Jenny McPhee Interviewed by Lisa Mullenneaux
McPhee’s new translation of Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery (NYRB Classics), now in its second printing, is the first unabridged version of this novel in English. Jenny McPhee is the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon and co-authored Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits. Her translations from the Italian include works by Anna Banti, Massimo Bontempelli, Natalia Ginzburg, Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, Curzio Malaparte, Pope John Paul II, among others. She is a co-founder and board member of the Bronx Academy of Letters, an NYC public high school and middle school. She teaches in the Master’s in Translation and Interpreting program at NYU and in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton.
An excerpt from Lies and Secrecy appears in our Fall/Winter 2023 issue.
Your latest translation from the Italian is Elsa Morante’s 800-page novel Lies and Sorcery [New York Review Books Classics, 2023]. You’ve said elsewhere “When I agreed to translate this novel I didn’t know what I was getting into.” In what ways was it different from the previous novels you’ve translated?
First, I didn’t realize how long the project would take me—more than five years—and how hard it is to keep 800 pages in your head. So the sheer volume was a challenge. Then, I hadn’t read Menzogna e sortileggio when I said “yes.” I just loved Morante’s work. And it’s written in a mix of styles—popular romantic fiction, epic poetry, tragic myth, the epistolary novel, the picaresque, the heroic adventure novel—and at the same time she’s parodying those styles. So another challenge was to make her prose readable. It was hard to establish flow with her mix of styles.
You’ve said that it was challenging to find her “voice.”
With each book you live so intimately with the characters that you become the author, but with Morante, she’s hiding. Capturing her voice was extremely difficult. It’s clear that with her unreliable narrator, Elisa, Morante is questioning the traditional way we tell a story. Today’s reader looks for voice above content or style. It’s all about the voice. But here Morante keeps telling us “don’t trust the narrator.”
Is she suggesting that realism is only superficially objective and that everything is subjective?
Yes, Morante hated neorealism, which was popular in novels and film after WWII. She felt it was falsely claiming “this is truth, this is honesty, this is how life really is.” She argued that neorealism was the opposite, a romanticization of reality. A lie.
In fact, the author dedicates this novel to “the fairy tale.” She writes “In you, Fiction, I cloak myself, lunatic garment. With golden plumes, I write you, dressing myself up before my great moment goes up in flames and I transform into a dazzling phoenix!” Aside from the melodramatic tone, how is the novel a “lunatic garment”?
We’ve mentioned lies that are truer than what’s presented as real. The “sorcery” of her title is how she sees her role as storyteller. She calls herself “a witch” and invites the reader to enter her world, all the ghosts from her past. Second, there’s storytelling from a woman’s point of view; in a patriarchal culture, highly transgressive. Finally, there’s the idea that patriarchy is bewitching us, feeding us fables that we’ll marry the prince and everyone will live happily ever after. Her “fairy tale” is the opposite: it doesn’t end happily.
Indeed. In fact, the dead hand of the past (the “mano morte”) seems to lie heavily over this strange Sicilian family. They keep repeating the same patterns and expect the same fate as their ancestors. Is there any glimmer that things will change for the better?
Not on earth, at any rate. At the end of the novel, Elisa describes heaven as “a place where I expect there are totally different laws from those on earth to govern love and marriage. There I hope the three of them have been able to form a family….” She’s talking about Anna, Edoardo, and Francesco—the love triangle.
It’s heart-breaking that at the end, as her mother lies dying, Elisa is still waiting fruitlessly for some recognition of her loyalty. What can you say about the mother-daughter relationship?
It’s sheer rivalry. The mother’s attitude is “I didn’t get what I wanted out of life so you’re certainly not going to get it.” That trope is so strong in our culture it prevents women from ever bonding and questioning what they’re being asked to accept.
Many critics assume that Elisa is a stand-in for Elsa [Morante]. Is this autofiction?
