On the occasion of Women’s History Month and celebrating the release in the United States of her acclaimed novel Strangers I Know (La straniera), writer and translator Claudia Durastanti will be in conversation with Professor Clorinda Donato, Director of the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies at California State University, Long Beach.
Moderated by Francesco Chianese, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Cardiff University and California State University, Long Beach, the event will be in-person and also livestreamed on Zoom.
Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood can be felt in her work as as a translator and as a writer. La Straniera, her fourth novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, and its English translation by Elizabeth Harris, Strangers I Know (Penguin Random House 2022) received a PEN award.
A funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family, Strangers I know makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.
The online presentation is an American Sign Language accesible event.
Date: TUESDAY MARCH 22
Time: 6:00 pm PST
Location: Italian Cultural Institute Los Angeles | ZOOM LIVESTREAMING
| In person RSVP HERE |
CLAUDIA DURASTANTI (Brooklyn, 1984) is a writer and literary translator. She writes for several literary supplements and is on the board of the Turin Book Fair. Her work has appeared on Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Serving Library. She is the Italian translator of Joshua Cohen, Donna Haraway, Ocean Vuong. Strangers I Know, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, has been translated into twenty-three languages and has received a PEN Translates award. She currently lives in Rome.
CLORINDA DONATO directs the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies at California State University, Long Beach where she is professor of French and Italian. She teaches courses in literary translation with an emphasis on translation in the eighteenth century and translating gender. In 2021 she published Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations 1680-1830 with The University of Toronto Press. Her volume, The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani. Sexual identity, science and sensationalism in eighteenth-century Italy and England, published by Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, won the American Association Teachers of Italian Inaugural Book Prize in 2021.