No crime in Sicily

Sicily is notoriously the home of the Mafia, but the closest thing to a crime I experienced there last week was Alitalia's kidnapping or murder of my luggage somewhere between Palermo and London, a crime, however, that I retain some hope will be solved. In the meantime, here are some photos from Palermo, Monreale, and their surroundings.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Ha[[y 90th birthday to Andrea Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri turns 90 years old Sunday, so go have a seat overlooking the sea, eat a nice fish dinner, and no cursing the saints until tomorrow.

Here are details on how Camilleri's Italian publishers are celebrating. And here's a link to my Camilleri posts at Detectives Beyond Borders, including my two-part interview with Camilleri's gifted English-language translator, Stephen Sartarelli.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

Casanova to Catarella: Detectives Beyond Borders interviews Andrea Camilleri's translator Stephen Sartarelli, Pt. II

In the second part of his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Stephen Sartarelli, Andrea Camilleri's English-language translator, talks about translating poetry. cursing the saints, Casanova, Catarella, Camilleri's relationship with Luigi Pirandello, and about future projects in crime fiction. He also fleshes out the list of crime writers he read to familiarize himself with the genre when he began translating Camilleri: "Well, let's see: Chandler, Goodis, P.D. James, Vargas, Mankell, Vázquez Montalbán ... "

[Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Stephen Sartarelli, Read more  Detectives Beyond Borders interviews. (Click link, then scroll down.)]

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Detectives Beyond Borders:   I'd like to bring back something you wrote in a comment here at Detectives Beyond Borders about the expression you render in English as "cursing the saints":

"I, as a translator, have always taken to heart the injunction made by Pouchkine where he said (I forget where) that the translator must create `new space' in the language into which he translates, since each language has many spaces peculiar only to it. Thus my "cursing the saints.'"

What further examples can you give of these new spaces a translator creates, whether in your own work or that of other translators?

Stephen Sartarelli:   Well, for example, there is the Italian expression of “far girare le palle,” literally to “make [someone’s] balls spin,” which I’ve translated more or less literally, though using the Spanish cojones, which is familiar to some US readers, as an exotic touch, since Camilleri always uses the Sicilian word for testicles, cabasisi, a word that is hilarious in and of itself. In Italian/Sicilian, it’s actually a way of saying “to get on someone’s nerves.” Another example would be my literal rendering of certain dialectal pleonasms, such as “poissonally in poisson” for di pirsona pirsonalmente, and so on. (I’m sure there are many more possible examples, but I can’t think of any right now.)

DBB:   What is the relationship between Camilleri and Luigi Pirandello?  I have read that there was some distant family relationship. I thought of this also because of a bit of meta-fiction in The Dance of the Seagull, where Salvo and Livia argue about the possibility of Salvo's running into "the actor who plays me? ... What's his name—Zingarelli."?  (The reference is to Luca Zingaretti, who plays Salvo in the excellent Italian Inspector Montalbano television series.)

SS:   Pirandello was a distant relative of the Camilleris, but above all he was a good friend of the family, to whom he was known as “don Luigi.” And there’s no question that he had a strong influence on the young Andrea, who had a long, successful career in the theatre. Incidentally, there’s another example of Pirandellian metafiction in one of the short stories that will figure in the forthcoming “Stories of Montalbano” collection, but I’ll let that one be a surprise.

DBB:   You have also translated work by the Italian crime writer Marco Vichi. What other authors have you translated, crime writers or otherwise? What special problems do they present?

SS:   Well, I’ve been at this for a long time, over thirty years, so, yes, there are plenty of other authors. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Francesca Duranti, Gesualdo Bufalino, Gianni Riotta, Umberto Saba, as well as classic French authors such as Jacques Cazotte, Gérard de Nerval, Xavier de Maistre, and Casanova, who was of course Venetian but wrote mostly in French.

Casanova was a particularly interesting case because, as an 18th-century Italian writing in French, his style is full of Italianate quirks and tics that are utterly foreign to the simplicity of 18th-century French. I tended to clean up his prose, however, in the translation, especially since there’s already a complete translation, by Willard Trask, of his immense, 3,000-page Story of My Life that renders his style pretty much the way it was written, and I find it for the most part unreadable. Ours was a selection (about 600 pp., Penguin Classics) of several outstanding episodes from the Story of My Life, and we decided to make it as readable as possible for the contemporary audience. (I say “we” because I translated it in collaboration with my wife, Sophie Hawkes, though I did the lion’s share of the work.) I also now have a large selection of the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (July 2014), a critical edition entirely curated and edited by me. That was rather difficult simply because it’s poetry, sometimes fairly regular in meter and rhyme. Poetry’s always much harder to translate because of the way that poetry (or good poetry, I should say) normally condenses as much meaning as possible in as few words as possible. Once you’ve unraveled the meaning of the original, it’s quite a long and arduous process to forge it back into as economical a form as it came from. But I try, and it sometimes works.

