Lore Segal. Photo: © Adam Golfer.

“We were having a car accident—”

Lore Segal is telling me why she writes.

“I was with my family, and we were having a car accident—”

As if they were hosting a party, or embarking on a voyage. Receiving a gift. Beginning an argument. Having: the word suggests a moment that stretches, roomy enough to admit analysis.

“I thought, This is interesting … ”

Interesting is why Segal writes. Falling outside her building, or swimming up from general anesthesia, or even, as a young girl, boarding one of the very first Kindertransport trains, which whisked her and other Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territory to England, Segal has a tendency to think, Well, this is interesting. This is an adventure.

“You see,” she explains, “whenever something happens, good or bad, you feel like you’ve just found some gold. You can use this. And you know?” She fixes me with her smile. “It’s a pretty fun place to live.” Read More

Jean Giono. Photo courtesy of the author’s estate.

One summer evening at the turn of the millennium, by the edge of a field near Roussillon, an elderly farmer told me that after the devastation of World War I the local villagers replanted their truffle oaks, knowing they would have to wait at least twenty years for a harvest. But after the devastation of World War II, they despaired of planning and planting, and returned to foraging in the forests with their dogs.

Among those drafted into the Alpine infantry in late 1914 was the twenty-year-old bank clerk Jean Giono, son of an artisan cobbler and a laundress in the Haute-Provence village of Manosque. He emerged more than four years later, “soldat de deuxieme classe, sans croix de guerre.” He had suffered the battles of Eparges, Verdun (where he was one of only a handful of survivors from his regiment), Chemin des Dames, and Kemmel. During a brief interlude in England, where he underwent treatment for gas exposure, he rescued a fellow patient—a blinded English officer—when the hospital caught fire. He was awarded a British medal, his only decoration.

Giono’s autobiographical novel of 1932, Jean le Bleu, ends with this memory: “It was easy for me to go to war without much strong emotion, simply because I was young, and over all young men, a wind was blowing the scent of sails and pirates.” The war left him a fervent, lifelong pacifist, and in 1939 his antiwar activism led to a three-month imprisonment at Marseille. In 1945, at fifty, he was again imprisoned—this time accused of collaboration with the Vichy government because his writing had been published and his dramas produced during the Occupation. He was placed on a blacklist of writers. At the end of six months, he was acquitted and the public learned of his successful wartime efforts to shelter a number of victims of Nazi persecution. Read More

Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg photo: courtesy of Archivio Storico Einaudi. Calvino photo: courtesy of the author’s estate.

On September 21, 1947, Italo Calvino—then the twenty-four-year-old book critic for Piemonte’s L’Unitá newspaper—published a review of Natalia Ginzburg’s second novel, The Dry Heart. The review, which is presented below in English for the first time, opens with this proposal: “Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world.” For a moment, if you’re familiar with Calvino’s surreal masterpiece Invisible Cities, written twenty-five years later, you feel as if you’re teetering on the edge of one of that book’s bewildering scenes—all glimpse and symbol, hallucination posing as anthropology. But no, the young writer is merely trying to find the perfect words to describe the entirely singular aesthetic of a novelist who is vexingly (to him, it would seem) female. Calvino’s review stands in the Ginzburg archives as one of the most bizarre, yet also astute, as he pinpoints the way her made-up worlds are hyperrealistic voids, her characters both humane and remote, her Minimalism dependent on small mundane artifacts, her domesticity suffocating and vast. “It’s a shame we’ll never know Ginzburg’s reaction to this review,” the Ginzburg biographer Sandra Petrignani writes, “that positioned her in a new world of fiction, modern precisely because it is ancient.”

Ginzburg is singular, and her organic, turgid, droll, intelligent Minimalism is difficult to capture with descriptives. Her writing just is. Or, as the novelist Rachel Cusk has put it, her voice “comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense—composed.” And though in his review Calvino takes pains to distinguish Ginzburg from the lacy histrionics of women’s writing (take heed, Virginia Woolf), his real point then, and for the next thirty years of their close friendship, was to absolve Ginzburg of the matter entirely: she writes like a man. Ginzburg took his judgment for what it was, a compliment.

