Roman Stories
by Jhumpa Lahiri
translated by the author with Todd Portnowitz
Alfred A. Knopf : 10 October 2023 : 224 pp. : 9780593536322
Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories: the first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form since her number one New York Times bestseller Unaccustomed Earth, and a major literary event.
In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line.
And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.
These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.
Praise for Roman Stories
“Electric . . . Elegant . . . The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Stories from a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole.” —The New York Times
"Masterful . . . Lahiri brilliantly delineates her characters' triumphs and trials." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A dazzling collection of nine stories originally written in Italian and featuring characters who grapple with vast emotional and social chasms that cleave the lives of families, longtime friends, and immigrants . . . Throughout, Lahiri’s luminous prose captures a side of Rome often ignored . . . These unembroidered yet potent stories shine.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A brilliant return to the short story form by an author of protean accomplishments . . . Filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In Search of Amrit Kaur
A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World
by Livia Manera Sambuy
translated by Todd Portnowitz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux : 14 March 2023 : 352 pp. : 9780374106010
As she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.
On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself standing before a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess at a museum in Mumbai. What’s written in the caption will change her life forever. This gorgeous Punjabi princess, it’s said, sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year.
Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unnoticed? Instinctively, almost viscerally, Sambuy becomes entangled in the mystery, losing herself in the history of the British Raj, in the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, in the Circus Balls and Jubilees, and in the lives of extraordinary figures such as the Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, the Jewish banker Albert Kahn, and the Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich—all in a decades-long pursuit of the elusive Amrit Kaur.
When she rendezvouses with the princess’s eighty-year-old daughter, Sambuy’s search takes on a new dimension, as she strives to reconnect an orphan with the mother who abandoned her in 1933, leaving behind her two children, her raja husband, and a legacy of activism in India’s women’s civil rights movement.
In Search of Amrit Kaur is an engrossing detective story, a kaleidoscopic history lesson, and a moving portrait of women, across the century, seeking personal freedom.
Praise for In Search of Amrit Kaur
“A luminous portrait of Amrit Kaur first beguiled Livia Manera in a dusty museum in Mumbai, and became an obsession. This beautiful Indian princess, she learned, had escaped her family, leaving behind an unfaithful husband, young children, and a feudal world where the reward for a woman’s submission was unimaginable privilege. It took Manera years to reconstruct her story, and at every stage, on several continents, mysteries and obfuscations thwarted her. The truth, when she finally discovered it, came as a shock, and a revelation. And the result of her quest is an even more luminous portrait—of both Amrit Kaur, and Livia Manera—two exceptional women who had to question their assigned fates as daughters, wives, lovers, and mothers in order to define themselves.” —Judith Thurman, author of A Left-Handed Woman
"Nuanced but relentlessly curious, Livia Manera Sambuy has a gift not only for listening to other people’s stories but for probing and unfolding exceptional narratives. In Search of Amrit Kaur—an ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author’s own emotional vicissitudes, is her crowning jewel." —Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Whereabouts
”Livia Manera Sambuy is a wonderful detective-companion to lead us through this rich and complex world of princesses and prisoners-of-war, love and deceit, secrets and discovery. Teeming with incident and character, In Search of Amrit Kaur is a thoroughly engaging read.” —Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
"A remarkable book about an extraordinary woman . . . impossible to put down. It offers a rare window into a vanished and exotic world." —Rudrangshu Mukherjee, author of Nehru & Rose
The Greatest Invention
A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts
by Silvia Ferrara
translated by Todd Portnowitz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux : 1 March 2022 : 288 pp. : 9780374601621
Silvia Ferrara's The Greatest Invention is a code-cracking tour around the globe, sifting through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention—writing.
The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form such complex structures as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, taking us back in time to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond.
With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Incan khipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah invents a script all on his own; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, where high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. As Ferrara demonstrates, in the shadows and swirls of these ancient inscriptions, not only are we able to decipher the stories these peoples sought to record, but we can also tease out the timeless truths of human nature, of our ceaseless drive to connect, create, and be remembered.
An exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance, The Greatest Invention chronicles an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and the faint, fleeting echo of writing’s future.
Praise for The Greatest Invention
“The Greatest Invention is far more of a performance than a history — which means that, without Portnowitz's superior translation, it could have easily been a disaster in English. Portnowitz embraces Ferrara's spark and liveliness; he leans into her assertive statements and corny jokes. Surely he tore his hair out rendering her Italian emoji rebuses into English. His translation is not only seamless but electric, and deserves tremendous credit for the success of Ferrara's show.” —Lily Meyer, NPR
"Ferrara says she wrote the book the way she talks to friends over dinner, and that’s exactly how it reads. Instead of telling a chronological history of writing, she moves freely from script to script, island to island . . . She is constantly by our side, prodding us with questions, offering speculations, reporting on exciting discoveries . . . . Her book doubles as a manifesto for collaborative research . . . Rendered into lively English by Todd Portnowitz" —Martin Puchner, The New York Times Book Review
“Encountered at the right time, this book could ignite a passion, even change a life . . . If one has any doubts that the ancient past deserves our attention as much as the future Ferrara also energetically imagines, this book should dispel them.” —Michael Autrey, Booklist (starred review)
Download the audiobook of The Greatest Invention
Narrated by the translator
About Me
TODD PORTNOWITZ (1986) is an editor, poet, and Italian translator. His co-translation, with the author, of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories was published by Knopf in October 2023. His other prose translations include In Search of Amrit Kaur by Livia Manera Sambuy (FSG 2023), The Greatest Invention by Silvia Ferrara (FSG 2022), Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini (FSG, 2019); his poetry translations include Go Tell It to the Emperor: The Selected Poems of Pierluigi Cappello (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2018), and the forthcoming Methods by Lorenzo Carlucci (Fomite, 2024). He has received honors from the Academy of American Poets (Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship, 2015, Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome) and the Bread Loaf Translators Conference. An Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, he is also a co-founder of the Italian poetry blog Formavera and of the Brooklyn-based reading series for writer-translators, Us&Them.
Books
click on the titles below to learn more
Read Original Poems & Translations Online
Poetry Translations
visit the Journal Publications page for a complete list of works
“Staying”
by Pierluigi Cappello
in Poetry
“The Highway”
by Pierluigi Cappello
in Asymptote
“In Which Forest”
by Pierluigi Cappello
in Guernica
“Morning”
by Pierluigi Cappello
in Narrative Magazine
“Prose Poems for Olympia”
by Lorenzo Carlucci
in PN Review
“Method8”
by Lorenzo Carlucci
in Copper Nickel
Original Poems
“The Bishop’s Supper”
in Virginia Quarterly Review
“Wave Hill”
in The Cortland Review
“The Bowling Ball”
in English & Italian
in Formavera
“Covergence” & other poems
in English & Italian
in Nuovi argomenti
“An Offering” and other poems
in English and Italian
in Poetarum Silva
“The Physiologist’s Rebuke to His Lover”
in Birmingham Poetry Review
The Us&Them reading series
Launched in the summer of 2015 by Todd Portnowitz and Sam Bett, Us&Them is a quarterly reading series, held at Molasses Books in Brooklyn, that gives writer-translators a platform to read from both sides of their work. Each reading features four readers and showcases literature from all over the world. Beyond Brooklyn, special Us&Them events have been held in Massachusetts, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Cuba.
