Thick Skin is an interview series featuring authors talking about negative reviews, from critics and (anonymous) readers alike

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Episode XXVI: “I rush the pain, in a way, I crave the sting”

Published 3/3/22
In this installment, I speak with Claudia Durastanti. Topics include early negative feedback, translating by instinct, being labeled as “cold,” the curse of midcult, “good” bad reviews, “vittimista” & more.

Today I'm with Claudia Durastanti, an Italian writer and translator, whose fourth novel Strangers I Know, was published in January (Riverhead). It is a work of fiction about family, mythology, and many, many other things; in fact, the book's chapters could be shuffled around and what would emerge would be just as cohesive as the original order.

It was called “a shape-shifting work straddling the boundaries of genre” (Kirkus), and “an enjoyable and distinctive bildungsroman” (Publishers Weekly), though, of course, not everyone loved it, at least on Goodreads et al. But we'll get to all that in a moment.

Before we begin, I have to ask, just because I'm intensely curious: You are a translator, from English to Italian, and yet you weren't the English translator for Strangers I Know, which you wrote in Italian. Why is that?

I was afraid it would turn into a never-ending cursed open work, constantly cancelled and overwritten like in a Borgesian short story. As a translator, I wanted to be the kind of author that I prefer, the one saying to me: “Do whatever you wish with this, your reading is part of the text now.” (I swear, it happens!)

There's a level of necessary surrender, of unguardedness by the author that helps to dismantle the text and to really transform it: lots of old-school debates and theories on translation were about betrayal, I think more in terms of transformation which is not necessarily an improvement or a worsening of the original book, but a parallel dimension. I wanted to be open and vulnerable, and I let Elizabeth Harris work freely as much as I could. Also, my English is very oral, fragmented, led more by memory than by adult experience and I'm not sure it would have molded into something readable: it was my mother tongue, then I lost it, and this trip back is infused with my paranoia of being an impostor.

Not to make this too nerdy, but I think my favorite quote ever on the practice and art of translation is by John Berger: “True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.” You can't be the murderer and detective at the same time in this game, it takes a high level of dissonance to be your own translator.

Also, you might be a bad detective, you might miss some clues in the text you were not even aware of in the first place. One example: there's a part in the book (“The Girl Absent for Family Concerns”) where I revisit my father kidnapping me as a girl, I wanted it to be a road trip with an adult man and a little girl whose relationship is estranged, fatherly but not really, and there's an underlying tension. This comes straight after a chapter (“The Girl Absent for Health Reasons”) where I discuss skipping school as a child, hiding in the attic to read and I quote one of Nabokov's literature lessons about crying wolf and making believe the wolf is really there, that's literature. Well, a friend of mine who is also a translator read this and he said: I really enjoyed how you used Nabokov first and then had this juxtaposition with the man-little girl road trip: you were leading us to think about Lolita. And I wasn't at all! Until he told me, I didn't actively think about that switch, it was an invisible clue. Or when Elizabeth Harris translated a part called Italy, she said I see that you are working on the translation of The Great Gatsby, the way you played with rhythms and adjectives and elusiveness is a reminder of the valley of the ashes, and I was not thinking about it openly, was I? Without a translator reading you so deeply, you're missing the chance to have an expanded and richer text. Good translators are hunters of the pre-verbal in you.

I think Derrida would disagree with Berger there, but he'd definitely agree with you about there being clues the original writer didn't pick up on themselves. Which is all to say no one completely owns their own language; language relies on a listener to begin with. But that doesn't mean there aren't conflicting strains of thought about what translation should be—how faithful it should be to a more literal translation.

Have you ever gotten negative feedback from a writer or publisher about how you have “transformed” the original text?

Definitely. Early negative feedback stung a lot: I felt since I “knew” English I could do it easily, which meant sloppily.

My first translation was a book on Tom Waits, and the editor who trusted me and assigned it to me is one of the most important translators and editors for English in Italy, a legend (David Foster Wallace's translator, among others) and I was in awe of her. Well, me “knowing” English didn't amount to anything, my translation was messy, and carefree, and I felt my career in the field would die when she sent me a very precise and meticulous email on me being a disaster. But that had to do with competency, skills, attention, and she was right. So that hurt a lot because we couldn't even argue on interpretation, it was just bad and entirely on me.

Also, it made me feel I didn't know English too well and this was the real nightmare: I was born in the US, I had cultural intimacy, I belonged to that world, how could anyone doubt that? I understood America.