Postwar Italian literature, arguably the country’s most fertile literary moment, was dominated by great writers—great male writers. Calvino would soon go on to become one of them, joining the ranks of Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, and Carlo Levi. The last woman on earth was hardly an outsider. A principal editor at the prestigious publishing house Einaudi alongside Pavese and Calvino (who left journalism for publishing), she was at the heart of a vibrant literary scene. The intellectual lions of this world were stubbornly defined by politics above all else: they were not Jewish writers or Catholic writers, not Holocaust survivors, feminists, depressed writers, or gay writers. They were just writers. If you were to ask them to define themselves as a group, they would have answered antifascist—which would explain nothing about the literature any one of them produced.

In many ways, this school of writers was an antischool. Fiercely united, they read one another’s work, edited and published one another, vacationed and socialized together, gossiped and discussed other writers. Many more times over the years, until Calvino died suddenly of a stroke in 1985, he and Ginzburg would continue to describe each other’s work in print. In a tribute after he died, Ginzburg spoke about reading Calvino through the years. In the first short stories of his that she read, “there flowed vibrant landscapes bathed in sun, though at times the events unfolding were the events of war, of blood and death, nothing ever clouded the great light of day … his style was, from the very beginning, linear and transparent, reality exposed as mottled, variegated, a thousand colors.” Then, right before Invisible Cities, “his most beautiful book,” there was a transformation. “Gradually, the vibrant green landscapes, the glittering snow, the great light of day disappeared from his books. There emerged in his writing a different light, no longer radiant but white, not cold but utterly deserted. His sense of irony was still there but imperceptibly so. He was no longer just happy to exist … it was as if he knew that his capacity to search, excavate, contemplate had abandoned him forever.” Calvino turned his gaze elsewhere, she wrote, trying to explain Calvino’s reach for transcendence, “to the immensity of human events.”

Natalia Ginzburg was thirty years old when she met Calvino; he was twenty-three. She was already a war widow with small children, and The Dry Heart had not yet been published. He’d stopped by the Einaudi offices to pick up books to review for L’Unita. The two stood in the hallway in front of a radiator, near a couch, talking. Ginzburg wrote, “I remember the radiator perfectly, the snow falling outside, but I can’t remember what we talked about.” They probably talked about Hemingway, she thought, about the story “Hills Like White Elephants,” which, they both agreed, they “would give ten years of life to have written” themselves. They couldn’t have imagined that winter day in 1946 when they, still strangers, would soon meet their hero together. That he would sit with them around a table and give them writing tips. That Hemingway would then read Ginzburg’s books and send word that he thought “they were glorious.”  They couldn’t have imagined the friendship, the life in letters, that stretched years into the future. Below, I have translated Calvino’s 1947 review into English for the first time. —Minna Zallman Proctor Read More

More than half of my life has been lived in translation. I moved to America when I was eighteen, and although my mother tongue is Spanish, I am so fluent in English that I talk like a native speaker. When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss. The transference of what I want to say pours from one container into an incompatible receptacle. Inevitably, something is lost. I am used to thinking of something in Spanish, for example, which then comes out strangely in English, or cannot be said in English at all, not in the same way. I am used to being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.

I wrote my first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, while I was working as a freelance translator and interpreter. I translated articles, wrote captions for documentaries, but the work I liked doing the most was simultaneous interpretation. That’s when two people (or one person and a roomful of people) who don’t speak the same language want to communicate and an interpreter does a real-time, live, continuous translation of what is being said without interrupting. There was a sparkling brain feeling that came with the labor of listening to someone speak in Spanish, then having my mouth open and speak English—like I was a spirit medium at the crossroads of language. I was always impressed that my brain could perform such a task, that I could listen and immediately translate, and then, while still speaking, tune out my own voice and listen again, translate again, continue to speak, following the speaker’s thoughts.

Simultaneous interpretation was just work to me—it didn’t have a role in my creative writing—until my sister got very sick.

