Ann Goldstein’s new English translation of Italian-Cuban author Alba De Céspedes' debut novel, There’s No Turning Back (Nessuna Torno Indietro, 1938), is the first since the novel – and contracts for further translations of its text – was banned by the Mussolini regime in 1941. Despite its initial critical and commercial success, the novel’s portrayal of eight young women living in a convent-run boarding house in Rome in the 1930s was judged ‘immoral’ by Fascist censors. It is the second De Céspedes novel to be translated by Goldstein, best-known for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.
Earlier this year, I spoke to Goldstein about the challenges and rewards of translating De Céspedes’ polyphonic novel, its antifascist aesthetics, the centrality of class and its incendiary portrayal of feminine desire. Speaking from her book-lined New York apartment, Goldstein tells me that she chose to translate There’s No Turning Back because of its intensity. It’s the sort of novel, she says, like Forbidden Notebook (the first De Céspedes' novel Goldstein translated) that pulls you in immediately. Indeed, from its first line, There’s No Turning Back propels the reader into the midst of daily life at the Grimaldi pensione-convent: ‘As the nun read the last words of the evening prayer, an indolent chorus of girls responded: “Amen”’.
This ‘indolent chorus’ constitutes the novel’s many protagonists, introduced to us first as an anonymised collective whose very silence is, as Goldstein translates De Céspedes’ text, ‘veined with impatience’. Their impatience is a reaction to the constraints of life lived within the convent’s walls. These young women, mostly in their twenties, have come to Rome to study, but their autonomy is strictly limited by the pensione-convent’s rules and regulations, lights out and curfew.
The Grimaldi boarding house stands in for the repressive, quasi-carceral structures of both the Italian Fascist state and the Catholic Church. Victoria de Grazia describes how ‘under fascism, women’s freedom to go out could be compared to the freedom reigning at the Pensione Grimaldi, a halfway house with fixed hours, closely watched group routines, and the structures of newly internalized conventions’. But the Grimaldi is not only a microcosm of Italy under Fascism: it is also a restless community of women, a city of women within a city.
This symbolic ambivalence plays out throughout the novel. One of the key reminders of the physical constraints under which these women live, as Goldstein points out, are the repeated descriptions of the convent’s many doors, locked against the outside world. There are scenes which dramatize the extent of the boarders’ entrapment – when Spanish Vinca pleads with the nuns to let her out after curfew on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, the doors are barred against her – as well as moments of subversion and escape. Yet the Grimaldi also offers these young women Woolfian rooms of their own or, as De Céspedes/Goldstein puts it, in the voice of the character Augusta, the unforgettable experience of living alone in the city, of ‘having had the key to our own room, going out and coming in when we want’ (93-4) – in daylight hours, at least. From that, there’s no turning back.
What drew Goldstein to De Céspedes in the first place? De Céspedes appears, Goldstein tells me, in a list of encouraging writers compiled by Elena Ferrante in her 2003 book Frantumaglia (also translated by Goldstein). Intrigued by the sound of Forbidden Notebook (Quaderno Proibito in Italian) in particular, Goldstein went hunting for copies of De Céspedes’ work but drew a blank. Despite De Céspedes’ immense popularity in 1940s-50s Italy, her books fell into obscurity and have only recently been reissued, first by Italian publisher Mondadori and now in a wave of new translations. Her novelistic preoccupations and themes clearly anticipate Ferrante’s: to read the opening chapters of Dalle parte di lei (Her Side of the Story, 1949) is to encounter a Roman version of the Neapolitan trilogy, written over sixty years before. There’s No Turning Back, too, is deeply rooted in 1930s Rome: the pensione on which the Grimaldi appears to be based, Goldstein tells me, can be found just below the Villa Medici, on the edge of the Borghese gardens. I go to visit next time I’m in the city. Down a steep-sided road draped in greenery, minutes from the Piazza di Spagna, the convent is tucked behind tall gates, narrow and shuttered, its coral bricks rising up into slender belltowers.
Goldstein observes that, again like Ferrante, De Céspedes’ writing has lots of plot, which makes you want to keep turning the page; but unlike Ferrante, and more like Natalia Ginzburg, the narrative is lean, the imagery evocative but minimal. Appropriately, perhaps, for an author who went on to pen an advice column in the 1950s, De Céspedes’ meditative plotlines weave themselves into frequent aphorisms, epitomised by ‘there’s no turning back’.
