Ilan Stavans pays tribute to the late Frederika Randall, acclaimed translator of Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God and forthcoming Bug.
My last email to Frederika Randall turned out to have been written a few days before she died. I knew she was ill. We talked about the anthology in which writers from around the globe reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic, about the perils and benefits of social distancing, and about despair.
She had sent me an essay about it. I said to her that I was seeing the calamity through Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Frederika and I never met. My first contact with her had been just a few years prior, when a friend brought to my attention a fragment she had translated of Giacomo Satori’s novel, I Am God. It was an exhilarating piece of writing and I was automatically taken by it. I appreciated her terse yet forceful translation style. Her presence as a translator seemed to me to be behind every word—even in the spaces between words—but she had also managed to “disappear” as a translator.
Somebody had told me Frederika was “a translator of the unsaid.”
I asked her to send me the entire novel. I gave her a contract. The book came out in 2019. It was a runaway success.
We then talked about other work by Sartori she was eager to translate.
Her essay in the anthology is titled “Augury.” Broadly speaking, it’s about birds and what they notice while Rome in in quarantine. But it’s also about humans thinking beyond “our sapiens-centric world, imagining one more multispecied.” She wrote to me: “Thanks for the opportunity to write this. Perhaps because I am neither very young or very healthy, I don't find the personal danger of COVID-19 or sacrifice in isolation measures as onerous as some do. So I wrote about another thing that's been on my mind during these weeks.”
In that last email, I told Frederika that I would use, as chapter titles for the book, various lines by Dante that are among my favorite: “A mighty flame follows a tiny spark,” “The path to paradise begins in hell,” “I’m not alone in misery,” “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” and “Love insists the loved loves back.” I also told her that, as an epigraph, I would use the last lines of Inferno:
Lo duca e io per quel cammino ascoso
intrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo;
e sanza cura aver d’alcun riposo,
salimmo su, el primo e io secondo,
tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle
che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
I mentioned—or I think I mentioned—how, when I was young, Borges was my Virgil in crisscrossing the Inferno. On the bus in Mexico City, I would read “The Aleph” and his Nueve ensayos dantescos (1982) alongside the Italian original.
And then I told Frederika I would use the last line of the Inferno as the title of the anthology.
I sent her several English translations of it, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s stilted “Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars” (1867). We laughed about it.
I don’t remember how, in successive days, we came to “And We Came Outside Again and Saw the Stars.”
Frederika wrote back immediately: “I hate to be a nit-picker, but the title And We Came Outside Again and Saw the Stars bothers me somewhat. The point is not that he comes out again, but that he SEES THE STARS again. I know a few have translated it as you have it, but it doesn't make much sense (why do we care if he came outside again?) and I THINK it was done for PURELY metrical reasons. I really think you lose something without that beautiful coda, with its suggestions of heaven, eternity, the universe, “and saw the stars again.”
Strategically moving the word “again”—“And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again”—was a masterful stroke. Only someone with a knowledge of language like hers, at once precise and passionate, could rearrange the universe so exquisitely.