Publishing Natalia Ginzburg in the Anglophone World

Natalia Ginzburg is one of the most acclaimed twentieth-century Italian novelists. After the publication of her masterpiece, Family Lexicon (Lessico famigliare, 1963), which received the prestigious Strega Prize, she enjoyed wide success. However, just recently, she has become a cult figure, with her work the object of a rediscovery beyond Italy, and her name inspiring a new generation of writers (Milkova, Special Issue: Reading Natalia Ginzburg. Reading in Translation, 22 February. https://readingintranslation.com/2021/02/22/on-humor-eccentricity-and-sound-in-family-lexicon-a-conversation-with-ginzburg-translator-jenny-mcphee/ , 2021). This chapter looks at the reception of Ginzburg’s work in the Anglophone world, as English remains the first language of this vast transnational circulation. It provides an overview of all translated texts, comparing several editions and different publishers’ strategies of presenting Ginzburg to a new readership. It highlights the role of Carcanet Press and its director Michael Schmidt, who took special pride in publishing the Italian novelist in the 1980s, and considered Ginzburg their “best author.” While drawing on publishers’ and translators’ testimonies, this chapter will focus on translational paratexts from a double perspective: as narratological devices enhancing the authority of both the translation and the original text (Alvstad, Language and Literature, 23(3), 270–284, 2014).