The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

Introduced, edited and with selected translations by
Jhumpa Lahiri

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

Contents

About the Author

Jhumpa Lahiri is an award-winning author and translator. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection, and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015. Her other works of fiction in English include The Lowland, which was a finalist for the Man Booker prize.

Lahiri has written three books directly in Italian, including In altre parole (translated in English as In Other Words) and the novel Dove mi trovo. Her translation of Domenico Starnone’s Trick was a Finalist for the National Book Award. She divides her time between Rome and Princeton University, where she is a professor of Creative Writing and Literary Translation.

A Note on the Citation of Titles and Their Translations

Careful effort has been made to ascertain whether or not there are published English translations of Italian works included or cited in this volume.

When an Italian work has been published in English, its title appears in italics, as is common practice. When such a work has not been published in English, a literal translation of the title is given, and appears without italicization. When an Italian novel published in English has a very differently worded title to that of the original, a literal translation has also been provided. Titles of individual short stories are placed within quotation marks and unitalicized.

Introduction

Poiché dispongo di input ibridi, ho accettato volentieri e con curiosità la proposta di comporre anch’io un’ ‘antologia personale’, non nel senso borgesiano di auto-antologia, ma in quello di una raccolta, retrospettiva e in buona fede …

Always inclined to a hybrid input, I accepted willingly and with curiosity the proposal to compile a ‘personal anthology’, not in the Borgesian sense of an auto-anthology but in that of a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith …

Primo Levi, La ricerca delle radici¹

One evening in Rome, in the kitchen of the Italian writer Caterina Bonvicini, I expressed a desire to assemble a collection of Italian short stories translated into English. It was March of 2016, during a brief trip back to Italy. Six months before, my family and I had returned to the United States after living for three years in Rome.

My life as a reader had, by that time, taken an unexpected turn; since 2012, shortly before moving to Rome, I had chosen to read only Italian literature, mostly from the twentieth century, and to read those works exclusively in Italian, a language I had diligently studied for many years but had yet to master. I was forty-five years old, and I believed, even before this new phase began, that I was already fully formed as a reader and writer. And yet I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself and to acquire a second literary formation.