Camilleri and Vichi are the only crime writers I’ve translated, though later this year I’m supposed to be translating a two-author duo, also Italian, but I don’t have the contract yet.

DBB:   Talk about Catarella's malapropisms and about why you decided to render them they way you did. What alternative ways, if any, did you consider for portraying his mangled speech in English?

SS:    Catarella serves as a good example of the evolution of my approach to translating the Montalbano novels. At first I was fairly daunted by the oddity of his language and would groan whenever he entered the scene, because I knew it would take me much longer to get through his lines of dialogue. Shortly thereafter, however, I began to view him as an opportunity for freedom and creativity in my interpretations. Very often, however, I have to look for different sorts of word play in the English, because a literal rendering of the character’s quasi illiterate Sicilian-Italian tends not to lend itself to the kinds of distortion necessary to carrying over the same effect as in the original.

People also often seem mistakenly to believe that with Catarella it’s only a question of dialect. It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than that. Catarella is an example of a dying breed of provincial Italians who don’t really speak Italian, but only their regional dialect. And since he’s a policeman, an employee of law enforcement, the majority of the Italian he comes into contact with is bureaucratese, which in Italy can be very convoluted and ornate, and it is, moreover, the only form of Italian he really knows. Thus he tends to conflate proper Italian with bureaucratic Italian, to predictably comic effect. If you then throw in a good dose of heavy dialect (also often misused) and a sort of written and oral dyslexia, you get the sort verbal chaos that is Catarella. All I can say is that I try to do my best to reproduce more or less the same effect in English. Some people, coming at the series for the first time and reading one of the episodes at random (a mistake, in my opinion), complain about Catarella as being incomprehensible, but that’s only because they’re unfamiliar with the character. It would be a mistake to clean up his language in translation. He’s supposed to be incomprehensible, or almost.

DBB:   The Smell of the Night (Scent of the Night, for tender British noses) has Salvo growing exasperated with Livia's clichés. You render these into English as "count your chickens before they hatch," "eat like a horse," and "sow your wild oats."  Talk about the Sicilian/Italian/Camillerian originals, about why you chose the English versions that you did, and about any shades of difference in meaning between the originals and the translations.

SS:   Actually, that was one of those rare instances where I was able to use what were more or less exact English equivalents of the Italian expressions. Not literally exact, of course, but occupying the same semantic space in the language. For example, “sowing your wild oats” is correre la cavallina; “eating like a horse” is mangiare a quattro palmenti, or “to eat [the equivalent of] four millstones.” But in that little paragraph I also took some liberty, since two of the English expressions I used involved a horse. Camilleri cites two consecutive clichés to mean “counting your chickens before they hatch,” but I separated the two English expressions of more or less the same meaning so that I could write “or eat like a horse, when you’re not putting the cart first!” That way I could recover some of the humor of Montalbano’s exasperation at the “incomprehensible variant” of “selling the bearskin before you’ve killed the bear,” which is “don’t say four if you haven’t got it in the bag!”

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[Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Stephen Sartarelli. Read   more Detectives Beyond Borders interviews. (Click link, then scroll down.)]

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

"Poissonally in poisson": Detectives Beyond Borders interviews Andrea Camilleri's translator, Stephen Sartarelli — Part I

Stephen Sartarelli has translated Pasolini's poetry and Casanova's memoirs, and he's also a poet. But readers of crime fiction know him best as the English-language translator of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano novels, the seventeenth of which, Angelica's Smile, is to be published later this year. Camilleri is as Sicilian as the rocks and the sea and the waves of peoples who have vanquished and become part of that island over the millennia.  His blend of Sicilian dialect, standard Italian, and "an invented language ... never before ... assembled in quite this fashion" would test any translator, and Sartarelli meets the challenge well; his historical and linguistic footnotes are concise, informative lessons in Sicilian language and society.  Sartarelli and Camilleri received the CWA International Dagger Award for best translated crime fiction in 2013 for The Potter's Field. In the first part of an interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Stephen Sartarelli talks about poetry, translation, the place where they meet, and the lack of respect crime fiction gets in the prestige U.S. press. 

