This blog post was written by Jeanne Bonner, a Short-Term Research Fellow at the New York Public Library in fall 2021. Jeanne is an editor, essayist, and literary translator specializing in overlooked or emerging Italian women writers. During her time at NYPL, she conducted research on Holocaust imagery in the works of Italian women writers.
 

The short stories of Edith Bruck, a peer of Italian writer Primo Levi and a fellow survivor of Auschwitz, often employ an unexpected angle to reflect her personal experiences and the wider travails of European Jews during and after the Holocaust. In one short story called “Silvia,” Bruck writes from the perspective of the young son of an officer in the Third Reich. While his father is away at war, the boy brings home a Jewish stowaway—to the horror of his proud Nazi mother. In another story, Bruck depicts a girl trying to shield her blind, sickly brother from the Nazis. Forced to board a German train that, unbeknownst to him, is headed toward a death camp, she distracts him by saying how bright the lights of the distant city twinkle. Some film scholars (and Bruck herself) consider the story an inspiration for Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning 1997 film, Life is Beautiful.

I applied for an NYPL fellowship to conduct research in connection with my translations of stories from Bruck’s two short story collections, Due Stanze Vuote (1974) [English translation: Two Empty Rooms] and Andremo in Città (1962) [English translation: We’ll Go to the City], as well as further my study of other Italian women writers who documented their Holocaust experiences. 

Born in Hungary in 1932, Bruck has been publishing literature in Italian since the 1950s when she relocated to Rome. The Bruck works cited here draw on her family’s deportation in 1944; her father died at Dachau, while her mother perished, almost immediately, at Auschwitz. After the war, Bruck adopted the Italian language as an emotional buffer so she could write about her experiences. She is the author of more than a dozen novels, short story collections, and books of poetry, including Letter to My Mother. Her 2021 memoir, Il Pane Perduto, which she published at age 89, was a finalist for Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega. 

The library possesses a fine collection of Bruck works; indeed, NYPL’s Dorot Jewish Division has extensive holdings of Italian-language works by and about women who are Holocaust survivors, including Liana Millu and Giuliana Tedeschi, plus the works of historians focused specifically on the Italian experience of the Holocaust. For an Italianist and especially one like me desperate to deepen my knowledge of the Shoah, the catalog is nothing short of a treasure trove.

Much is known about the experiences of men who survived the Holocaust. In Italy, Levi, cited above, educated a nation— and the world—with his 1947 book, If This Is a Man. But much less is known about women survivors. In his book Auschwitz: Storia e memorie, writer Frediano Sessi says it’s partly because in the early post-war decades, far fewer women published accounts of their experiences. This dearth is especially remarkable because women made up 50 percent of the victims of the gas chambers, according to Sessi, despite constituting only 30 percent of all prisoners. What’s more, some survivors have said women fared much worse in Nazi concentration camps than men. Levi, who wrote an introduction to Liana Millu’s Il Fumo di Birkenau, cited a variety of reasons for this assessment, but most notably, "the haunting presence of the crematoria, located right in the middle of the women’s camp, inescapable, undeniable, their ungodly smoke rising from the chimneys to contaminate every day and every night, every moment of respite or illusion, every dream and timorous hope." (From the book’s English translation by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Smoke Over Birkenau). 

When I came to NYPL to forage in the Library’s holdings, I aimed to resolve some questions about vocabulary that arose while working on my translations. That led me to the majestic Rose Main Reading Room, which is home to dozens of colossal Italian dictionaries and etymological works. I’ve always loved dictionaries, and as a child, I would page through the one we had at home for the fun of finding new words. Today, translators use online dictionaries a lot. But toggling between physical dictionaries to compare definitions—rather than browser tabs—supplies a richness and, I would argue, an analog efficiency to the translation process. And besides, a dictionary like the massive, multi-volume Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, edited by the legendary Salvatore Battaglia, can be unwieldy to use online if available.

Translating any work of literature poses challenges on a pure linguistic level but translators also must consider the context in which the works are conceived. I will zero in on particular constructions that require a second look, but first, about that context: Bruck, like other survivors of the Shoah, writes about something that arguably beggars the imagination. As journalist Furio Colombo notes in his introduction to Daniela Padoan’s Come una rana d'inverno: Conversazioni con tre donne sopravvissute ad Auschwitz  "It’s not the inability to recount but the inability of something to be recounted.” (Note: Translation is my own; the book’s title, which refers to a prefatory poem by Primo Levi from If This Is a Man, could be translated in English as "Like A Frog in Winter: Conversations with Three Women Survivors of Auschwitz").

