In both its iterations, "Silk" straddles the line between domestic and foreign, not unlike Joncour himself. Translation serves as a lens through which Baricco interrogates traditional Western notions of foreignness and domesticity.| Reading in Translation
Nadia Terranova’s 2022 novel "The Night Trembles" (Trema la notte), translated by Ann Goldstein for Seven Stories Press (2025), gives voice to Barbara and Nicola, a young woman and a boy whose parallel plot lines develop against the background of a catastrophic natural disaster – the earthquake that decimated the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria, on each side of the Strait of Messina, on December 28, 1908.| Reading in Translation
In both its iterations, "Silk" straddles the line between domestic and foreign, not unlike Joncour himself. Translation serves as a lens through which Baricco interrogates traditional Western notions of foreignness and domesticity.| Reading in Translation
Baricco’s short novel almost reads like a collection of linked prose poems, a form that lends itself to be read and reread. Rather than understand Waldman’s and Goldstein’s translations as in competition, one “more faithful” than the other, it may be more useful to see them as partners.| Reading in Translation
