In early March, Marella Feltrin-Morris, professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Ithaca College, translated famous Italian writer Grazia Deledda’s short story “La porta stretta.” Morris also wrote a chapter in “Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic,” called “The Space Between: Deledda’s Doors as Frames for Visual and Symbolic Landscapes,” which seeks to dive deeper into Deledda’s imagery of the Door.
The chapter Feltrin-Morris wrote explores the recurring element of doors in three short stories by Deledda: “La porta aperta” (“The Open Door”), “La porta chiusa” (“The Closed Door”) and “La porta stretta” (“The Narrow Door.”) The Door has inspired literary artists for the imagery it provides to the reader because it represents access to freedom, nature and the outside world whether depicted to be open, closed or partially open. The way the door is depicted can present risk or potential.
Staff writer Liam McDermott sat down with Feltrin-Morris to discuss her chapter as well as her passion for other pieces of Italian literature.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Liam McDermott: What about Grazia Deledda inspired you to write this chapter?
Marella Feltrin-Morris: A lot of the stuff that I do comes initially from translation. I had happened to have translated a short story by Grazia Deledda years ago called “The Narrow Door,” and I had been meaning to send it to a journal to be published. But then I received a call for contributions to this volume called Grazia Deledda’s, “Painterly Aesthetic.” And I thought, “Is there a way to be able to contribute to this volume, with the translation and with also something that deals with the topic?”
LM: One of the main points of the chapter seems to be the Door, what is the significance of the Door, and how can it relate to our lives today?
MFM: One of the reasons why Deledda has suffered a little bit is because people tend to — and justifiably — circumscribe to the region that she wrote about, and so they have a hard time finding her valuable beyond that time period and that specific space. However, Grazia Deledda was compared to Dostoevsky, a very major Russian author … because of her preoccupation with sin, with morality, with characters who didn’t make the right decision and keep regretting it throughout their lives. One way in which I think people today might not find it relatable is because very much of this preoccupation revolves around God, but there is a sense of doom in Deledda’s writings, a sense of being helpless. So, this God that we see there is almost never a benevolent God. I think one of the ways that we can read her today is, how do we make the right decision? Either when we don’t feel that there’s anybody watching us — without the sense of direction that you might get from religion — or when nobody seems to care, when you know whether you do the right thing or you do something completely immoral [and it] doesn’t seem to make any difference whatsoever. And instead, Deledda shows how that can make a big difference, and how people can be tormented about that for a very long time.
LM: Your chapter includes a translation of the work. What went into the translation and what was the process of writing the chapter like?
MFM: Often I find a story that I find compelling and I almost instinctively want to translate it, in part because I want other people to enjoy it. The [chapter] stemmed from examining the translation and the short story and the short story in the context of all of the rest of the letters’ production.
LM: How can this experience impact your teaching as a professor in the translation studies program?
MFM: I find it very important to keep translating as a professor of translation, because if you don’t translate on a regular basis, you don’t remember the challenges. I think every time a translation is done and disseminated, it is also something that can be not only analyzed, but can also be re-translated, because the fact that I translated it doesn’t mean that my translation is the final one.
LM: What is the significance of a translation studies program at IC and what does it entail?
MFM: I, along with my colleagues in the department, created it because it is one of the many pathways that students can take having studied languages. It’s also a field that helps us analyze text better, because there is no better way of reading a text than translating it.
LM: How did you get involved with being a part of this project?
MFM: I had already done work on the Deledda. One of the editors of the volume reached out to me with the call for contributions, because I work generally with authors who wrote during that same time period.
LM: What inspires you most about Sardinian/Italian literature?
MFM: I am a professor of Italian and so pretty much anything to do with the culture is something that I find interesting and that I find potentially useful for using in class.
LM: Are there any other Sardinian/Italian writers that have inspired you over the years?
MFM: The ones that I have been working on and thinking about for a long time are Luigi Pirandello and Italo Calvino. Pirandello [is] specifically an author that I would recommend.
LM: Are there any other writers or artists that you would love to do similar projects about?
MFM: I’m always working on something. I think I probably want to continue working on 19th and early 20th century Italian writers. I’m teaching a class on Italian culture called “Italian Culture: A Culinary Journey.” It’s about Italian food traditions, and so we’ve looked at a lot of cookbooks. … I’m always on the lookout for something that would be worth translating.
