THE SENTENCE: NATALIA GINZBURG

From "The Mother" (1958), a short story newly translated from the Italian by Paul Lewis and published last month in "The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg" (University of Toronto Press):

She would tell them to turn their backs while she got undressed, and they would hear the quick rustle of her clothes, see the shadows dancing on the walk, and then she would slip into the bed next to them, a thin body in a cold silk blouse.

The story is so beautiful, I spent the weekend looking for Isabel Quigley's original English translation, published in the Penguin anthology "Italian Short Stories" (1965). I'm glad I did. Quigley's version unfurls the above sentence only a little further, but the change in meaning is profound.

In Lewis's shorter sentences, the narrator's omniscience darts around the bedroom, never finding a fixed point. But in Quigley's take, the narrator falls into a more intimate voice, the close third person, and shadows the mother. The comical, stark clauses in Lewis's translation give way to something else entirely in Quigley's: a panoramic view of a life mired in regret:

She told them they must turn the other way while she undressed, they heard the quick rustle of her clothes, and shadows danced on the walls; she slipped into bed beside them, her thin body in its cold silk nightdress, and they moved away from her because she always complained that they came too close and kicked while they slept; sometimes she put out the light so that they should go to sleep and smoked in silence in the darkness.

~ ANDREW STOUT