Early bad reviews to my fiction work never made me cry, and I rarely have bad feelings about it. But I always had huge breakdowns when my translations were criticized by the press or publishers.

It’s way more fun and less painful when the conflict is on transformation, interpretation and everything I try to do with a text I'm translating that cannot be classified as a “mistake” and I have margins to appeal to poetic justice. Sometimes I get away with it, sometimes I need to justify my choices line by line: my current battle is on a beautiful and mesmerizing book by Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa called A Ghost in the Throat, and since she's a translator herself in the text (falling in love and becoming obsessed with Eibhlín Dubh’s lament), she speaks about her fragility of not being a trained professional or academic and translating by instinct, experimenting with it, I wanted to reflect this in my own approach. The result feels very visceral and intuitive and I'm happy with it, but I think some editors might have a different say about it. In this case, criticizing is pain free. I will surrender if the editor comes up with something better, I’ve learned to let it go.

One funny thing is that my translations that usually get praise are for books like Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen, which are the furthest from me, it's like reaching out to alien-speak. Publishers usually look out for translators who have empathy, intimacy, or interest in certain subjects, have their own tradition, so this is why I get a lot of language / form-based projects like a Ghost in the Throat or Sleepless Nights or On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, but these are hit or miss intuitions. These are extreme projects, scaringly arbitrary in a way. Whereas authors like Cohen or Yu for me are more like codes, and require an inner program in me. I'm not saying there's no transformation or poetry here, but books with stronger codes have stronger demands and are easier.

Yes, when I saw that you translated Cohen I definitely paused, just having read Strangers I Know and having read him—these works are on different planets.

But I want to ask about memorable criticisms in the press about your translations (as opposed to the works themselves). Normally I provide the criticisms and ask your opinion about them, but because these reviews are, naturally, in Italian, can you help do my job and provide one or two that were especially brutal for you to read?

I must say I got annoyed last year when Animal Farm came out and lots of authors and translators were working on it at the same time. In a collective comparison of these new translations on Il Corriere della Sera, the critic said that I achieved a “novelistic distance from Orwell's text, new but cold” (while others managed to treat it as a fable) and that my take of the song “Beasts of England” was wrong as I decided to translate it as “Animali inglesi” / “Animals of England.” She felt I lost the specificity of inhumanity in Beasts, maybe I was too preoccupied to get the rhymes and music right! That “cold” bothered me.

Another tricky one was Future Sex by Emily Witt. A critic said my Italian felt “jumbly” and must have been way less fluid and smooth than the original and I remember really sweating on that book for lots of untranslatable categories: the Italian language imports a lot when it comes to the lexicon of the internet or even the lexicon of the future, and YouPorn categories are often untranslatable and when they are they sound “wrong.” I must confess my result was so and so, with Book of Numbers being a work of fiction I felt free to invent, experiment, come up with entire new works but Witt's book is nonfiction and I had to stay within certain boundaries.

Before we move on to your own writing, I want to ask one last question about translation. Assuming you read the reviews of the books you translate, do you sometimes feel responsible for criticisms, even if those criticisms aren't directly about the translation? Perhaps someone noted the book was too opaque, and you felt you had a hand in that. Or the jokes didn't land (humor being one of the most impossible tasks of the translator).

Fragile books, the ones that are half-finished in their own language, are the hardest to translate not just because it's difficult to grasp them and go through them completely (I've noticed lately that lots of novels in English sink three-quarters of the way through, as if author and editor just gave up and went “whatever”), but because when the book comes out I can turn protective and shield the author by taking some burdens on me if the tone feels removed or the pace is not right, especially if it's a debut novel.

I feel I need to share some of the inconclusiveness. I think this is why publishers like to hire authors who are translators, they do it if the book is exceptionally strong but also if the publisher thinks that the translatable text is not so strong but maybe the author is worth investing in. So in that case, relying on a translator who's also a writer comes with the unspoken request for the translator to edit intensively as well while working on it—this is rarely openly discussed, but often assumed.

Obviously, I don't and can't do it all the time, I usually keep quiet and let the translation have its own life if it's not a classic: that's where I take things more personally, since the original author is a ghost and my role is more invasive, centered.

