La proposta — The Offer

Translators, rights and how a book crosses a border

When an Italian novel is published abroad, the Italian publisher — or an agent — sells the translation rights to a foreign publisher, usually at a book fair or after sending sample chapters. The foreign publisher then chooses and pays the translator, under a separate contract that normally includes an advance, a fee per page or per word, and sometimes a share of royalties. In Italy the people who handle this are the foreign-rights departments of publishing houses, many of them in Milan, which has been the center of Italian publishing since the nineteenth century. Literary translators almost always translate into their own language, not out of it: the hard part is not understanding the original but writing something that reads as if it had been written in the target language. That is why Marta wants Alex, an English speaker who knows Italy from the inside, rather than an Italian who writes English well. Translators are often credited on the cover in the English-speaking world only recently; in Italy the name of the traduttore has long appeared on the title page, and good translators can become known in their own right. Trieste, where the novel is set, is a city at the far northeastern edge of Italy, on the border with Slovenia. For most of its history it was the main port of the Austrian empire, and it only became Italian after the First World War. It is famous for its wind, the bora, for its cafés, and for writers such as Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba. Francesca's memory of it — mostly the wind — is the one most visitors take home.