Vincenzo Latronico

The inspirations behind Perfection, and how I wrote it 

I had tried for years to find a way to tell a story set at the intersection between our physical and our digital lives – how the two shape each other and our inner horizon. But it never worked – there is something about the way time spent online vanishes, about the simultaneity of it all, that seemed to resist any linear plot. Then I read Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties – which is about how consumerism changed a couple’s inner horizon – and immediately started annotating how it would play out today. The analogies seemed to write themselves. So I tried rewriting it, initially very closely, then taking some liberties along the way until it became a novel in itself. 

When I finished, at first, I was a bit dispirited. It is a short novel without real characters, without dialogue, with no explicit plot and almost completely made of descriptions. This makes it sound abstruse and boring. When I sent the first draft to my agent, I apologised profusely. I still read that email from time to time and have a laugh. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading / writing  

It’s the same, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I read it over the course of a single day at 15 because it was referenced in a comic book – my only reading at the time. I remember feeling my pulse increasing while finishing The Cask of Amontillado and thinking that if literature could do this – this spooky action at a distance in time and space, this guiding of dreams – I wanted it to be the centre of my life. 

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

Definitely Mizumura Minae’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English. I am a translator myself, from English; and as a writer I have been deeply influenced by this sense of dual literary citizenship, which sometimes feels like a blessing, and sometimes that you’re a stranger everywhere. Mizumura’s thinking and personal story helped me understand where and how to feel at home. 

A book originally written in Italian that I’d recommend to English-language readers 

Anna Maria Ortese’s The Iguana. Such a brave, mysterious little book. It’s the love story between the dumb scion of a wealthy Milan family and a sentient iguana. It’s also a romantic parable about nature and magic. It’s also extremely funny. 

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin. It’s an uncanny gem, gripping and disturbing at the same time, and so enlightening about the world around us. It was a huge inspiration for me.  

Sophie Hughes 

The inspiration and process behind the translation of Perfection 

I’m always slow, but this short book took me a particularly long time to finish, in part because I had a baby, but also, I think, because it is my first published translation from Italian, so I was particularly dithering and tinkering, in a way that I no longer am with Spanish. I agree with Damion Searls that ‘decisions tend to get made unconsciously and instinctively, even if the translator likes to rationalise them afterward’. But something about the precision of Perfection’s descriptions and the level of detail meant there was a lot of time-consuming rationalising happening all the way through.  

It helped a lot that, despite not having met Vincenzo in person, I got to work closely with him. He’s an experienced literary translator himself, and instinctively understood what sort of input might be useful. Because the prose is quite stylised, and in part styled on another writer, Georges Perec, Vincenzo gave some initial notes like ‘I tried to keep figurative language to a minimum’. Most were things I would have hoped to notice anyway, but I liked working with Vincenzo because he cares about the smallest details, knowing from experience that over the length of an entire novel, making these seemingly inconsequential changes is actually the most important part of the process of reconstructing style in another language.  

Biggest challenge… I’ve never been to Berlin. But Douglas Adams never went to space.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

Reading as a child was all pleasure. I loved Spike Milligan’s Silly Verse for Kids, and I have a strong memory of a now out-of-print picture book called Mr. Bill and the Runaway Sausages that made me laugh and laugh. In the copy I now read to my children, my sister and I have written and crossed out ‘This book belongs to…’ several times. I remember being delighted when books included characters called Sophie: The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The BFG, Dick King-Smith’s series Sophie Hits Six etc. Now I can see that this was an early expression of what, as a teenager, turned me on to the power of literature: reading poetry that seemed to have been written for me, that might not feature a Sophie, but absolutely spoke to my first intense experiences of falling in love, being dumped, travelling alone, being a Londoner etc. There was a lot of poetry in the house thanks to my mum, and now there is a lot in mine.  

The book that made me want to become a translator   

For my MA thesis I had to read all the fictional works of the late Spanish writer Javier Marías. At a certain point, stuck for time, I cheated, reading one or two of his novels in Margaret Jull Costa’s translations. I was a few chapters into Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me when I remembered I was reading a translation and not Spanish. Jull Costa was Marías. I wasn’t cheating. Translations weren’t next-best-things. The translator was a writer. I wanted to have a go. 

The translator whose work I always look out for   

I’m lucky enough to get to watch Annie McDermott in action because we co-translate sometimes, and she has all the regular qualities I admire in a translator (perceptive, large vocabulary, natural ear for rhythm and dialogue, discerning self-editor), but she’s also demonically, infectiously optimistic! Even when a Spanish text is particularly difficult and fights back, she keeps going, trying this and that with a smile on her face until it’s right (it always turns out right with her), and she seems to love the book all the more for its inhospitality.  

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I recently read Shaun Whiteside’s beautiful, beautiful translation of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, an unaccountably gripping but also resolutely pragmatic and practical account of a woman – the last human on earth – trying to survive in her newfound, unexplained isolation among two cows, a dog, some cats, and the woods. ‘Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain.’ I underlined half the novel. 

A book originally written in Italian that I’d recommend to English-language readers  

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davies. I carried this book across continents throughout my twenties. I felt she had found the language – simple, almost pure language – to describe my feelings about so many things, including translation. ‘My vocation is to write … When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me, I know extraordinarily well.’ In my thirties the same book has provided a handy guide for raising my kids. ‘As far as the education of children is concerned, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money… not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.’  

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

If you haven’t read anything by Han Kang, The White Book or The Vegetarian are great places to start.    

Why is translated fiction so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?   

My guess would be that independent publishers of translated literature have helped, with their palpable enthusiasm for great books and the personal touches they offer readers – subscriptions, reading groups, book launches, tote bags, book chat! If you enter into a detailed discussion about a translated book, usually the least interesting or important thing about it is its foreignness.