Speakers
Mary Norris
Key note speaker
A New Yorker and a Roman team up to solve some of the problems that arise when a book on English grammar is translated into Italian.
First hurdle: the title. In English, Between You and Me is both a grammar lesson and an idiom for a confidential conversation, and it has no precise equivalent in Italian. What is the point of a paragraph about the so-called Oxford comma in a culture where it is not taught? What is the relative weight of a hyphen in English as opposed to Italian? Mary Norris and Costanza Rizzacasa-d’Orsogna became friends after Rizzacasa reviewed Norris’s book for the Corriere della Sera (in Italian). The attempted translation leads to insights into both languages.
Mary Norris is a writer and longtime copy editor at The New Yorker. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” (2015), based on her experience at the magazine, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor, and “Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen” (2019), about her pursuit of Greek and Greece, which was longlisted for the 2021 Runciman Award. She has made a series of videos on language, under the title “Comma Queen,” for The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in that magazine and on its Web site (newyorker.com) and in the New York Times and the TLS, among other publications. Her books have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian. She is a perennial student of Italian. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Norris lives in New York City with a big bruiser of a cat named Rocco.
Constanza will be joining Mary Norris for her presentation.
Costanza Rizzacasa-d'Orsogna graduated with honors from Columbia University in 1997, with a degree in writing. After spending several years in New York City, she moved back to Italy, her native country, in 2004, and is currently based in Rome, where she works as a writer and an editor for la Lettura, Corriere della Sera's weekly literary supplement (Corriere is Italy's leading daily newspaper), covering American literature and culture. In 2018, Ms. Rizzacasa published her first fiction, "Storia di Milo, il gatto che non sapeva saltare" (Milo, the cat who couldn't jump), a children's book on disability and racism that was reprinted internationally for the Thai and Korean markets and it's being translated into other languages. In January 2020, Ms. Rizzacasa published her first novel, "Non superare le dosi consigliate" (Do not exceed recommended dosage), which deals with eating disorders and addiction and was one of the most talked-about books of the year in Italy. During her time at Columbia, Ms. Rizzacasa revived one of the oldest student publications of the University, serving as an editor and later as editor-in-chief and receiving the Dean's Citation for outstanding contribution. Her poetry was published in The Columbia Review. Ms. Rizzacasa's new children's book, "Storia di Milo 2", will be out in September. Her new novel will be published in 2022.