[Read Part II of the Stephen Sartarelli interrview. Read more Detectives Beyond Borders interviews (click link, then scroll down).]

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Detectives Beyond Borders: How did you first come to work with Andrea Camilleri?

Stephen Sartarelli:   I was contacted around the year 2000 by William Weaver, who was a good friend and my sort of mentor in the field of Italian literary translation. Bill, at the time, was the “dean” of American literary translators of Italian and often gave me first dibs on the work he was offered, but didn’t have time to do. So I decided to have a look at the first two Montalbano novels. I’d heard about Camilleri but hadn’t read him yet. And I confess that I had a sort of literary prejudice against detective fiction as not sufficiently “serious” to merit my attention—with the exception, of course, of classics like Poe, Conan Doyle, Simenon, Hammett and a few others. Well, I read those first two novels in the Montalbano series and liked them very much. Also, having worked with Sicilian before—predominantly in translating the mammoth modern classic Horcynus Orca, by Stefano D’Arrigo, which runs about 1,300 pages and which I haven’t finished yet—I was perhaps less daunted by Camilleri’s dialect than other translators might be. And so I got the job, a contract for the first two novels, and that got the ball rolling. I should add that before setting about translating the first Montalbano novel I boned up on the hard-boiled and detective genres to acquaint myself a little better with the tone and the sort of language those authors use, and this proved very helpful, at least at first, in finding the right sort of stylistic approach to take.

DBB:   You are also a poet. What does this contribute to your practice of, and attitude toward, translation? I can't recall the interview or article that gave me this impression, but I seem to remember that you take a humble attitude before the words that you must translate from one language to another. Is that a poet's attitude?

SS:   I don’t know if that attitude has to do with being a poet, really, but where the poet’s craft intersects with the translator’s is, I think, in viewing language as something plastic that can be molded to fit the circumstances, the desired effect, and so on. This is even truer, of course, when one is translating poetry. But there is a stage in the translation process that is rather similar to poetry composition, and that’s in what I would call the intermediate revision process, when I don’t even look at the original anymore and just deal with the words on the page and how they sound and look as an English text. This is similar to poetry revision, I think. That is, I revise my poetry compositions much more than my prose writings. And while I’ve refined my translation approach to the point that I revise less now than when I was first starting out, there’s still that crucial phase when the original text is no longer in view, and I work the text as if I’d written it myself.

DBB:   Talk about the challenges of translating an author who writes "an invented language, in the sense that, though made up of existing manners of speech and writing, it has never before been assembled in quite this fashion."

SS:   It was a little daunting at first, I must say, though, as I said above, my experience with D’Arrigo, who also writes in an original blend of Sicilian dialect (though it’s from the Messina area, and thus different from Camilleri’s) and Italian, was very helpful. But with a writer as original as Camilleri there’s always that slight feeling of regret that I’m not reproducing all the multifacetedness of the original, and so I try to focus on the most important things: the humor, the tone, the different speech patterns of the different characters. If I can get those things right, then I’ve already covered the most important things. There’s also the problem of the standards of American publishing. When I first started translating Camilleri, I was a little more timid about carrying over too much of his linguistic hodgepodge, for the simple reason that the editors would start questioning everything, as they always do when they come across something different from the norm. The very existence of a writer like Camilleri, or say, Cormac McCarthy for Americans, renders the Chicago Manual of Style useless, at least for fiction writers. But once my translations of Camilleri started to do well, and I became more familiar and comfortable with his approach, I had a little more freedom to experiment and I began to see the unusualness of his language as an opportunity to be creative.

DBB:   You are probably one of the few crime-fiction translators whose work has been the subject of an academic study. Discuss Does the Night Smell the Same in Italy and in English Speaking Countries? An Essay on Translation: Camilleri in English by Emanuela Gutkowski.

