The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg

by Wendell Ricketts

The Wrong Door is the first English-language translation of the complete plays of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Bringing together the eleven plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and the months before her death, this volume directs attention to Ginzburg's unique talent as a dramatist. Ginzburg's plays, like her novels and short stories, are incisive, finely tuned studies of family drama, of the breakdown of relations between the sexes, and of the tribulations of Italian domestic life. The plays showcase Ginzburg's fearless social commentary, her stark and darkly comic observations of Italian life, and her prescient analyses of the socio-economic changes that have transformed modern Italy. Along the way, Ginzburg creates memorable female characters in a series of fascinating roles. In this fluent and faithful translation, Wendell Ricketts highlights Ginzburg's scalpel-sharp dialogue and lays bare the existential absurdities that lie at the heart of her plays. Including an introduction by the translator and two essays by Ginzburg on her approach to the theatre, The Wrong Door adds a new dimension to the literary portrait of one of Italy's most significant modernist writers.

Genres: Canon

320 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

Wendell Ricketts was born on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,and raised in various small towns on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. He holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and has worked professionally as a translator from Italian since 1998. In addition to The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg (U. Toronto Press, 2008), an early version of which received the PEN American Center Renato Poggioli Prize for translation, he is the translator of Communicating Success: Public Relations with an Italian Flair; Olive Oil and the Mediterranean; Trilobites: The Back To The Past Museum Guide; Ferrara and its Bread: The History of a Culinary Masterpiece across Seven Centuries, and Twenty Cigarettes in Nasiriyah: A Memoir, among other publications. He has also translated four books as yet unpublished in English, including the novels Generations of Love (Matteo B. Bianchi) and Around Three O’Clock (Andrej Longo); his translations of excerpts from two recent Italian working-class novels appeared in World Literature Today in November 2013. From 1986 to 1996 he was theater and dance critic for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco, California, and his writing about literature, travel, politics, the media, and contemporary social issues have appeared in such publications as Contact Quarterly, The Advocate, Dance Ink, Marriage and Family Review, Spin, Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools, and 30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. His fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, modern words, and The Long Story. He is the author of What We Lost in the Fire & Other Stories (FourCats Press, 2022), Cards from the Basket: 307 Imaginative Writing Prompts to Spark the Creativity of Writers, Writing Teachers, Students — and Everyone! and editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life (2005) and of Blue, Too: More Writing by (for or about) Working Class Queers (2014).

Reviews

[Seingalt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of Ginzburg's plays I like especially (and have read more than once) Ti ho sposato per allegria, Paese di mare, L'intervista, and Il cormorano. In this hardcover, an excellent value, there's also a lovely prefatory note by Ginzburg herself, as well as an introduction, not pedantic and off-putting as such intros often are, by a professional critic.

Ginzburg's plays are also excellent learning aids for anyone studying Italian, as they are light and airy, on the surface at least, and such great fun to read that you forget you're learning (and of course you can really learn only when you don't realize that's what you're doing).