Olta's Summer

Date of Graduation

5-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Brock, Geoffrey A.

Committee Member

DuVal, John T.

Second Committee Member

Viswanathan, Padma

Keywords

Translation; Creative Writing

Abstract

Olta’s Summer is the most recent work (Gallimard, May 2018) from Albanian author Ornela Vorpsi, who was born in Albania in 1968 and emigrated to Italy in the 1990s, escaping a communist society in which her family was blacklisted as political dissenters. She later moved to Paris, where she has lived for more than 20 years. She has published seven novels, five in Italian and two in French. Her first novel, The Country Where No One Ever Dies, was translated by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck and published in 2009 by Dalkey Archive Press, but none of her works have been brought into English since. What follows here is my translation of Olta’s Summer. The novel tells the story of seven-year-old Olta Toptani, a Tirana native growing up in the 1970s, when Albania is shifting its allegiances from Khrushchev’s increasingly Westerning Soviet Union to the hard-line socialist politics of Mao Zedung’s China. Olta’s family becomes caught up in political turmoil when her father, Arshi, disappears one night without a trace. Unable to trust the police, the family stews in their suspicions, and Olta’s mother Veronika becomes manic in her habits and her hand-wringing, often cruel to Olta and helpless in the face of her husband’s mysterious absence. Eventually, the family learns that Arshi has been arrested as an enemy of the communist party, and has been sent to Spaç, a notoriously brutal reeducation camp high in the Albanian mountains. Vorpsi’s work invites meditation on a country, region, and people whose perspective is often absent from global conversations on history and politics, despite the large role Albania played in the tensions between China and the USSR during the Cold War. And amid this large-scale setting, she also asks the reader to connect with her characters on a more personal level, examining the intricacies of family life and the loyalties we feel toward others, including those individuals and institutions who rule over us and make us afraid.

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