SS:   I think this has more to do with Camilleri’s popularity and mastery than with the fact that I’m his translator. He’s such a cultural phenomenon in Italy that he’s become the object of intense study. There’s also the fact that in Europe the field of literary translation has become a proper area of university study, and you can now get a degree in literary translation, which I don’t think is the case yet in the US. I do find it strange, however, that the Italians are devoting so much attention to my translations. I periodically receive university theses based on studies of my translations (usually of Camilleri). And I’ve even told some Italian academics that they might do better to devote more time to studying Italian translations of foreign authors, where they would have a better grasp of what the translators are doing than in studying translations into a tongue that for them is at best a second language. That’s because, while a full understanding of the language of the original text is of course essential for any translator, the crucial part of translation comes in the rendering in the target language. A foreigner for whom English is a second language will never, except perhaps in rare cases, fully grasp the process whereby I arrive at the final version of the translation.

DBB:   I have long enjoyed your historical, linguistic, and gastronomical footnotes to the Camilleri novels. Why did you decide to include them, rather than letting the text speak for itself in all respects?

SS:   I’m not really sure. I think I simply thought that it would be a shame for readers to miss the full meaning of certain details and references in those books. And I suppose it was a way to confer a “scholarly” veneer on a writer in a genre that still isn’t treated as seriously by critics as straight fiction. I’m amazed sometimes how, say, the New York Times Book Review, will devote a half-page or a full page to the first book of a budding but mediocre young novelist but only a short paragraph in a group review to an accomplished master like Camilleri, simply because it’s detective fiction. So in this sense the notes give a sense of what lies just beneath the surface of what are relatively simple stories. And I think these underlying meanings and messages are necessary to a full appreciation of the work.

DBB:   Have you ever had to leave out a word, phrase, or concept from a Camilleri novel simply because you could find no suitable equivalent in English?

SS:   No, I don’t think so. I tend to think that everything, with enough good will and effort, is translatable. There may be an instance or two where I left out a reference to the fact that, say, Montalbano, switches from the formal address to the familiar in talking with another character (since this doesn’t exist in English), but normally I try to work this in too. More likely there may a phrase here or there that I’ve dropped because, in the circumstances, it was redundant or superfluous.

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[Read Part II of the Stephen Sartarelli interrview.  Read more Detectives Beyond Borders interviews (click link, then scroll down).]

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Alan Glynn, meet Leonardo Sciascia

I don't like when reporters slip into the jargon of the beats they cover, even something as simple as politics writers calling the Justice Department "Justice" or education reporters calling charter schools "charters."  If a reporter talks like his sources he might identify with them, think like them, act like them.

I seethe at the evasive intent of "going forward," and my allergy extends to apparently harmless locutions such as "Thank you so much" or "reach out." Why the effusion? What is the speaker hiding?

So my heart beat faster at the following, near the beginning of The Moro Affair, by Leonardo Sciascia:

"He was obliged to express himself in a language of non-expression, to make himself understood by the same means he had sought and tested in order not to be understood."

"He" is Aldo Moro, an Italian politician kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 with the apparent post-facto consent of leading figures in Italian society and, in the communications his kidnappers and killers allowed him with the outside world, forced to try to tell the truth without appearing to do so after a career of doing precisely the opposite. 

I can think of no writer of crime fiction (or, in this case, of true crime and cynical, deadly corruption) other than Alan Glynn who thinks so deeply in his writing about what words mean and what they conceal. Alan Glynn, if you read this, you should read Leonardo Sciascia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Dance of the Seagull, latest of Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano to appear in English, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"The title," quoth the Inquirer, "refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him and his dreams throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates this dream into the mystery more skillfully than he has done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.

"... introspection and empathy need not imply surrender or resignation. Indeed, Salvo not only solves the murders and arrests the murderers, but he also manages to exact a bit of revenge from a powerful target."

Spoiler alert: Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Dance of the Seagull: How Camilleri gets better and better

Fifteen books into his Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (with several titles yet to translated from Italian/Sicilian/Camillerian into English), Andrea Camilleri manages both to offer readers the pleasures they've grown to expect and to vary the ingredients and add enough emotional depth to keep the series from growing tired.

In Book Fourteen (The Age of Doubt), for example, two sentences in, and Salvo is already cursing the saints. In the fifteenth and latest novel, Dance of the Seagull, Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104, and for me the deferred pleasure is like that gained by letting a vintage port age just a few years more. ("Cursing the saints" is translator Stephen Sartarelli's ingenious and entertaining rendering of an untranslatable Sicilian verb. In a comment to an earlier blog post, Sartarelli tells Detectives Beyond Borders the origins of "cursing the saints.")

