A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays

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Human Relations: an essay on our relation to our world and its people as we grow from child to adult "knowing so well how the long chain of human relations takes its course, making its long navigable parable, the whole long road we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion." (1953)

The atmosphere of the book is so clear and immediate that reading it is like being there or seeing a film.”— The Christian Science Monitor Natalia Ginzburg witnessed the rise of Fascism in her native Italy, the second world war, the death of her husband in prison. The essays collected in this book are haunted by the past, by her confrontation with evil and abject misery, which she survived and others had not. Sometimes I catch myself humming the words of this song, and then the whole village rises up before me, bringing the special flavor of its seasons, the icy gusts of wind, the sound of the bells. I WAS 24 years old when I met Natalia Ginzburg in Rome. I had just come from three weeks of intensive study of Italian at the Universita per Stranieri di Perugia (University for Foreigners in Perugia), and before that had managed to pass an Italian reading comprehension test for a graduate program that I never completed. With the misplaced confidence of the young, I assumed I’d be able to conduct an adequate conversation with her. During the Italian course at Perugia, the teacher had introduced us to Ginzburg’s early essays collected in Le piccole virtù ( The Little Virtues) and I was immediately enamored of them. Every lucid, plangent sentence enchanted my ears and twisted my heart. The essay “Broken Shoes” considered the condition of her shoes as she walked through Rome after the fascists murdered her husband, preceded by a spell of political exile with their children in a village in the Abruzzi region. The essays about their life in that town sketched the mutually generous friendships that developed between her family and the local people.In 2020, New York Review of Books issued Ginzburg's novellas, Valentino and Sagittarius, translated into English by Avril Bardoni in 1987, in a single volume. In her new introduction for this edition, Cynthia Zarin observed that location "maps the emotional terrain" in these two works as in Ginzburg's other works: the apartment, the living room, the café where events transpire. [7] At a book talk to honor its debut, Zarin and the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri discussed the significance of Ginzburg's works and career. [8] Honors [ edit ] Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese.She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes(New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published in the New York Review Books / Poets series.Her translations of children’s literature include Cao Wenxuan’s Feather(Archipelago Books/Elsewhere Editions) which was an USBBY Outstanding International Book for 2019, and Decur’s When You Look Up(Enchanted Lion) which was named a Best Children’s Book of 2020 by the New York Times. Her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in the publications BOMB, Boston Review, A Public Space, and Gulf Coastamong others. She lives outside Boston and works as managing editor of Harvard Review.

Vita immaginaria (1974). A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays, transl. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2002) Crocetta was our cleaning woman. She wasn’t a woman, actually, since she was only fourteen years old. The dressmaker found her for us. The dressmaker divided the world into two camps: those who comb their hair and those who don’t. You have to steer clear of those who don’t comb their hair, for of course they have lice. Crocetta combed her hair, and therefore she came to work for us and told the children long stories of deaths and cemeteries. Once upon a time there was a child whose mother died. His father married a new wife and this stepmother didn’t love the boy. So she killed him while the father was out in the fields, and made a stew out of him. The father came home and ate, but when he finished, the bones left on the plate started singing: This special issue would not have come into existence had it not been for Eric Gudas’s astute eye and profound knowledge of Natalia Ginzburg’s works. I am grateful to all the contributors for their time, immense expertise, and enthusiasm. “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” gives space to voices that are diverse and deep, moved by respect and passion. Even though she condemns us all to join her, “Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia.” (40), I can’t help rereading, hoping, hopelessly, that she has hidden an answer in the essay, a way to avoid her fate. Beginning in 1950, when Ginzburg married again and moved to Rome, she entered the most prolific period of her literary career. During the next 20 years, she published most of the works for which she is best known. She and Baldini were deeply involved in the cultural life of the city.As the author walks through this remembered winter, she describes to her reader whatever details catch her eye in bright focus. But there is also darkness in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” shadowy figures she does not allow us to see clearly: her family. Her children, never referred to as anything less than a plurality, remain faceless and nameless throughout. Her husband, sometimes walking with his arm linked through hers, sometimes working near her at the table, sometimes consulted like an oracle by the people they live among, his only name the one they give him, the professor, is a presence not a character. We are told less about Ginzburg’s family than about the cleaning woman, the shop owner, the neighbors. All that we know of her family is what can be shown by the shape of their absence. They do not exist in this essay; they haunt it. Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.”—William Weaver, The New York Times Ginzburg’s death in 1991 was the occasion for an outpouring of critical praise and affectionate personal reminiscence in the Italian press. In her native country she has long been recognized as one of its greatest twentieth-century writers, and the most eloquent, incisive, and provocative chronicler of the war years and the postwar ambience (notably in All Our Yesterdays and Voices in the Evening). Mostly what she provoked was love and allegiance, but there was occasional exasperation at the outspoken, intransigent quality of her thought and moral judgments (precisely what I find most endearing). The critic Enzo Siciliano, while expressing awe for Ginzburg’s “grasping things without any intellectual filters,” also notes that this “very peremptory and direct way of presenting her ideas” could alienate readers accustomed to a more temperate mode of argument. This special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” (February 2021) responds to the renewed interest in her writing in the Anglophone world and posits that Ginzburg’s texts capture many of our own struggles today. As Katrin Wehling-Giorgi comments in her contribution: There is no one quite like Natalia Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded, artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest pleasures of everyday life. For all those like myself who love Natalia Ginzburg’s prose, this generous selection assembled from her essay collections will be irresistible, a must to own, cherish and re-read.” –Phillip Lopate

Mai devi domandarmi (1970). Never Must You Ask Me, transl. Isabel Quigly (1970) – mostly articles published in La Stampa between 1968-1979

Though the trauma and grief of Leone Ginzburg’s death colored her life and work forever, Ginzburg remained unremittingly dedicated to her craft and to speaking out against injustice and equivocation. Her novels and plays focus on large moral issues as played out ruefully, often with tragicomic results, in the lives of individual characters. But the essays are where she speaks in her most candid voice. It is the intimate yet elusive tone of that voice, along with the challenge of trying to hear it in English, that has long intrigued me. A glowing light of modern Italian literature … Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase … As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.” – New York Times a b c Castronuovo, Nadia (2010), Natalia Ginzburg: Jewishness as Moral Identity, Troubador Publishing UK, ISBN 978-1-84876-396-8 Ginzburg was politically involved throughout her life as an activist and polemicist. Like many prominent anti-Fascists, for a time she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament as an Independent in 1983.