from the heart, from the guts, that at times become inevitable. It’s words far from Ganselle’s affectionate vocabulary that made her re-discover a lost part of her family, but that still comes from an almost genetically predisposition, uncontrollable urge that makes up her being.

In the untranslated version of the first book of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, the word dialect is used 36 times, but only to describe a speech that is reported in scholarly Italian. Dialect, therefore, is never used – apart from some sporadic chillu strunz and the words tàmmaro, cantaro inserted within the wildest arguments between the characters. In an interview for Guernica, Ann Goldstein, translator of My Brilliant Friend, tries to give her own explanation for the author’s choice:

“The obvious reason Ferrante doesn’t use dialect is that many Italians wouldn’t understand it. But a second reason may be that, as an Italian professor at the City University of New York was saying, the Neapolitan dialect is very much a spoken language, and if she were writing it, there would be no point, in a way. It would lose the character that it has as a spoken language.”

What Goldstein doesn’t say, is that the author’s language choice is part of the narrator's characterisation. Lenù doesn’t want to engage with her mother tongue anymore. The narrator, like my grandmother, decided to distance herself from Neapolitan as an indicator of class and education. Lenù, as my grandmother, did what their mothers wished for them: went to school, learned Italian, and found a job in Northern Italy. However, such an estrangement from a territory doesn’t only bring feelings of alienation upon oneself, but also hostility. Lenù did not feel comfortable in her neighbourhood anymore as she kept studying. Towards the end of the book, Lenù notes

“I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behaviour normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them.”

In the case of my grandmother, her parents realised this before her. When they visited, they felt embarrassed in front of her new family. Their accent was jarring in the new environment, and they quickly became convinced that speaking a new dialect and learning scholarly Italian was, for her daughter, a statement of estrangement from that poor family. Ashamed, they decided to never go back to the North, and leave their daughter there.

But even when one goes the furthest from a place, and language, it is difficult to lose all links to the past and identity. As Ferrante still had to use some Neapolitan words within her scholarly Italian, as my grandmother still shouts Neapolitan words that she is careful of hiding in her every day, translators can’t help allowing the original text to seep through, and they give in to the use of calques. In Ann Goldstein’s translation of My Brilliant Friend, the first calque appears as soon as page 27 – it’s the word stradone. Italic underlines a certain importance, the impossibility and resistance of the word to exist outside its own nature. By using a calque, the translator is inviting the reader into her failure. This gesture of surrender opens up a world: the rip in the language opens a cultural window. It invites us to take a lip in the void, to use and utter that unknown language, to play a game of cultural identification. A calque is a grounding element that keeps the reader in touch with the setting of a book, while the English language can neutralise it. The stradone, in this case, leads back to a specific part of Naples and roots the reader here.

My grandmother’s use of Neapolitan is far from gentle, while the word stradone is a sweet harmony in the context of My Brilliant Friend— a celebration of the home space. Despite this difference, in both cases, the use of the original language highlights an intention to escape. In the case of books translated into English, the use of calques contrasts the Anglo-centricity of the translation and fights against the will of the book to flee its territory and the mouths it belongs to. Calques give space for places and characters to emerge out of their original broth. A calque contains a chorus of different voices: my voice, the translator’s, the writer’s, the narrator’s, Lila’s, and my grandmother’s (who is still missing her parents that she left in a destroyed south of Italy). When I read the word stradone I read it with all the voices it contains, I try to go back to the original text, my original language, and the many Italians that my grandmother learned. If I open my lips to say stradone: I blow a gentle whistle through my teeth, tongue slightly curved upwards to touch the palate — Ss — then the jaw trembles as the tongue twists on the side to vibrate and produce that terrible tr sound that causes some spit to wet the pages; the friction of the two letters pronounced together produces a tremor that opens my mouth wide, the throat unlocks to push air out the oral cavity. I think that I want a lover that can roll the Rs, as the tongue pushes against the front teeth, lips almost separated, to create a short thud, like a brick falling on a soft surface, D, then the lips contract in a kiss. The gentle gesture of producing the O sound is contrasted by the incisive biting on the tongue, throat vibrates to say N. I stop before I can pronounce the E… Lenù is from Naples, her Es are open, and mine are closed; I concentrate on letting my jaw slide a little more open than usual. This is how Lenù would talk, her mouth in my mouth – deforming my words “several voices, several ways of speaking, resound endlessly back and forth.” How would my grandmother pronounce the word? With which accent?

Ann Goldstein in a Literary Friction interview talks about her admiration for the Italian language’s particularity of using a lot of suffixes to render things larger or smaller and to give nuance to words – in English, she says, you need to use a separate word, an adverb. Stradone is an augmentative of the word strada/street/road, literally big road. The translator, however, highlights the subtle impossibility of a fair translation for this word. She tried BIG street, WIDE street, BROAD street, but nothing worked as it should have, hence her decision to keep the original word. In this way, the italicised stradone becomes the proper name of the broad road that runs through Lila and Lenù’s neighbourhood, untranslatable also in the specificity of its location.