Camilleri has said he "deliberately decided to smuggle in a critical commentary on my times," but the jabs, while sharper than ever, have become more human over time. The exasperated vitriol aimed at government and Mafia remains, but now laying bare more than in earlier books the human consequences of the misdeeds at which he rails.

Indeed, an increasingly human touch makes this one of the rare long-running crime series that arguably grow stronger with time. Camilleri was 68 years old when the first book appeared, and he recently turned 87. The titles available in English have taken Salvo from his forties to age 57, complete with amusing and touching descriptions of the aches and pains of aging.

In recent books Salvo has grown more tender toward his lover, Livia, and more appreciative of what his colleagues mean to him. In The Dance of the Seagull, the humanity takes the form of Salvo's new revulsion at the savagery whose results he witnesses as he investigates a pair of murders, and the introspection and empathy manifest themselves from the beginning. (The title refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates the dream into the mystery more skillfully that he done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.)

Fans of the excellent Italian television series based on the Montalbano novels and starring Luca Zingaretti, telecast with English subtitles on MHz Networks and available on DVD, will enjoy this little argument between Salvo and Livia:

"`Well, I wouldn't want them to be shooting.' 

" `What are you talking about? Shooting what?' 

"`I wouldn't want to run into a film crew shooting an episode of that television series right as we're walking around there ... They film around there, you know.' 

"`What the hell do you care?' 

"`What do you mean, what the fell do I care? And what if I find myself face to face with the actor who plays me? ... What's his name—Zingarelli ...' 

"`His name's Zingaretti, stop pretending you don't know Zingarelli's a dictionary. But I repeat: What do you care? How can you still have these childish complexes at your age?' 

"`What's age got to do with it?' 

"`Anyway, he doesn't look the least bit like you.' 

"`That's true.' 

"`He's a lot younger than you.' 

"Enough of this bullshit about age. Livia was obsessed!"

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Happy Birthday, Andrea Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri, whose work includes the Sicily-based novels about Inspector Salvo Montalbano, turns 87 years old today.

Camilleri and translator Stephen Sartarelli won the CWA International Dagger award this year for The Potter's Field, thirteenth book in the Montalbano series. Book 15, The Dance of the Seagull (La danza del gabbiano) arrives in February 2013, and several in the series have yet to be translated.

Camilleri's non-Montalbano novel The Hunting Season is also due for English-language publication early next year. Buon compleanno, Andrea Camilleri!

===============

(Here a sympathetic interview with Camilleri along with a review of his career from the Guardian. Here how visitors can follow the Montalbano trail. And here's the Camilleri Fan Club site, which includes, among much interesting material in several languages, short articles in Italian by Camilleri's translators. including Sartarelli.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Win Andrea Camilleri's latest (and give yourself one less reason to curse the saints)

Two sentences into The Age of Doubt, fourteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano mysteries and newly available in English, and Salvo is already cursing the saints:

"He had just fallen asleep after a night worse than almost any other in his life, when a thunderclap as loud as a cannon blast fired two inches from his ear startled him awake. He sat up with a jolt, cursing the saints."

That has long been Salvo's favorite expression of disgust as well as one of mine, and its occurrence this early bodes well for the book. Thanks to the people of Penguin, one lucky U.S. reader can win a copy of The Age of Doubt and curse the saints along with Salvo. All that reader has to do is answer the following question correctly:

What is Salvo's favorite restaurant? (Hint: The restaurant is named for a saint.)

***

While you're scratching your head and cursing the saints, why not weigh in on your favorite invective in crime fiction, read my review of Camilleri's previous Montalbano book, or get hold of Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction, which includes an essay about Camilleri by your humble blogkeeper?

***

We have a winner! Fred in Ohio knew that Salvo's favorite restaurant is the Trattoria San Calogero. He wins a copy of The Age of Doubt, just in time for several festivals of San Calogero in Sicily over the next few weeks. Felicitazióni e buon appetito. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Win a Camilleri library and stuff your face

The good people at Penguin are offering a big, fat prize in conjunction with the release of The Age of Doubt, fourteenth in Andrea Camilleri's series of novels about the splenetic, introspective, put-upon, food-loving police inspector Salvo Montalbano.

