Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano and Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale: the afterlife of two ‘glocal’ series

Abstract

This article brings together perspectives from world literature and translation studies to compare the international reception of two 'glocal' literary cases: Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano books, and Elena Ferrante's tetralogy L'amica geniale. The national and international success of these series raises important questions for scholars of translation studies, multilingualism, world literature and literary markets, and sheds light on the significance of different kinds of multilingualism in fiction and of their treatment in translation. The article addresses the following questions: how do monolingual book markets contain and discipline multilingual fiction? What happens when multilingual fiction travels through translation? How do we explain the present openness of the Anglo-American market to translated fiction with an emphasis on the vernacular? The author argues that while both Camilleri and Ferrante foreground cultural difference and linguistic incommensurability, the way in which they portray the experience of diglossia had an important impact in determining their national and international success as well as the route through which they achieved international visibility.

“Visible” at Last? Some Notes on English as a Target Language and Translated Books in the US

“…A more nuanced view of the translatability assumingly inherent in the work of writers who have enjoyed international success is offered in two studies by Segnini (2017; who focuses on the Italian authors Elena Ferrante and Andrea Camilleri. In particular, Segnini points out the ambivalence of the cultural specificity represented by these authors.…”

Elisa Segnini speaks to Frederika Randall: tilting at the Leaning Tower, or translating irony in two writers from Northeast Italy

“…As a translator from Italian into American English, you must have developed a keen sense of which books travel through cultural and linguistic boundaries, and which ones do not, or do so in a limited way. As I have argued in my own article in this issue (Segnini 2018), the books that become best sellers in translation are often those that embody national clichés, and thereby provide Anglophone readers with a taste of the exotic while presenting them with a familiar cultural landscape. How much is known about Italy's complex socio-cultural landscape in the US today?…”

From Scampia to Rione Luzzatti: Marginality and its Language in the Age of Convergence

“…On the other hand, his ability to understand the shades and connotations of this jargon underlines his status as a 'border-line figure' 18 , an insider whose origins and upbringing make him vulnerable to fall pray of the 'System'. Ferrante's novel, as I have argued elsewhere, 19 can be seen as belonging to the category that Rebecca Walkowitzt describes as 'born translated texts'; texts in which the use of multiple languages is foregrounded thematically or structurally, but does not feature explicitly. 20 Here, too, the choice of narrating in standard language marks the accrued distance between the narrator and the marginal reality portrayed: Elena (both as author and narrator) ascribes to dialect a negative value and prefers to engage with it from a distance, without quoting it explicitly.…”