Virginia Ivaldi

My grandmother’s farm, now abandoned. August 2019

but I only want to write. I can write and write with someone else’s voice, as possessed, enthusiastic, using anyone’s text, whatever material.

I am an Italian writer based in London and living in translation. My writing has been featured in SPAM Magazine, NY Times Modern Love, Entropy Magazine, and Mashable. I have collaborated on projects with the British Bilingual Poetry Collective and currently with Dog Section Press and DOPE Magazine.

Prior to study at the RCA I graduated the BA History of Art programme from Goldsmiths University of London.

Two crying faces and twisting tongues.
An extract

A translated sentence. A detail hidden in a word left ashore.

The sound of a mother’s voice echoing in an empty home. A man learning his partner’s language. My grandmother learning English. Tongue twisting together, salivating (mis)understandings - kisses that generate languages.

I want to produce texts that function like paths - paths backwards and forwards, that diverge from and run along people’s voices. Starting from a word, a sentence, a poem, a language I write in search of ________. I don’t write to critique, but to echo and expand voices.

Throughout my time at the RCA I have used translation as a mode to explore and develop my writing through analysis and story telling that spark from the act of picking words.

My final major project, HOME in Italian is CASA, is a collection of essays that explore the condition of speaking and living in a second language. Each essay was conceived as a love letter to a member of the narrator’s family, her therapist, and lovers. Starting by assessing translation as a mode of reconciliation, the practice of translation (or talking about translation) opens up questions of privilege, class, trauma, and grief. The texts present some of the most important Italian writers and poets of the XX century — Sibilla Aleramo, Elena Ferrante, Amelia Rosselli, and Alda Merini. HOME in Italian is CASA is a quest for Home contained in the act of reading and writing through love, trauma, and loneliness.

Here I present excerpts from my FMP, HOME in Italian is CASA, the essay Notes on a first attempt at translating poetry, a Translation Manifesto, and a short story The Bubble, all texts produced for the Writing programme.

Content warning: sexual abuse, medicalisation, references to death and suicide.

Warning: This section contains mature or explicit content.

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HOME in Italian is CASA is a collection of essays that explore the condition of speaking and living in a second language. Each essay was conceived as a love letter to a member of the narrator’s family, her therapist, and lovers. Starting by assessing translation as a mode of reconciliation, the practice of translation (or talking about translation) opens up questions of privilege, class, trauma, and grief. The texts present some of the most important Italian writers and poets of the XX century, Sibilla Aleramo, Elena Ferrante, Amelia Rosselli, and Alda Mer- ini, but also works along writers such as Cheryl Strayed (Wild and “Dear Sugar”) and Adrienne Rich (The Dream of Common Language). HOME in Italian is CASA is a quest for Home contained in the act of reading and writing through love, trauma, and loneliness.

NOTES ON A FIRST ATTEMPT AT TRANSLATING POETRY

In the attempt of translating Amelia Rosselli’s poem, I have paid endless attention to her words which, after a while, started mingling with English terms, memories and history until the text became a dense treacle, a stream of consciousness that explores the themes of leaving and languages.

confession diary italian poetry translation

The Bubble is a short story, a response to an encounter with the Warburg Institute’s photographic collection. Exploring the Magic and Science > Science Technology & Medicine > Pregnancy and Midwifery archive, The Bubble asks other questions of the unfamiliar, transforming a placenta into a wall and later into a window through which to see a new world.

More info about the project here

medicine midwifery pregnancy science-fiction

This translation manifesto was the introduction to a collaborative pamphlet. The contents of the pamphlet were generated through a series of five workshops, each led by a member of the group.

The etymology of translation suggests something being ‘carried across’ – we are interested in what can be carried across; from where, and to where. This pamphlet is about the seductive space between meaning and understanding, its capacity to illuminate, erode, animate. Our pamphlet is less about cross-language exchanges, and more about trying to speak to one-another, more about celebrating language’s failure, more about play, transference and regeneration. We would like to give you this, from our hands to yours.