Enter by Tuesday to win all 14 Montalbano novels, plus a basket of food that just might divert Salvo's attention from the case at hand: pasta, sauce, olives, desserts, roasted red peppers, olive oil, and cheese. Visit this link for details: http://apps.facebook.com/penguinpaperbacks/Giveaways/Enter/3663

Now, if only they'd offer elocution lessons from Catarella as a prize.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Andrea Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Potter's Field, thirteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian crime novels about Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano and the first in which Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Typically for a Montalbano novel,” I write, “the investigation becomes one of mob connections, heated emotions, and family secrets. But crime, investigation, and solution are the least of the Montalbano novels. Every word is a commentary, sometimes wry, sometimes righteously angry, sometimes touching, on the protagonist’s political, social, professional, and personal worlds. To choose just one typical example, `Ingrid’s husband was a known ne’er-do-well, so it was only logical that he should turn to politics.'”

Read the full review, and learn how to impress your server the next time you visit an Italian restaurant.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Andrea Camilleri, heart and sole

Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have come to feel like old friends whom I am always happy to see and to report on to our mutual acquaintances.

In The Potter's Field, thirteenth novel in the series, Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid.  Out of bed, his choice of reading matter, always a delight to Camilleri's readers, is a special treat this time. (OK, I'll give it away: Salvo, whose reading in previous novels has included Georges Simenon and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, this time chooses a novel by Andrea Camilleri.) 

The political gibes, as barbed as ever, are delivered with greater concision even as they ripen into a kind of weariness at the state of the world, though the gibes are as funny as always.  Camilleri has deepened and mellowed his protagonist's view.

In previous books, this has taken the form of increasing tenderness in Salvo's regard for his distant lover, Livia. Here, he feels the pain of a friend's betrayal more sharply than a younger Salvo would have, and his kinship with his fellow creatures even turns him briefly off seafood after he admires the fish at an aquarium in Genoa. (Can I have veal milanese? he asks a waiter. "Sure," the waiter replies,  "if you go to Milan." Salvo settles for an excellent plate of fried sole.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Leave the gun, take the cannolo: Camilleri, Sartarelli, and good grammar

I’ve found several reasons to like The Potter’s Field, thirteenth of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels translated into English and newly out in the U.S. from Penguin.

For one, no one is better than Camilleri at saying things funny rather than just saying funny things. That is, Camilleri won’t just put a funny line in a character’s mouth, but his entire syntax, his way of building a sentence, is a delicious wink to the reader that something is up. One smiles well before one gets to the punch line.

But mainly I like the book because when Montalbano bursts into the pathologist Pasquano’s office and finds the doctor out and a box of cream-filled pastries left behind, “Having finished the first cannolo, he took another.”

That’s cannolo, singular, not cannoli, plural, and the translation gets it right. I seethe when a waiter or waitress at an Italian restaurant offers me bruSHetta, and when some fast-food place urges me to “Have a panini!” I curse the saints; panini, like cannoli, is plural.

So, thanks to Camilleri’s ever-excellent translator, Stephen Sartarelli, for respecting the rules of good grammar and for keeping my blood pressure down.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A Simple Story: The Leonardo (Sciascia) code

I'm about done with Bouchercon posts, and I have no more crime-fiction conventions until Thursday, so I can now return to my regular reading.

Leonardo Sciascia's novella (or long story) called A Simple Story, reissued by Hesperus Press in a new translation by Howard Curtis, begins with a one-two punch of sardonic observation and ends with irony just as sardonic. As the story opens, police in a small Sicilian town receive a phone call on the eve of a festival honoring St. Joseph the carpenter,

"who seemed to have inspired the bonfires of old furniture which were lit in the working-class neighborhoods almost as a promise to the few carpenters still in business that there would be no lack of work for them. The offices were almost deserted, even more so than on other evenings at that hour, but they were still lit, the way the offices of the police were usually kept lit in the evening and during the night, by tacit agreement, to give the townspeople the impression that the police were ever alert to the safety of the public."

Good god, an opening like that snaps the reader to attention. In such a world of deception, one must — readers included — be ready for anything, and the mental alertness that this demands is exhilarating. Sciascia's world is not one in which the police must solve a mystery, but rather one in which everything is a mystery.

Sciascia's skeptical wit also appeals, as perhaps all skeptical wit does, to the intellect, and I like this example especially:

"But as the commissioner's attitude had annoyed him, and as he was almost entirely devoid of what is usually called esprit de corps — which meant regarding the body to which he belonged as the most important thing of all, considering it infallible, or, if it was not infallible, untouchable, overwhelmingly right, especially when it was wrong — he had a mischievous idea."

Oh, man, that's what I want to be when I grow up.

