Gianna Manzini: Julia Nelsen on Translating the Overlooked Female Writer
Sarah Coolidge: I’m sure Gianna Manzini will be an unfamiliar name to many readers who haven’t studied Italian literature. Can you give us a sense of how she is regarded in Italy?
Julia Nelsen: I’d say Manzini is not a household name to most readers in Italy either, at least not today. From the time she began writing in the 1930s, she was hailed as an important, original voice in modern Italian fiction. But despite enjoying critical acclaim and winning several awards throughout her career, Manzini has largely gone overlooked since her death in 1974. This has been explained in part by changing trends and evolving tastes, but it also has to do, unfortunately, with many notable women writers of her generation being edited out of the canon of 20th century Italian literature. While some authors like Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg, for example, have gained international recognition—also thanks to translations!—others like Manzini have mostly fallen off the map outside academic circles. It doesn’t help that many of her books have gone out of print or are tucked away in libraries and archives. Scholars and translators have begun to pay more attention to her work in recent years, but there is still much more to uncover.
SC: Can you tell us about the time period when Gianna Manzini was writing? What was happening in Italian literature at that time? Who were her contemporaries both in and out of Italy?
JN: Manzini began writing at the height of the modernist and avant-garde movements that swept across the world in the 1920s and ’30s. This was a time of renewal and breaking with tradition in pursuit of innovative forms—in Italy, think of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurists, the poetry of Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, the plays of Luigi Pirandello. Especially in the cultural hubs of Florence and Rome, where Manzini got her start, there was a real push to revitalize Italian literature by engaging with new models emerging elsewhere in Europe. Manzini was immersed in this cosmopolitan, experimental atmosphere. As a critic and contributor to journals like Solaria, she helped introduce Italian readers to contemporary works by James Joyce, André Gide, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and many others, while drawing upon their styles to develop her own inventive fiction.
All this was unfolding, of course, under the Fascist regime. Among Italian writers and intellectuals during this period, women actually made gains in the publishing industry as part of the regime’s efforts to modernize Italian culture, even as they remained subject to its narrow ideals of wife and mother. For Manzini, narrative experimentation was also about exploring new ways to express female identity beyond these repressive gender roles. The same can be said of fellow novelists like Anna Maria Ortese, Alba de Céspedes, Ada Negri—all of whom would continue to write in the postwar years. Like theirs, Manzini’s modernist style was very much shaped by the social and political context of the Fascist regime.
SC: How would you characterize Manzini’s style as a writer? Is there a distinctive “Manzini style” or does it vary from book to book?
JN: There’s a distinct subtlety and sensitivity to Manzini’s writing. She’s most often compared to Virginia Woolf, whom she considered a major influence and literary mentor. Like Woolf and other modernist writers, Manzini is more interested in illuminating ineffable sensations and states of mind than in following a linear, plot-driven narrative. Her style captures this curiosity for the elusive, shadowy nature of things—it’s delicate, searching, incisive and fluid at the same time. It’s also highly metaphorical, and very attuned to the rhythms and musicality of language, or what she once described in an interview as a kind of “architecture” for “expressing the harmony between things, reality, and inner movement.” This lyrical, meditative voice echoes throughout Manzini’s work, from early short pieces like this one to her later novels, which almost read like postmodern autofiction for the way they play with memory and stream-of-consciousness.
SC: You translated “False Days,” which is a short story from her 1932 collection Boscovivo. Can you talk a bit about this particular story and how it showcases Manzini’s style at work? What made you choose this story in particular to translate?
JN: This is the story that introduced me to Manzini, and one that I’ve kept revisiting. I first translated it several years ago for a seminar in graduate school, and was drawn back to it when the pandemic hit. Its descriptions of time, especially in the opening lines, really resonated with our disjointed lockdown experience: a patchwork of “false days” stitched oddly together. I read this piece as a meditation on the moments that make up a day, and a life—moments that feel both intensely vivid and strangely illusory. Manzini’s prose captures this tension really powerfully. What starts as a tram ride through a vibrant cityscape, seen through the narrator’s eyes, turns into a series of fleeting memories that never quite crystallize. Both share a dreamlike strangeness that blurs our sense of what is real and what is imagined. “False Days” shows Manzini’s talent for blending past and present, inner and outer worlds (Boscovivo means “living forest”). It’s also a wonderful example of the way she moves fluidly between surface and depth, by way of striking imagery and metaphors. Like many of her stories, it’s at once extremely descriptive and deeply meditative.
SC: What is it in general about Manzini’s writing that made you want to translate her work? What do you hope that today’s readers take away from her writing?
JN: Besides wanting to shine some light on her under-acknowledged work, I’ve found it an incredibly stimulating exercise to engage with Manzini’s imaginative style. Her writing has been called “acrobatic,” “baroque,” sometimes too “arty” and complex. For some critics, this intricacy explains her relative obscurity today, as a fellow translator has pointed out in her introduction to the English edition of Sulla soglia (Threshold). To me, these quirks are what makes Manzini so compelling. Her words are sharp and yet elusive; she gets at things sideways. Translating her is like untangling a ball of yarn and teasing out the different threads of meaning. It’s an exciting challenge to try and render her distinctive voice in a way that feels current, without smoothing out the more unusual aspects. With this piece, I hope readers will appreciate Manzini’s sensitivity to language, and her attentiveness to the unfamiliar in the ordinary—and that they’ll want to discover more.
Sarah Coolidge received her BA in comparative literature from Bard College. She enjoys reading books in Spanish and English, and she writes essays on photography and international literature.
Julia Nelsen translates from and into Italian. She holds a Laurea magistrale from the University of Milan and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published essays on Italian futurism and avant-garde magazines, with interests ranging from poetry to media studies. Alongside her research, Julia has worked as an educator, translator, and copyeditor for various organizations and publications in the US and abroad.