There are autobiographical elements in the novel, but it’s not auto-fiction as we know it where the author deliberately writes herself into the work.
Such as Anna Banti did in her novel Artemisia, about Artemisia Gentileschi.
These women—Banti, Natalia Ginzbrg, Alba Des Cespedes, Morante—were all writing at the same time. They were so radical, really radical. And what they were saying was that the domestic sphere—of the home, the family—determines the political, social and cultural spheres. We never look at that link. We dismiss the domestic because it’s associated with the female.
You’ve translated several books by Natalia Ginzburg. Why do you think she and Morante were not sympathetic to feminism?
They wanted nothing to do with it, and at first it was confusing to me that they wouldn’t own that. They are profound mentors for me and I’m deeply feminist. My view is that after fascism, they may have been wary of any “isms,” any labels. I know that when I’m translating or writing, gender goes out the window. That is, it never occurs to me I can’t write from a male point of view, for example, or not translate a male author because I’m a woman. But Ginzburg and Morante were fighting against gender biases that dictated “you can’t do this because you’re a woman.”
So why would today’s reader be interested in Lies and Sorcery?
To me, this novel is all about fascism, not fascism as a piece of history but as a constant threat. Morante is showing us fascism wasn’t an anomaly; it’s endemic to our systems. The bad actors aren’t past; they’re present. Morante and Moravia were each half-Jewish and went into hiding during Mussolini’s reign. They said their enemies—those Italians who would have reported them to the authorities—were the middleclass, not workers. Those who had something to protect were less willing to risk helping those in need. She wants us, especially the middle class, to look at who we are.
You’ve written three novels. How does your ability to craft fiction help you translate the work of others?
I’d say it’s the opposite. The close reading that translation demands teaches me how to write. I love Jennifer Croft’s idea that all writers have to translate a book first. Translation teaches writing and gets you to understand your native language. Many writers are also translators: Ginzburg, for example, translated Proust. In many ways I prefer translation to writing because you have all the joys of writing without that blank page. The hubris of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills is balanced by the humility of a loyal Sancho Panza, loyal to the author’s text.
Edith Grossman, a legendary translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, wrote that “Fidelity should never be confused with literalness.” What do you think she meant by that? What does the translator need to be faithful to?
First, there’s a kind of cult of the original version of a work. “Oh, I wish I’d read it in the original,” people say, instead of understanding that storytelling is derivative and was originally aural and is constantly being revised. The idea of “the author” is fairly recent. So what Grossman means is that the ideal translator is faithful to the intent of the author in creating the work and doesn’t just transfer their sentences from one language to another. That’s why products that use artificial intelligence like ChatGPT can’t produce literary translations. Each translation has its own personality- and should have.
The word “translate,” from the Latin, means to “carry across.” Can a translator be a bridge in the cultural sense as well as the linguistic?
It’s the same thing. In fact, what we’re doing is more cultural than linguistic. Each language is unique in how it perceives the world and the carrying over is one of perspective. That’s why we need as much literature in translation as possible; we need those different perspectives. Our world is far more exciting because of the doors they open.
Can you think of a recent novelist who did that for you?
Just one? The International Booker Prize winner David Diop comes to mind. He writes in French and grew up in Dakar, Senegal. His winning novel, At Night All Blood Is Black [Frère d’âme], is based in part on his great-great-grandfather’s service for the French in World War I. As much as I knew the horrors of trench warfare, I didn’t know the story of the Senegalese Tirailleurs soldiers. That’s just one example of translation as a cultural bridge.
Thank you!
Lisa Mullenneaux specializes in the translation of modern French and Italian poets, such as Louis Aragon, Maria Attanasio, Alfonso Gatto, and Giovanni Giudici. She also reviews books in translation for the Harvard Review and World Literature Today. She is the author of the critical study Naples’ Little Women: The Fiction of Elena Ferrante and has taught research writing for the University of Maryland’s Global Campus since 2015. More at lisamullenneaux.com.