Let's shift now to criticism of your most recent novel, Strangers I Know, starting with professional reviews. I could really only find one review that was critical of the book in a meaningful way (although Publishers Weekly wrote, in an otherwise positive review, “some of the narrative can feel jumbled”): The Brooklyn Rail. Your reviewer there had one main gripe, which is this:

...during my reading, many of the essays (or story components) seemed disjointed and could be read, with few exceptions, in a different order and suffer only minimal impact. Durastanti intends this disjointed state of narrative and calls it “shapeshifting text.” This heterodox book breaks many literary conventions, making it occasionally hard to follow. Orthodoxy, unlike it was for William Warburton, isn’t my doxy, but this heterodoxy can get confusing and sometimes paradoxical.

Had you read this review before? If so, what did you feel then and what do you feel now?

Yes, I read the review and I focused on this passage as well. I felt the disjointedness of chapters could add up to the reading experience, but maybe I miscalculated the “abundance” of material and minor threads. I remember my first agent complaining about my synopses or pitches for early or unwritten novels. She would say “there's 5 books in here, get me 1.” That's the first thing that came to me when I read this piece in The Brooklyn Rail: was I unconsciously hiding the “1” book in Strangers I Know behind this shapeshifting idea? What's the line between feeling disoriented and getting lost altogether? One can say this is bad or good heterodoxy, but I don't think “following” a book is necessarily a higher or more satisfying experience. Sometimes I like going back to the same line over and over even if it maddens me. So I understand the frustration, but I admit I was surprised about the frequent comments on how non-linear the book is in English. I guess this is because literary non-fiction, autofiction, personal essays, autobiography, and biomythographies are an older established tradition in English literature. I wouldn't say there is no reinvention of the formats, but there is a praxis and a canon that is way stronger than in Italian—and maybe a clearer path as well? I wrote a bit from an orphan’s perspective in Italian, where hybrid books are now first generation in a way. I felt The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg was a solitary example I could go back to, and that's quite classic, organic in shape.

That's fascinating, I hadn't thought of this idea of hybrid books being first-generation in certain languages / literary cultures.

Before we move on to reader reviews—what you said about your (former) agent caught my eye. I wonder: How much does criticism from agents and editors impact you? Are you someone who seeks out feedback from “gatekeepers,” or do you do what's needed to get the book published?

I never edited my books with my first agent: I trusted her opinion, but an agent is an agent and an editor is an editor.

I was also very skeptical of advice in terms of what could work: La straniera / Strangers I Know was pretty chaotic as a project and as many established editors told me after publication in Italy, “What a shame! Without the final two chapters it could have been a masterpiece!” And there's some credit to that, but my editor and I felt that the asymmetry of the book was a merit, not a flaw. Do we really want books to “work” when we write them? Is that the first verb that comes to mind? When I delivered the final manuscript to my agent she said it was beautiful but it would sell 2000 copies and have no translations. And I could see why: the book didn't work, maybe it did other things. I went through with it anyway.

Yes, and of course a book “working” can mean something different to every editor (or reader). Which is a great segue to actual reader reviews of Strangers I Know.

Have you read most of the reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon? Many writers I've interviewed for this series tend to categorize reader reviews, grouping gripes into, say, three to seven buckets. Is this true for you?

That's quite a stratified system! No, I don't have groups of bad reviews. I mean, you have the ground zero of comments, where someone says it sucks and drops it at page 2, or complains about packaging or the publishing system as a whole or attacks the genre of the book: “Why is this memoir and not a sci-fi novel!” That's a whole category, but the rest of bad reviews are just what they are and can be very unique.

I must confess I have some morbid fun while going through them. "Good" bad reviews are an exercise in style, almost a challenge to the author, a chess game. But that takes time, and usually these reviews never make me cry or upset because I appreciate the effort and the creative attention. I read them quickly, like I do with bad reviews of bigger or famous authors, it's the same approach: I want to get to the bad part, the flaws, the juice. Even if it's against me. I rush the pain, in a way, I crave the sting if the reader is smart and funny. Then two things can happen: I might agree with the reader, or I might disagree. What I can't really do is react to boredom: when a reader says this was boring, I quit reading, there's no possible reaction. There's no fun or pain in there, no interaction. Unfortunately, most negative reviews fall into a mid-zone of death, where there is no challenge at all: it's just a bored reader against a committed writer.

Yes, and I'll try not to bring up those reviews (the ones where passion is involved are more fun, anyway). Unfortunately—or perhaps fittingly, given the tenor of your book—I'll have to translate some of your reviews from Italian to English. And by translate I mean run through Google.