This brings me to a passage from a short story that I worked on at the Library. It emerges in the story entitled "Silvia" (from Andremo in Città) during an exchange between the main character, a German boy named Robert, and a railway worker. While playing by the tracks, Robert has heard the sounds of passengers from passing trains, and he wants to know about the trains that come and go each day. 

The railway man replies that there is only one kind of train that comes through, and he uses the word "malora" to describe it. The word is formed by two other very elementary words: mal and ora. Basic definitions: "Mal" (or "male") means bad; “"Ora" indicates hour or time. Hence, at first glance, the word is not a difficult piece of vocabulary, and with the presence of the word "mal," I already know "malora" has a negative connotation. 

But it intrigues me. These trains are headed for concentration camps, and with this sentence, the worker is referring, even if only indirectly, to the forced transport of Jews to almost certain death. It’s how an average German man might describe the Holocaust—how he would reference the death camps. Even in a casual conversation, how exactly do you refer to trains full of people going to a place and those people never returning? Do I need a word that will evoke that in the translation of the passage?

Perhaps not. But the word seems to capture the doomed essence of the camps—and Bruck’s short story—and I wanted to do some digging before I decide on the final rendition, even if I chose a simple solution. So beginning with the Italian language dictionaries, which can supply synonyms and examples of usage from literature, I find the 1999 Grande Dizionario Italiano Dell’Uso (edited by Tullio De Mauro) lists malora as "a situation or painful event that unravels a person’s life" (translation my own). In the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (which the Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese published in 1975 on the Oxford English Dictionary model), I find "sfortuna" and "disgrazia," both of which can indicate "misfortune" or a tragic event. This multi-volume work also says that something that has gone in malora has been inextricably lost or is much reduced, existing now in almost apocalyptic condition. The Dizionario Etimologico Carlo Battisti has an entry for "malora" that means bad luck. This last definition resonates; the trains in question personify hardship and misfortune. It also reflects the railway employee’s attitude of disdain toward the trains.

But in the sentence from the story, "malora" is joined to "della," a form of the Italian word for "of," which connotates belonging or can indicate a description. In this vein, the 1995 Ragazzini Zanichelli Italian-English Dictionary lists colloquial uses of malora, such as, "Fa un gelo della malora," which is translated in English as: It’s damned cold. This construction mirrors the phrase in question from the Bruck story ("quei treni della malora"), and in this case, "malora" acts as an emphatic element (How cold is it? It’s malora-level cold). 

Similarly, in the Battaglia dictionary, I find a citation from writer Dino Buzzati in which a character who is driving finds himself stuck in "traffico della malora." We might translate this as "hellish traffic," or "horrendous traffic." 

I should probably confess that, at this point, I was immersing myself in linguistic study just for the joy of doing so—and the opportunity the fellowship afforded me. Indeed, I labor over Bruck’s words—belabor might be more apt—not only because I translate but also because I had returned to translation amid a career in journalism, and only after earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College (I’d done some translation work as an ex-pat in Italy after college). When I sit in a room with Bruck’s words, I’m also there with my various identities, including an Italophile in reluctant exile and an independent scholar who cannot dedicate herself fully to literary translation or scholarship. Plus, there’s something about the word "malora" in this context that fires my imagination—that obsesses me.

So at The New York Public Library, I delved deeper, going beyond the requirements of the passage I need to translate. And I learn that it is not a new word; indeed, malora appears in several stanzas of Boccaccio’s poem "Ninfale Fiesolano," which is believed to have been composed between 1344 and 1346. I also learn more about a 1954 Beppe Fenoglio novel that is called La Malora. John Shepley’s English translation is entitled Ruin, and in another context "ruin" might work but I’m not working with the word as a straight noun ("la malora") but rather in a possessive construction that is often rendered in English with an adjective. So in the passage I am translating, something like "those damned trains" might work, or "those awful trains." Like I said, a simple solution might in the end be best. 

Yet something gnaws at me. When Schwartz, Millu’s translator, began translating a series of essays by Natalia Ginzburg, she sought points of communion where the two women’s sensibilities "connected, like wires that produce sparks." In the introduction to her 2017 nonfiction book on translation, Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays about Translation, Schwartz writes, "I tried to inhabit her, to feel what it was she felt compelled to find words for, her Italian words." 