Hers is not my story to tell, not really, so I will just say that at the time, we didn’t know if she would live. She was at an inpatient program for women with eating disorders. I slept on the floor of her apartment, which had been empty for many months, and Mami and Papi slept in her bed. The center provided an interpreter for Mami. There were speeches about girls who had survived that needed to be translated, there were meetings with doctors and nurses and psychiatrists. But everything was getting lost in translation.

My sister was sick because of PTSD and trauma, but these words did not mean anything to my mother, who believed her daughter was sick because of witchcraft. Mami was a seer from a line of faith healers. In this ancestry, physical ailments were tied to spiritual, psychic, and emotional ailments. PTSD, trauma, eating disorders—those were white people words. Our people did not get sick in this way, or if they did, we had never needed another word for what was wrong other than “suffering.” We had our own solutions. We dealt with suffering by making offerings, relying on our community. We defied suffering with joy. My sister was not interested in those cures. I did not blame her. No matter how much we danced, what we offered, how passionately we insisted on celebration, suffering always returned.

So even though the interpreter spoke with speed and diligence to Mami, telling her what was being said, it didn’t matter. As my mother tried to engage with an unfamiliar system of medicine in a language she couldn’t understand, I became acutely aware of translation’s failures.

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Joe Russell and Ernest Hemingway with a marlin, Havana Harbor, 1932 (young man at left not identified). Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Public domain.

On March 4, 1960, the French freighter La Coubre, delivering Belgian arms to Havana Harbor, exploded, killing 101 people. Fidel Castro immediately denounced the United States for “sabotage.” To protest the “heinous act,” commanders Che Guevara, Ramiro Valdés, Camilo Cienfuegos, William Morgan, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado (who would remain the president of Cuba until 1976), and Fidel Castro walked arm in arm down Calle Neptuno, forming a dramatic contrast between the street’s garish neon signs and the plain green of their uniforms—and the sobriety of their mission.

In a photo taken on March 5, 1960, by Alberto Korda at a ceremony for the victims of the tragedy, Che appears full of sorrow, anger, and determination. That image would become ubiquitous across the world, a trademark, appearing on T-shirts and countless other commodities. Che transcended his personhood and became a symbol for both the struggle against tyranny and of tyranny itself. His spirit seemed to impress even nihilist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who, with Simone de Beauvoir, was there that mournful day when Che’s picture was taken.

One of Che’s first questions in taking over as president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba in November was where Cuba had deposited its gold reserves and dollars. When he was told Fort Knox, he said that the gold would have to be sold and converted into currency in Canadian and Swiss accounts. During a speaking engagement at the bank two months later, Che apologized “because my talk has been much more fiery than you would expect for the post I occupy; I ask once more for forgiveness, but I am still much more of a guerrilla than President of the National Bank.” As if to prove it, he signed banknotes with his nom de guerre: “Che.” The agenda was the struggle, and so it would remain, and La Coubre only confirmed the necessity of his resolve and commitment to the bitter end. Read More

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Paris, 1935.

There are few books for those of us on the other side of fertility. There’s a whole literary genre, the coming-of-age novel, that details with wonder and reverence the moment in which girls become sexual, and yet both male and female writers have been reluctant to take on menopausal characters. As I entered my own transition, I began reading the whole tiny canon of menopause literature. In Edith Wharton’s book Twilight Sleep, fifty-year-old Pauline Manford is so obsessed with staying thin and avoiding wrinkles that even her daughter compares her to a “deserted house.” Menopausal Rosalie Van Tümmler in Thomas Mann’s The Black Swan thinks her period has come back because of her infatuation with a younger man. On the night of their rendezvous, Rosalie begins to hemorrhage from her vagina, eventually slipping into a coma on a bed soaked with her own blood. The original German title of Black Swan was Die Betrogene, “the betrayed.”

Pathetic. Depressed. Doomed. These examples may seem extreme, but I could not find a single story that did not equate menopause with disease and death. I’m all for darkness, but these stories made me feel hopeless. I’d just about given up trying to find a book that would honor both the physical struggles and the spiritual complexity of the change when I came across Break of Day, by the French writer Colette.

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