Kitty, Mousy and Good Year – finished

Wow!
Now was that fast or what?!

OK, so Consolata Lanza’s story is only 3000 words long, but that’s not the point.

Not the only one, at least.

There is the fun factor – the fact that I am actually enjoying myself translating the story, finding the right turn of phrase.
That normally makes me go a lot faster.

And there is the quality of the writing.
This one helps a lot.
Maybe that’s why it’s taking me so long to finish translating my story.
Or Max’.

Anyway – now I’ll let the story rest for a few days and then I’ll revise it, before inflicting it on my revisors.
Nice and smooth.

I somewhat changed the tito to Kitty, Mousy and Good Year, which I hope better conveys the fact that these are not just names, but terms of endearing.

OK, time for a short break.
Who’s next?

Darkness according to Consolata

I’m one third through Consolata Lanza’s short story.

It translates like a breeze – despite a few curves that I’ll have to fine-tune later, like Consolata’s habit of slipping the odd regionalism in her otherwise crisp-clear Italian.

The story is a happily nasty number, as I already mentioned.
The author herself has placed a lengthy post on her blog, about the necessity of goin all the way through where violence is concerned, if violence is what the story needs.
Consolata’s fictional world is one in which bad stuff happens to bad people, so that we can be both horrified at what happens, but at the same time go “There, you bought it, creep!”

And creep’s the word.

The twist is this lady’s profoundly Piedmontese sensibility towards petty badness.
With an attention to etiquette details that feels like an update of Austen, miss Lanza’s world is full of petty villains – libidinous teachers, doped-out students, giggly chicks, less than honest workers.
We are not dealing with “Evil!”, but with stupidity, bad manners, lack of intelligence.

Compared to the cosmic horror of thelikes of Lovecraft, what the author offers us is much scarier as it’s much more commonplace, and very low-key.

Who’s Next

OK.

One story validated, one story in the finishing phases… time to think about the future.

Up next – Consolata Lanza, with Cat, Mousy and Happy New Year.

Despite the somewhat Disney-esque title, this is a deliciously nasty little story set in Turin’s Egyptian Museum.

Now this is weird.
Considering I spent a lot of time in the Egyptian as a high-school student – coming to the point of cutting lessons with a two friends to go and photograph everything on the premises – this thoroughly enjoyable number about three high-schoolers in the shadowed halls of my unlikely teenage haunt does give me few extra shivers.

But I guess everyone will get a little frisson before the end of the story.

More about the author, her crisp language and her story in future posts.