Book record
Small Talk
Raffaello Baldini
Translated from Italian by Adria Bernardi
Small Talk, by Raffaello Baldini and translated by Adria Bernardi, gives humble speech a literary charge. Baldini is known for work rooted in dialect, locality, theater, and the rhythms of ordinary talk, and that makes translation especially interesting here. Small talk can sound trivial, but it often carries social fear, tenderness, gossip, loneliness, and the comedy of being alive among others. Bernardi’s translation has to bring not only meaning across, but voice, timing, and everyday pressure. I would read Small Talk for its attention to the minor utterance, the thing said because silence would be too much. Poetry does not always need elevated diction. Sometimes it needs the awkward brilliance of people talking just enough to keep one another nearby.
- Published
- 2009
- Publisher
- Gradiva
- Language
- Italian
- Country
- Italy
- ISBN
- 9781892021366