On dark days, days when she thought there was really nothing important to be done, she had the impression that for women like herself, the world might just keep shrinking down until it was small enough to fit into a shopping list. And then everything would seem to contract, to the point where she couldn’t breathe any more, as if the walls and the ceiling were closing in on her…
Jennifer Panek
JENNIFER PANEK is an associate professor of early modern drama in the English department at the University of Ottawa; she translates from the Italian for the sheer joy of it. Her translation of Danilo Balestra's novel Tirati a Sorte (The Luck of the Draw) was published by Atene Edizioni in 2019. The story she translated just before this one couldn’t be more different from it: a laugh-out-loud hilarious excerpt from Sandro Veronesi’s Terre Rare can be found in the Fall 2022 issue of American Chordata.