I read quite a few reviews along the lines of this: Sul podio dei libri più brutti mai letti. Uno stile piatto, vuoto, intere pagine schizofreniche e inconcludenti. Una accozzaglia di ricordi, senza capo né coda.

On the podium of the ugliest books ever read. A flat, empty style, whole pages schizophrenic and inconclusive. A jumble of memories, without rhyme or reason.

Had you read this? What was / is your reaction?

I love reading them in translation!

Lots of judgment in this one. I remember focusing on the word schizophrenic because one of the things that bothered / surprised me the most with this book was the use of the expression “dysfunctional family.” It's a tautology, this expression should be banned forever. So schizophrenic was intense, but at least nice for a change, even if vulgar. What stings here is the flat empty style.

Does that sting because you feel he has a point—or worry he feels as others might? Or it stings because it's counter to what you believe?

The prose in Strangers I Know is plain, there's no doubt about that. I wanted the book to have an elaborated syntax underneath, but the surface should have been accessible. I wanted to write a book that my mother could read: my earlier prose was more magmatic, never deeply sensorial, but less plain. Since the book dwells into language, disability, accessibility, I felt the style should be a channel for these ideas, and not add another layer. It should play with the illusion of plainness. This review reminded me of one of the comments by a few established Italian literary critics: if the book is so defying in terms of format, genre, ideas about fiction, why is it that the style doesn’t follow? Like writing an avant-garde book in plain boring clothes basically. Not cool as in black and white, and not full as in the whole spectrum of colors. As if I gave up on the “beauty” of language. This is why “flat” stings.

This remark I think might also sting, and I'm very curious what you think of it:

L’impressione finale è irritante. Per quel che avrebbe potuto essere se avesse avuto il coraggio di essere meno midcult*, meno costruito attorno al proprio ombelico (non basta scrivere dell’infanzia e delle vacanze a Bruclìn per essere cosmopoliti, se l’effetto è tra i Soprano e la Tata; è imbarazzante quella visione della se stessa a Londra), meno spasmodicamente alla ricerca della frase memorabile (quella che poi diventa un meme su Facebook). Forse sarebbe bastato un editore più attento alle spalle (questo non si perita di mandare i propri autori nel vasto mare ad accattare premi anche se le opere avrebbero bisogno di rifinitura, anzi proprio di maggiore riflessione).

*di fronte a opere come questa è evidente da cosa/come nasce il midcult: avere tanto talento ma non (crederci) abbastanza. Cattura l’attenzione, è ben pensato (e la struttura è ben nascosta), e scritto in modo fluido (ma coi fili della leziosità troppo scoperti), è anche empatico. E allora perché mortificare così il talento? Lo avesse chiamato “Acidi fritti alla fermata Basilicata, sobborgo di Brooklin” e pubblicato con Bompiani o Rizzoli sarebbe stato perfetto (tagliando gli ultimi tre, imbarazzanti, capitoli).

The final impression is irritating. For what it might have been if she had had the courage to be less midcult*, less built around her navel (it is not enough to write about childhood and holidays in Bruclìn to be cosmopolitan, if the effect is between the Sopranos and the Tata; that vision of herself in London is embarrassing), less spasmodically in search of the memorable phrase (the one that later becomes a meme on Facebook). Perhaps a more attentive publisher behind her would have been enough (this does not hesitate to send its authors into the vast sea to accept prizes even if the works would need finishing, indeed more reflection).

* in front of works like this it is evident from what / how the midcult is born: to have so much talent but not (believe it) enough. It captures the attention, is well thought out (and the structure is well hidden), and written in a fluid way (but with the threads of affectation too exposed), it is also empathetic. So why mortify talent in this way? Had she called it "Fried Acids at the Basilicata stop, suburb of Brooklyn" and published with Bompiani or Rizzoli, it would have been perfect (cutting the last three, embarrassing, chapters).

This is a smart one, but also very mean. I also feel it's a little pre-packaged: you can sense the suspicion against first person narratives, the little migrant girl trope, the setting. Someone told me years ago I was “too enamored with the sound of my voice,” which sounds like something you would say to a minor character in a minor Fitzgeraldian novel, and this leads us to midcult, which is interesting, as I believe that's what happens with certain books that fit into the category: you can tell the author is at the fullest voice or fullest smell, like a potpourri that just exploded in the room and overpowers the senses and the lucidity to understand or figure out what's really being said. I wonder if there's any passage like that in the book, I guess there might be a couple, but I don't think it justifies this labeling. She compared the treatment of my family to “The Nanny,” and I should say I hold that show in the highest regard at least for one reason: in the American version Fran is Jewish, in the Italian version she's Italian-American. That's comparative literature to me!

