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As part of our ongoing project to think through translation, In Other Words presents our new season of seminars. This summer, we invite you to join us for Chronicles of a Heartache, a series of four seminars where we will delve into the powerful work of Elena Ferrante, one heartache at a time. Each session will explore one of Ferrante’s standalone novels: Troubling Love (L'amore molesto), The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell'abbandono), The Lost Daughter (La figlia oscura), and The Lying Life of Adults (La vita bugiarda degli adulti). With a fascination for translation at the core of our project, we invite you to read these books in the original Italian, in the beautiful English translations by Ann Goldstein, or in any other translations and we look forward to discussions that journey across the different versions of these novels. 

We have chosen to explore the works of Ferrante as they have deeply influenced our own reading lives. Ferrante’s writing unflinchingly chronicles the lives of women, and shows how political intimacy can be. It is her insistence on taking the experiences of friendship, motherhood, desire and disappointment seriously that has made readers devour Ferrante’s words. Her success has led to a renaissance of Italian feminist literature, and has brought feminist translated fiction to new anglophone audiences. While the Neapolitan Quartet is the most talked about of Ferrante’s novels, we believe that her other work deserves close attention and so we have decided to spend this summer reading through Ferrante’s four standalone novels. 

We will meet around the community table at Tills & Company in Portobello four times over the course of three months to discuss mother-daughter relationships, marriage, friendships, heartbreaks, and social mobility, all in the context of Ferrante’s Naples. We will also think about what it means to preserve one’s anonymity as an author, Ferrante’s influence on translated fiction, and how history bleeds into narrative. 

A ticket for all four seminars is £28. We will release single seminar ticket closer to the date, for £7.50, subject to availability.