I studied under Schwartz at Bennington, and regret that her wise approach is one that has eluded me in my translations of Bruck’s work. Indeed, while it will seem obvious to state, I must say the passages that fluster me are where Bruck refers not simply to the Holocaust but to the effects of the Holocaust.

So another point that’s given me pause as I translate this story (and others) arises when Bruck describes the sounds the train passengers made after the Nazis had loaded them into cattle cars and shipped them to the death camps (the narrator—this young German boy—is haunted by these sounds in the story). She repeatedly uses the word "lamento," a form of which in everyday Italian is used for the act of complaining ('lamentarsi’) I, myself, use it frequently when I speak Italian with friends or students. We get the word "lament" in English from this Latinate construction and in some contexts, that translation could fit. But we often use it with a different register in English that doesn’t necessarily reflect the sounds Bruck describes, which I believe have a mournful note.

While "malora" appears once in the course of "Silvia," Bruck uses various forms of "lamentare" no fewer than 10 times, ranging from "lamento" to “lamentela” to "lamentarsi" and "lamento collettivo." These words voice the horror of the Nazi regime that hovers over the story. They also likely voice something that Bruck herself experienced—the "lamenti" that she and her own family heard or expressed while being deported. 

On a hunch that forms of lamentare might recur in survivor accounts, I spent time studying two other works in Italian by women who survived the Holocaust: Millu’s Il Fumo di Birkenau, along with Schwartz’s English translation; and Giuliana Tedeschi’s C’è un punto della terra. The English translation, by Tim Parks, which is called There is a Place on Earth, is out of print so finding it in the Library’s holdings was invaluable.

Taking the example of the Millu book, she uses forms of "lamentare" repeatedly; in one chapter, a character named Maria is in great pain. One sample passage reads: "‘Signore Iddio!’ si lamentava Maria premendo la testa contro il pagliericcio." And the translation reads, "‘Oh God in heaven,’ moaned Maria, pressing her face into the mat." But in another passage, Schwartz uses the verb "to wail" to translate lamentare, and in a third section of the text, she uses the verb "to groan." This means I have options as I translate, while also signaling there is no one definitive solution.

Again, the original Italian word isn’t arcane or difficult but it can cover a wide range of feeling and reaction, and the context is important. These ‘lamenti’ occur at moments of intense distress on the part of people deported to Nazi concentration camps and I want the register of the vocabulary I choose to telegraph that.

Ultimately, since my translation of the short story remains unpublished, it is still a work in progress. But my study at The New York Public Library has helped me examine literary precedent—how these vocabulary words have been used in other contexts—and that guides me as I make final word choices. 

The fellowship has also confirmed for me that women’s experience of deportation and survival differed in some important ways from the experience of men who lived through the Holocaust, and it’s a topic I hope to probe further in the future.

I persist in translating and studying Bruck’s work for two reasons: we can never learn enough about the Shoah so Bruck’s writing needs to reach more Anglophone ears. And secondly, Italian women authors continue to be translated less frequently than Italian men. In Italy, Bruck is often mentioned in the same breath as Primo Levi but in America, only Levi is well-known. So I need to soldier on. As Bruck said in an interview one summer when I visited her apartment in Rome, her experiences at Auschwitz constitute "un’eredità per la vita," a lifelong inheritance. 

"The dead cannot speak, so we must speak for them," she told me. 

I use her fortitude as an inspiration while I seek to bring her work to a larger audience.

 

Works cited

Bruck, Edith. Andremo in città. Milan: Lerici, 1962.

-------Due stanze vuote. Venice: Marsilio, 1974

-------Letter to My Mother. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. Translated by Brenda Webster and Gabriella Romani.

-------. Il Pane Perduto. Milano: La Nave di Teseo, 2021.

Millu, Liana. Il Fumo di Birkenau. Firenze: Giuntina, 1986.

-------. Smoke over Birkenau. Translation from the Italian by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. 

*Padoan, Daniela. Come una rana d’inverno: Conversazioni con tre donne sopravissute ad Auschwitz. Milan: Bompiani, 2004.

*Sessi, Frediano. Auschwitz: Storie e memorie. Venice: Marsilio, 2020.

*Tedeschi, Giuliana. C’è un punto della terra. Firenze: Giuntina, 1993

*-------. There’s a Place on Earth. Translation from the Italian by Tim Parks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

*Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays about Translation. Edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.