Her resurrection joins a renaissance of interest in mid-century Italian women writers, including Ginzburg, Marina Jarre and Luisa Adorno (whose work Goldstein is currently translating). While some of this can be attributed to the Ferrante effect, a larger recovery of women writers – many of whom, like Ginzburg and De Céspedes, were subject to Fascist persecution – is underway. Sometimes described as ‘forgotten’, De Céspedes might more accurately be fêted as Italy’s suppressed Ferrante.
A long and convoluted process, Goldstein tells me, led to the banning of There’s No Turning Back. Before the book was even published, De Céspedes was a subject of interest to the Fascist authorities, as Guido Bonsaver has discussed. In 1935, the police intercepted telephone calls made by De Céspedes in which she spoke ‘in derogatory tones’ about Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, which led, briefly, to her arrest. Only three years later, Nessuno Torna Indietro was published by Mondadori, the Italian publishing house closest to Mussolini which published much propaganda (Fascist leaflets, the pro-Fascist newspaper Il Secolo) on behalf of the regime. Despite this, Mondadori identified De Céspedes as a promising young author and the publication of There’s No Turning Back was accompanied by an intense publicity campaign. It won a prestigious Viareggio Prize in 1939 and reached its nineteenth reprint by 1940.
The reckoning came when De Céspedes sent a copy of her subsequent publication, a collection of short stories titled La Fuga (The Escape, 1940), to Mussolini’s private secretary. Mussolini himself read the first story and pronounced De Céspedes to be a ‘good but immoral writer’ – a verdict which appears to have sunk this first phase of her literary career. A month later, in January 1941, the Ministry of Popular Culture issued a directive to Mondadori banning further reprints and translation contracts for There’s No Turning Back. The wording of the directive strongly suggested that the order had come directly from Il Duce. A film adaptation of the novel was brought to an abrupt halt, and in August 1941, another directive sent to all Italian newspaper editors forbid them to publicize De Céspedes’ work. Production of the film, albeit with significant changes that excised major characters due to their ‘immoral’ behaviour, resumed in 1942, but it was never released. A year later, De Céspedes fled occupied Rome to join the Allies in the South, where she worked as a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. Her literary career would not resume until after the war and the fall of Fascism.
Yet There’s No Turning Back (unlike, for instance, Her Side of the Story) is not an overtly political novel. As with De Céspedes’ later novel Forbidden Notebook, the defining political events of the era remain a shadowy backdrop to its protagonists’ daily lives. The plotline of one of the major characters, a Spanish woman called Vinca, centres around her on-off relationship with her boyfriend Luis. Not long into the novel, Luis goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and we gradually glean that he (and presumably she) are on the side of the Nationalists (and of fascism). In passing, we also learn that Luis, an architecture student, is an advocate of Rational architecture – an architectural movement sponsored by Mussolini’s Fascist regime. But such details are fleeting and incidental to the narrative.
For Goldstein, the subversive force of the novel lies in its portrayal of the intertwined daily lives of eight young women who in diverse ways transgress the gender norms imposed by the Fascist regime. The figure of the sposa e madre esemplare exalted by Fascist discourse and propaganda is notable in her absence: only one character, Anna, gets married and only one, Emanuela, is a biological mother, and the latter’s attitude towards (single) motherhood is troubled and conflicted. De Céspedes articulates this inner conflict in terms that challenge pro-natalist Fascist ideals and policy.
Emanuela is ‘repulsed by the idea of carrying inside herself a creature that was taking her blood, that was growing inside her in spite of herself, was master of her life even before it was born’ (64) and envisages a spontaneous abortion. Other characters forego marriage and motherhood in favour of scholarship, writing or the luxury lifestyle of a high-class escort. The array of non-normative femininities presented, from the intellectual to the promiscuous, constitutes the novel’s power and its threat.
Any straightforward characterisation of There’s No Turning Back as feminist, however, is troubled by what Goldstein defines as De Céspedes’ characteristic ambivalence. Just as the Grimaldi acts as both prison and community, her protagonists practice various forms of subversion without achieving true emancipation. One character, Xenia, runs away from both the convent and her impoverished background after failing her exams and achieves a form of independence, or social mobility at least, by becoming a rich man’s mistress. But her story is not one of feminist enlightenment; her freedom is radically circumscribed by her financial dependence on an older man.
