Brian Robert Moore
Photo by Yuma Martellanz
Bio
Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator originally from New York City. His published and forthcoming translations from the Italian include Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza (Other Press), A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano (Pushkin Press), and You, Bleeding Childhood and Verdigris by Michele Mari (And Other Stories). His translations of shorter works have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Asymptote, Brick, the Nation, the Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2021 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature and was selected for a translation residency at the Casa delle Traduzioni in Rome. After receiving degrees from Brown University (BA in comparative literature and Italian studies) and Trinity College Dublin (MPhil in Irish writing), he worked for several years in Italian publishing, including as an editor of literary fiction in translation.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Italian of Paradise Overload by Walter Siti (b. 1947). Paradise Overload begins as an intense look at the Italian entertainment industry and the broader television universe, a subject that develops into a nearly all-encompassing lens through which Siti grapples with critical facets of modern Western society, including consumerism, physical and emotional desire, homosexuality and queerness, and questions of class and sociopolitical identity. A survey of the Italian book world published in the magazine L'Indiscreto revealed that Paradise Overload was widely regarded as the greatest Italian novel of the last two decades.
For a little over two years, I have been working full-time as a literary translator, and to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at this point in my career feels nothing short of life-changing. It is equally meaningful that the fellowship will allow me to translate a truly indispensable novel by Walter Siti, who more than any other author opened my eyes to the incredible vitality of 21st-century Italian writing. While Siti has won many of Italy’s top prizes, including the Strega, a list of accolades cannot do justice to the profound impact his work has had over time; it is no coincidence that in a survey taken of the Italian book world and published in the magazine L’Indiscreto in 2020, Paradise Overload was ranked the best Italian novel of the previous 20 years.
Though originally published in 2006, the book still proves incredibly timely and even prescient, not least in its depiction of the growing unreality of a society obsessed with reality television. A pioneering work for the now widely recognized genre of autofiction, Paradise Overload offers a critical perspective for today’s literary landscape, as Siti’s treatment of the self does not romanticize the author or succumb to moral posturing, but instead dramatizes the involvement and complicity of the individual in contemporary mediatic and consumerist systems. Indeed, as the character Walter Siti, caught in a professional and financial spiral, becomes infatuated with Marcello, a sex worker from the outskirts of Rome, he is forced to recognize in their transactional relationship both real tenderness—even love—and his own role as the quintessential consumer. Through using a narrative double, Siti conveys the modern individual’s struggle to arrive at true authenticity in a world that increasingly resembles a hall of mirrors, or rather, of monitors and screens.