Haha, brilliant. This one is a bit less nuanced, for sure, but I bet you'll have an interesting retort, specifically around this word vittimista:

...un inutile dribbling sulle sventure di un destino infame tra qualche rigurgito vittimista e la scoperta che non succede mai nulla.

...a useless dribbling on the misfortunes of an infamous destiny between some victimization regurgitation and the discovery that nothing ever happens.

The reason I didn't want this to be my debut book and I avoided writing it for many, many years revolves around this word vittimista. I remember reading Gwendoline Riley's debut novel in my 20s, Cold Water, and there is a passage (this is an approximate quote) where the main character says, “you can spill your guts to anyone but you will never get rid of the fire of their compassion.” I've been unwillingly exposed to compassion for my whole childhood, and I knew it burnt—I was not going to set myself on fire so easily. So I waited for the right tone and temperature to get to Strangers I Know but I guess the victim is in the eye of the beholder, like with this reader. No matter how you choose to tell your story, if funnily or ironically or lightly, it's the biology that nails you, it's your own biography that ties you down. I feel this comment is not about my book, but about the pure and material facts of my upbringing. A distasteful reminder, if you wish.

You haven't held back, Claudia, which makes me want to feed you ten more of these reviews, but before I burn you out I'll bring up just one more I want your thoughts on:

Di per sé non apprezzo lo stile di scrittura da una parte patinato ma al contempo che vuole ostentatamente distinguersi, con frasi scritte perché così chi legge sicuro si appassiona e le sottolinea, frasi che sfiorano le citazioni emo che si mettevano su netlog, metafore del tipo ‘le persone sono come i licheni, che si pensa siano una cosa ma in realtà sono la composizione di due, le alghe e i funghi’ (sto andando a braccio ma giuro che il senso e la gran parte delle parole sono così) per poi fare ogni tanto degli scivoloni tipo ‘ero vittima e carnefice, sia Frankenstein che il Dottor Frankenstein stesso’ (spiace ma Frankenstein è il dottore e l’altro è la creatura, non esiste una cosa chiamata Frankenstein ed è un errore comune, una sorta di Mandela effect, che non mi aspetto di trovare in un libro che usa metafore elaborate e pretenziose come quella dei licheni).

Mi dispiace perché la trama mi sembrava accattivante e volevo leggere qualche scrittrice italiana contemporanea, ma purtroppo Durastanti non fa per me.

Lo consiglio a chi apprezza lo stile di scrittura di Bazzi o ha apprezzato ‘Il mio anno di riposo e oblio’, altro libro che ‘ma che senso ha’, gli unici che al momento mi vengono in mente se faccio una sorta di brain-storming.

In itself I do not appreciate the style of writing, on the one hand it's glossy but at the same time it ostentatiously wants to stand out, with sentences written so that the reader is passionate about them and underlines them, sentences that touch the emo quotes that were put on netlogs, metaphors of the type ‘people are like lichens, which are thought to be one thing but in reality they are the composition of two, algae and fungi’ (I'm going off the cuff but I swear that the meaning and most of the words are like this) and then sometimes slips like ‘I was victim and executioner, both Frankenstein and Doctor Frankenstein himself’ (sorry but Frankenstein is the doctor and the other is the creature, there is no such thing as Frankenstein and it's a common mistake, a sort of Mandela Effect, which I don't expect to find in a book that uses elaborate and pretentious metaphors like that of lichens).

I'm sorry because the plot seemed captivating to me and I wanted to read some contemporary Italian writers, but unfortunately Durastanti is not for me.

I recommend it to anyone who appreciates Bazzi's writing style or has appreciated My Year of Rest and Relaxation, another book that 'but what's the point', the only ones that come to mind at the moment if I do some sort of brain- storming.

This reader is right about Frankenstein! No editor or translator ever picked up—but that's not the only mistake in the book. The final quote I assign to Karl Marx in the end is a line from an obscure German poet he was referring to in his youth and papers. Also, no offense taken for “emo”: that's such a wide spectrum. Emo like Minor Threat or like My Chemical Romance? Sounds like the quotes that bothered this reader the most are about love, symbiosis, etc. That's a tough subject, but I am unashamed to say the final chapter, “Love,” is also my favorite and most intimate part in Strangers I Know. It goes beyond any criticism in a way, for me.