Then there is the character Augusta, a Sardinian woman who aspires to be an author, who issues a full-throated critique of ‘the tyranny of man’ and calls for the emancipation of women. To her classmate Emanuela, she seems to be ‘preaching a new religion’ (195) founded around a Christine de Pisan-like city of women. Yet Augusta spends all her time writing bad love stories ‘like filet lace’ (94) which are continually rejected by literary magazines. The oldest of the novel’s protagonists, she appears doomed to remain unpublished, scribbling away in her sequestered room at the Grimaldi. If, Goldstein suggests, all the characters represent aspects of De Céspedes herself, this is a grim portrayal of the fate of the woman writer. And towards the end of the novel, Augusta’s violent reaction to the discovery of Emanuela’s illegitimate child implies an immiseration in patriarchal values and a conservative morality, despite her emancipatory aspirations. ‘De Céspedes’, says Goldstein, ‘is very good at writing characters that are not stereotypes.’
Ambivalence is inscribed, too, into De Céspedes’ daring treatment of feminine desire. In one of the novel’s most astonishing scenes, the character Valentina slowly, autoerotically asphyxiates herself in front of a mirror. It’s incredible, Goldstein says, to think that De Céspedes was writing, in the 1930s, what is essentially a female masturbation scene. Translating this passage, which is almost stream-of-consciousness in style, was tricky at times: getting the positions of the body right, for instance, and deciding how to render granular detail. In Goldstein’s delicate translation, Valentina runs ‘her lips over her wrists: the skin was salty’ (247). Through Valentina, we encounter a very De Céspedian articulation of the unsaid: ‘Did the others do this, in their rooms? […] certainly no one had sweet, stupefying dreams like hers’. Despite her bold embodiment of feminine desire, however, there is no happy ending to Valentina’s story. One of several protagonists to have grown up in Italy’s impoverished South, she does not break free of her circumstances like her closest peer, Xenia; and when her fellow Puglian, Anna, the daughter of a landowner, receives a proposal of marriage, Valentina can only look on in bitter envy. Her erotic fantasies, which feature an orientalised ‘Indian prince’ but also carnivalesque scenarios which invert her social position with Anna’s, become her refuge, but they do not set her free.
Written only a few years after Virgina Woolf’s The Waves (1931), with its highly experimental chorus of narrators, There’s No Turning Back anticipates more explicitly feminist narratives such as Luisa Passerini’s collective Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (1996). Passerini’s collaborative book project adopts a collage-like approach which intersperses oral history interviews with diary entries to record a web of subjectivities. De Céspedes’ collective, fictionalised biography similarly creates a montage-like effect to articulate the simultaneous inextricability and profound separateness of her protagonists’ lives. We can think of There’s No Turning Back as the autobiography of another generation, Italian women who came of age in the 1930s, whose many voices defy the monologic discourse of the day, whether Mussolinian or religious.
Was it a challenge, I ask Goldstein, to move between the different narrative threads or voices of There’s No Turning Back, which sometimes weave tightly together, chorus-like, and at other times (especially with, for example, Xenia’s story) strike out on their own? The main challenge, Goldstein found, was to keep track of whose story was being told when; at times the narration switches abruptly, from impulsive Vinca to scholarly Silvia, or from daring Xenia to the more conventional Anna. A scene during which Vinca, Luis and their Spanish friends share news of atrocities from Spain splices suddenly, even abruptly, into Silvia’s perspective and a very different scene: a lecture by the professor who is both her mentor and the object of her desire. Moving swiftly between Vinca’s and Silvia’s innermost thoughts, De Céspedes achieves a polyphonic form of free indirect discourse. As Goldstein points out, the third person narration creates a layer of distance but it’s an unobtrusive voice which often dips out of sight.
It is this polyphonic narration that enables De Céspedes to grapple with the questions of class that are so central, as Goldstein stresses, to the novel. Through the central characters, we traverse the whole of Italy, from the impoverished South to the wealthy North. Room 63 smells of the dried figs sent to Silvia from her home in Calabria; the girls drink wine from Anna’s farm in Puglia at Christmas; Xenia’s parents mortgage their vineyard in Lazio to pay for her studies; Emmanuela is the product of a wealthy Florentine upbringing. The convent itself, Goldstein observes, is a strangely classless space where difference is suspended, and young women from wealthier and poorer backgrounds come into close contact, in what is almost a social experiment in the tenacity of class difference. Early on, De Céspedes articulates Emanuela’s illusion of commonality within the walls of the Grimaldi. ‘The conviction that her life was similar to that of the others’ (13) is reinforced by the superficial uniformity imposed by the convent (no lipstick, low heels, modest dress) as well as the close-knit group of literature students who absorb her into their daily rhythms and nightly meetings.
