At Wassermann Projects we hosted a lecture by Ann Goldstein, a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Italo Calvino, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her translation of Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, published in English between 2011 and 2015, tell the story, in sometimes excruciating psychological detail, of the sixty-year friendship between two girls from a crumbling, violent neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. The books became best-sellers in America and England, and because the author had decided to remain anonymous, the translator, Ann Goldstein, became prominent in an unusual way. Goldstein, will talk about the novels, the pseudonymous author, and the process of translating the books.

Organized under the High Patronage of the President of the Italian Republic, by the Dante Alighieri Society of Michigan,  the Consulate of Italy in Detroit, the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, in collaboration with the Italian Program in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University, with the support of the Federazione Abruzzese del Michigan, the Italian American Cultural Society, the Italian American Club of Livonia Charitable Foundation (IACLCF), and the NOI Foundation.