The word highlights the economic and colonial implications of languages, a nostalgia for a vernacularism that had to be abandoned for scholastic or (inter)national languages. My grandmother abandoned her parents and her town to keep studying Italian. Her parents rarely went to visit. Her departure was a neat cut to the roots in favour of the opportunities offered by a new world. Yes, as Ganselle notes, learning a new language can be a form of conciliation, but in many cases, it is a process of alienation.

In the essay “Preserving the Tender Things” Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, discusses the limits of translation, especially as this tends to move towards colonial languages, that often eradicate other languages. Writing about her niece growing up in a mainly English household, she says that she witnessed a language dwindle in favour of another, partly because of socioeconomic factors. She remembers how English came in, and God got out of the window, as her father started a business in Karachi, a process that involved speaking in English. Siddiqi writes “My impression is that many tender things are sacrificed to enter the world of the so-called ‘progressive elite’.” It is exactly the term ‘progressive’ that sparks the sense of shame towards everything that deviates from it and thus, brings awareness to what is abject to the liberal class – poverty, ignorance, and untranslatability for the general Western audience. When I started dating in the UK, it was with a slight shame that I would advise my partners that my family don’t speak English. In My Brilliant Friend, when Lenù’s mother speaks to her teacher for the first time, Lenù explains “I was ashamed of the difference between the harmonious, modestly dressed figure of the teacher, between her Italian that slightly resembled that of the Iliad, and the misshapen figure of my mother, her old shoes, her dull hair, the dialect bent into an ungrammatical Italian.” Similarly, my grandmother admits, forever resentful towards herself for it, that she felt shame whenever her parents would visit her in her North. It’s the dangers of the framework of globalisation and liberalism – while vouching for a borderless economy, they create new boundaries that, as Siddiqi writes “solidify after you cross them” and confirm classism as a system that sends to the bottom anything that deviates from an English framework. Siddiqi continues her essay by writing one of the truest definitions of what it means to live in another language and prioritise status and social mobility over one’s own origins:

“And you think you’re an expert, switching ways of being according to who you’re speaking with, but then you find that some irreversible transformations have taken place in the process. And since they happened without you noticing, the necessary funerals were not conducted in time.”

While we are celebrating the new popularity of translated fiction in the leading publishing markets, the UK and the US, we are failing to notice that foreign fiction is mutating with this trend, by creating texts that are easily translatable, as is the case with My Brilliant Friend. Many linguists, Siddiqi included, have written that they are influenced by the work of Ferrante, described as “firmly located, unconcerned with the English language.” Yet, what I find, is that Ferrante’s writing does exactly what it criticises – it shies away from Neapolitan, not only to mimic the social movement of the narrator, but also to move across the globe, to function as an easily translatable book, that shows Naples to an international audience, not only by fetishising post-war Italy for an anglophone audience, but also by adopting a standard Italian language, that moves easily across places, and uses sporadic calques of Neapolitan to mystify and fetishise it. The use of standard Italian within a narrative that mainly features dialect, is in fact, a choice deeply concerned with the English language as it allows a seamless translation. Take for example the book, Il Fuoco che ti porti dentro by Antonio Franchini, shortlisted for the 2024 Campiello Prize,  also praised for its vivid portrait of Naples. It is a novel that heavily uses the Neapolitan language. It tells the story of the life and death of Angela, the writer’s mother, a woman who embodies all the horrors of Italy: Qualunquism, racism, classism, selfishness, opportunism, transformism, a half-culture worse than ignorance, and resentment. Differently from My Brilliant Friend, which tells a story of class by distancing itself from it, Il Fuoco che ti porti dentro analyses the character through a critical eye, yet it never leaves the domestic sphere of Naples. This is also reflected in the life of the book, outside of the story it tells – it is a book less subjugated to the international demand, and that, in the context of this essay, brings forward the question of the use of vernacularism as a way of resisting translation and the ‘gentrification’ of language.  Ferrate, on the other hand, only describes the gutturality and vulgarity of the dialect used by the characters, communicating an overall disconnection from the language by invoking a cleaner version that elevates the narrator’s class and the marketability of the book. It is this disconnection that provokes the loss of the “tender things” that my family, with the help of my current partner, is trying to avoid and/or recreate.‍

My Brilliant Friend can be criticised for serving an international audience and bending to the demands of an Anglophone market, but this is also why I’m in such awe of the word stradone and the translator’s choice of leaving it untouched, which seems more than serendipitous: when translation means ‘to carry across’, that stradone resists and remains immobile. The stradone doesn’t move, but it takes you across Lenù’s neighbourhood and allows you to wander through the story. It reminds me of Gansel’s hopeful approach to languages, and translation as a way of retracing roots, and re-ignites the hope that, perhaps, translation has been a newfound way of communicating between us, a new tradition and a necessary new “tender thing” to share between with my family.

© Prakriti Khajuria