But the moment the protagonists go back out into the outside world, class difference resumes in full force. There is some class mobility, or even wealth redistribution: working-class Xenia’s escape is funded by upper-class Emanuela’s stolen engagement ring; Silvia studies her way to financial independence thanks to her professor, who recognises her intellectual gifts and offers her a position (although not the romantic connection she craves). Valentina hopes her association with middle-class Anna might elevate her in the eyes of Southern community where she grew up, but this does not come to pass.
The intersection of gender by class is always present in De Céspedes’ rendering of what Goldstein terms the ‘negative picture of the constraints women face’. The material conditions that shape these characters’ lives form part of the fabric of the text. At a café in Milan, Xenia carefully adds up the cost of her dinner, item by item, and concludes that she must eat less tomorrow. Even within the convent, the ‘lights out at ten’ rule only applies to the poorer boarders. Those who pay more, like Milly and Emanuela, are not forced to study by candlelight. Asked in an interview from 1980 about her relationship with feminism, De Céspedes responds that she has always fought not only for women but for all oppressed classes or conditions (27:42).
The community of young women at the Grimaldi is then a community held together, paradoxically, by difference. The friendships which form at the Grimaldi, cutting through class and regional boundaries, are brittle and provisional. They do not endure, Goldstein notes, beyond the walls of the convent. During one of the group discussions that unfolds in one or other of the protagonists’ rooms, Silvia suggests that theirs is a default, rather than a chosen, community of women (173) and characterises the Grimaldi as a bridge, a meeting point, from which all their paths will diverge. This is an apt description of De Céspedes’ narrative arc, which bends from the early togetherness of her protagonists, holed up together in room 63 after lights out, to their gradual dispersal across the city and beyond it.
Relationships between women are central to the novel, but – again anticipating Ferrante – this is no idealisation of female friendship. ‘“The only solid bond”, as Augusta has it, is ‘“sharing the same illusion”’ (256). That illusion shatters on contact with reality – for instance, the revelation that Emanuela has been concealing her reasons for being at the Grimaldi, her class status, and her illegitimate child from the others. Crucially, it is not the social transgression represented by the illegitimate child to which Augusta and the others object: it is Emanuela’s secrecy, her failure to make herself fully known, to confide in those who confided in her. This revelation marks the climax of the novel, and acts as an exposition of its title. The conclusion Emanuela draws from her exile from the group is that there is no way to begin again, that ‘life goes forward, the past accumulates behind us, the acts, the gestures carried out, form a wall, make a dike’ (274). There’s no turning back.
To honour the fundamental ambivalence and the non-closure of De Céspedes’ writing, Goldstein bases her approach to translation around that of Primo Levi. In the preface to his 1983 translation of Kafka’s The Trial, Levi describes translation as a process of becoming entangled with the very fabric of the text while resisting the temptation to untangle those knots and ‘correct’ the original. Resisting the urge to untangle narrative knots and contradictions seems key to the project of translating There’s No Turning Back, with its many ambivalences. De Céspedes offers no neat resolution to her reader. The book ends with Emanuela setting off from Naples on a cruise ship, embracing the autonomy her wealth affords while sailing towards unknown shores.
Goldstein is now translating De Céspedes’ radio broadcasts from her time spent working for the Resistance. As I read There’s No Turning Back, I realised that the name De Céspedes adopted for her radio personality – Clorinda – is taken from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581). Clorinda, a warrior woman who dies in battle, makes a brief appearance via Silvia’s life story in There’s No Turning Back, as if foreshadowing its author’s own future. De Céspedes’ decision to revivify the fictional Clorinda, giving her new life as an anti-fascist voice on the radio, is significant. Even before her work became the subject of Fascist censure, De Céspedes recognised the disruptive power of articulating the unspoken. Towards the end of the novel Emanuela denounces a ‘sense of morality [that] consisted in silence: in keeping others from speaking […] that had no basis other than universal dissemination of similar lies’ (266-67). As De Céspedes knew all too well, a Fascist ‘morality’ was fabricated through censorship and suppression. After the regime suppressed her writing, the radio enabled her to speak. Through the work of Goldstein and others, her violation of a Fascist ‘morality’ speaks to us across the decades.