That Ferrante feeling

By THEODORA HAWLIN

I have finished Ferrante. After working my way through the author���s Neapolitan series ��� the final instalment of which will be reviewed by Lidija Haas in next week's TLS ��� I found myself working back through her shorter work, in which similar themes ��� the effacement of women; transformation within the everyday ��� are explored with less range but a vivid intensity. Three novels are currently available in English (with more to come). Troubling Love concerns a daughter in the wake of her mother���s mysterious death; The Days of Abandonment follows a wife and mother reeling at the betrayal of her husband; in The Lost Daughter a woman is preoccupied by both a stranger���s loss and her own.

There is an inevitable feeling of abandonment when you finish a really good book. Everyone knows the feeling ��� at least I hope they do ��� and it speaks to the strange intimacy of the reading experience as a whole. Ferrante's voice has been with me for so long now, I feel bereft without it. Science has apparently established that reading a book stimulates the membranes in your brain (in the left temporal cortex, to be exact), so it���s perhaps no wonder I feel dulled. But where do I turn next?

It is fortunate, perhaps, that August was ���Women in Translation Month���, an initiative masterminded by Meytal Radzinski on her blog Biblibio, Life in Letters, which aims to raise awareness and co-ordinate discussions of works in translation written by women. This follows in the wake of work done by the organization Literature Across Frontiers, which has tracked the steady growth of translated titles in the UK over the past few years. And yet a report published by them in 2013 still found that only 3 per cent of books published in the UK were in translation, a figure the organization���s director Alexandra B��chler rightly condemned as ���embarrassingly low���. Currently the figure stands at around 5 per cent ��� a marked improvement, certainly, but still a meagre offering when compared to France���s 50 per cent, especially when only a third of these translated titles are by women.

Thankfully, due to recent successes such as Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard, literary translation is on the rise, with a glut of small presses ��� Pushkin Press, Peirene Press, Norvik, to name a few ��� dedicated to bringing writers from around the world to an English-speaking audience. A few days ago the TLS received review copies of Donatella Di Pietrantonio���s My Mother Is a River, the first book produced by Calisi Press, a new publishing house that deals exclusively with translations of Italian fiction by women. Earlier this year, & Other Stories announced their plan to only publish translations by female authors for the whole of 2018. Ferrante has helped to create a demand not only for translation but for women in translation. With no face and no real name she has inadvertently made herself the perfect template for the overlooked foreign female author.