I hadn’t read anything by Davide Longo – one of the most celebrated writers from my region – since my teenage years, and actually didn’t even know he was translated into English until I found this book of his at an Amnesty International book sale. Needless to say I made it mine.
Longo writes extremely well (too well, according to my mom,
in order to be appreciated by the general public) and in this case the
translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose. The book
itself is a very dark crime story set between Turin and the Piedmontese Alps
(it reminded me of Furttero&Lucentini’s La
Donna della Domenica, but considerably gorier). I’ve read some reviews that
criticized the author’s bleakness, but this worked just fine with me.
However, after saying that “the translator does quite a good
job of preserving his beautiful prose”, I must also point out that in one case
he took a sentence absolutely out of context and made me wanted to cry a bit:
Bramard’s dad belonged to the Decima Mas,
probably the most bloodthirsty faction of the Fascist military corps, but the
translator calls them partisans (auch!) and translated the name using the roman
numeral “X” – making it the X Mas, which is accurate in Italian, but sounds
just way too festive in English.
Ah, and one of the Fascist thugs has got my surname, which
stings a bit…
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