***

Howard Curtis' previous crime-fiction translations include novels by Gianrico Carofiglio, Jean-Claude Izzo and Caryl Férey. He's built a nice niche translating gialli and polars that pack a punch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

California dreaming

I'm going to California (for Bouchercon 2010); Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano is doing the dreaming, in The Track of Sand, twelfth of the Montalbano mysteries to be translated into English.

Dream scenes in movies are generally embarrassments; in books they're merely obvious. But Camilleri, who often opens his novels with Montalbano waking in the morning, shows here that he knows how to write a dream. Montalbano's dreams here feel like dreams. It helps that the crime sets the story in motion is full of material ripe for dreams: a horse, a beach, sand (as in the stuff you get bogged down running in...slower...slower...sinking deeper).

So the dream can have something to do with the mystery Montalbano is trying to solve without being clunkingly obvious about it.

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Longtime readers of this charming series know that Camilleri likes to have Montalbano reading a mystery as he tries to relax. This time Montalbano thinks about Giorgio Scerbanenco; Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the creators of Martin Beck; and that newcomer Henning Mankell. Here's my favorite example:

"He got into bed and started reading one of the Swedish books he had bought. Its protagonist was a colleague of his, Inspector Martin Beck, whose manner of investigation he found very appealing. When he had finished the novel and turned out the light, it was four o'clock in the morning."

Readers for whom the running gag of Montalbano's inability to finish reading a Simenon novel in The Smell of the Night will find that especially noteworthy. I find it touching, and it's hard to imagine a warmer author-to-author tribute.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Stripped down in Sicily

"(H)aving to write down the things he saw and the anxiety this caused him sharpened his ability to select, to pare down, to express things pithily, so that only what was sound and perceptive remained in the net of his writing. Such may be the case with Italian writers from the south, especially Sicilians — in spite of school, university and lots of reading."

That's from A Simple Story, a novella by the late, great Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia newly reissued by Hesperus Press, and I'm eager to see how the wittily self-reflective sentiment of the last sentence will play out in the story.

For now, the passage's meditation on the power of spare expression reminds me that stripped-down writing can induce shivers of recognition, a feeling that the author is onto something essential. Jean-Patrick Manchette does this and, based on my recent reading of the Continental Op stories, I'd say Dashiell Hammett does, too.

Who's your favorite creator of stripped-down prose? And is Sciascia's narrator right? Do Sicilian authors have a special talent for expressing the essential?

(Howard Curtis, who translates from French and Italian, has carved out a nice niche in hard-boiled and neo-noir. In addition to A Simple Story, his translations include Caryl Férey's Zulu, Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy, and works by Gianrico Carofiglio.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Following the Detectives is in my hands!

I can't review a book to which I contributed, but I can say that Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction manages the neat trick of offering information beyond the ostensible range of its subjects.

The book's core is twenty-one essays, each about a single fictional detective and the real city, country or region where he or she works. One of my assignments was Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, for instance, but a full-page insert tells the reader about Arnaldur's fellow Icelandic crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir as well. That sort of efficient conveyance of information is a good idea for a book whose other crime-fiction destinations include London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Pretty hard to squeeze all the fictional detectives who call any of those cities home into a single essay.

The extras include maps, graphics, information boxes, guides to television and movie adaptations, walking tours, useful Web sites and, as an accompaniment to my essay on Andrea Camilleri, remarks on the history of Sicilian cuisine with explanations of some of Salvo Montalbano's favorite dishes. Pappanozza. Just the sound of it makes me hungry.

Here's a list of contributors and their fictional destinations:

Boston: Michael Carlson
Brighton: Barry Forshaw
Chicago: Dick Adler and Maxim Jakubowski
Dublin: Declan Burke
Edinburgh: Barry Forshaw
Florida: Oline Cogdill
Iceland: Your humble blogkeeper
London: David Stuart Davies
Los Angeles: Maxim Jakubowski
New Orleans: Maxim Jakubowski
New York City: Sarah Weinman
Nottingham: John Harvey
Oxford: Martin Edwards
Paris: Barry Forshaw
San Francisco: J. Kingston Pierce
Shropshire: Martin Edwards
Sicily: Your humble blogkeeper
Southern California: Michael Carlson
Sweden: Barry Forshaw
Venice: Barry Forshaw
Washington, D.C.: Sarah Weinman

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Order Following the Detectives here (free shipping!), from the publisher, here, here, or from an independent bookseller in the UK or Canada.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010