"I just finished translating Avere tutto by Marco Missiroli and immediately devoted myself to translating L'amore assaje, the debut novel by Francesca Maria Benvenuto.
The author was born in Naples but then moved to Paris where she works as a criminal lawyer. The book is written in a mixture of Neapolitan dialect and an Italian that is sometimes ungrammatical, but which sounds very authentic coming from the mouth of Zeno, the fifteen-year-old protagonist incarcerated in the Nisida juvenile prison. He ended up there after shooting to death a boy who belonged to another gang. Encouraged by his Italian teacher to write down his thoughts almost in the form of a diary in order to obtain permission to spend Christmas with his mother, Zeno talks in these pages about himself, his life outside of prison, his family, his love for Natalina, life in the juvenile prison; he talks about his fears and hopes, expressing himself in a language imbued with authentic poetry, very intense, childish and very mature at the same time.
What struck me about this novel at first, in addition to the poetic expression, is the way Zeno tells his story: without playing the victim, without feeling sorry for himself, accepting responsibility for his own choices and actions.
The greatest challenge for me as a translator is certainly trying to give an authentic Croatian voice to Zeno. I try to do this by using some dialect expressions here and there (I also come from an island, the island of Lussino, where as a child my grandmother and I spoke a Triestine-Venetian dialect whose influence can also be felt in my local Croatian dialect and which, therefore, will be useful to me to "season" Zeno's Croatian voice with some never invasive dialectal notes), but above all by using contemporary slang, typical of fifteen-year-old Croatians.
The book, published in Italy in 2024, should be released in Croatia before the summer of 2025 and will speak to at all those who want to discover the hard life of marginalized youth, the reality of young people who are abandoned but who never give up, who still hope to be able to live a better future."