Last month, the Edizioni E/O publishing house in Italy announced a new book written by Elena Ferrante. It will arrive on November 7.
Last month, the Edizioni E/O publishing house in Italy announced a new book written by Elena Ferrante. It will arrive in Italian bookstores on November 7, 2019.
The title of this book is not yet established, but Europa Editions – the American author’s publicist – has stated that we should not wait long for an English translation.
In addition, Europa Editions previewed, via Twitter, the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s new novel, in the English version, in Ann Goldstein’s translation:
Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.
And here is the Romanian version, in my own translation:
Cu doi ani înainte de a pleca acasă, tatăl meu a spus mamei mele că sunt foarte urâtă. Sentința a fost rostită sub răsuflarea lui, în apartamentul pe care părinții mei, recent căsătoriți, l-au cumpărat în Rione Alto, în vârful Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Totul – spațiile din Napoli, lumina albastră a unui februarie foarte rece, acele cuvinte – au rămas fixe. Dar m-am pierdut și încă mă pierd, între aceste linii care ar trebui să-mi ofere o poveste, dar de fapt nu sunt nimic, nimic de-al meu, nimic care a început cu adevărat sau a fost adus la bun sfârșit: doar un nod încurcat și nimeni, nici măcar ea, cea care în acest moment scrie, nu știe dacă firul potrivit pentru o poveste există sau este doar o confuzie înfricoșată a suferinței, fără salvare.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. We don’t know much about her, even though a few disclosures have been made. In Romania, her books were published by the Pandora M Publishing House, including Neapolitan Quartet, a series that was adapted for television by HBO. I think her first book translated into Romanian is the novel The Days of Abandonment, published in the Cotidianul collection, in 2009.