Lecture by Domenico Scarpa
“I would have liked to meet Ivy Compton-Burnett, an old unmarried lady who lived, I was told, in my neighbourhood. However, I was also told it was not interesting to meet with her, because all she talked about was the weather or refrigerators. But I loved her books and would have liked, just once, to talk to her about refrigerators”.
This is how Natalia Ginzurg recalls her relationship with the British writer, while she lived in London from 1959 to 1961 together with her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, who was appointed director of the Italian Cultural Institute.
During her stay in London, Natalia learnt a little bit of English (How do you do?) and discovered Compton-Burnett’s novels: “They are novels made up almost entirely of dialogue: a stubborn and vicious dialogue. I liked them”. She committed to translate them for her publisher, Giulio Einaudi: she never finished the translations, but Natalia’s encounter with the “great lady” left many marks and was a great adventure.
This lecture will be held in Italian with simultaneous translation into English.
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Domenico Scarpa is is a consultant for the Turin-based Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi, for which he edited, alone or in collaboration, the VI Primo Levi Lesson (In un’altra lingua, Einaudi 2015), the notes on the texts of Primo Levi’s Complete Works (Liveright, New York 2015), the collection Così fu Auschwitz and the Album Primo Levi (Einaudi 2015 and 2017). From more than twenty years he’s been curating for Einaudi the works of Natalia Ginzburg. The Opere di bottega of Fruttero & Lucentini, which he also curated, are due out for the “Meridiani” Mondadori in October.
Scarpa taught or conducted research at the universities Naples-L’Orientale, Milan-Bicocca, Middlebury College, Italian Academy at Columbia University and Normale in Pisa. He is author of monographs about Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg and Franco Lucentini, as well as the collection of essays Storie avventurose di libri necessari (Gaffi 2010). He writes for the newspaper “Il Sole 24 Ore”.