Slavist and cult author Serena Vitale shares stories on life and Russian culture

If you pin the more generic term «intellectual» to her, she is aghast and inwardly sends you to hell. «I just happen to be a person who writes» she says, to those who try to define her. In addition to having no rivals in literary translations from Russian, and an academic career that has produced hordes of adoring Alumni - «the cuvée of Naples: outstanding students» -, Serena Vitale is the author of cult books, and novels even though they are not real novels, and created a substantial group of followers around her name. Il bottone di Puškin, La casa di ghiaccio, A Mosca, a Mosca! Il defunto odiava i pettegolezzi are just some of her must-have titles.

When we ask her whether she prefers to translate or to write, her answer is, «If it’s a question of Mandelstam, then I would prefer to translate». Osip Mandelstam drove her to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day. The responsibility is to be shared between the victim poet of the Stalinist purges and Roberto Calasso, owner and Managing editor of Adelphi, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago. He had insisted that Serena take on a new translation of Conversation about Dante. «I’m not a writer, I’m more like an archivist», she says to complete her own portrait. «I’m a factualist. For example, I wrote a book about Mayakovsky, Il defunto odiava i pettegolezzi. When I started to study him, I realized that he was a helpless person, like a kitten, and I said to myself, ‘Now who shall I leave it to?’, and I was compelled to work on this sort of investigation». I ask her which authors she prefers to translate. «Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky». Why doesn’t she throw in Tsvetaeva? «Because I feel it’s bad luck». Because of her wretched life, a sampler of the horrors of the Stalin era? «Because she’s great but I guess she brings bad luck to me. I keep away from her now. Every time I’ve picked up Tsvetaeva either a shelf fell on me, an earthquake came, or I twisted my leg.

It’s possibly self-identification, but by now my Tsvetaeva phase has passed. I was completely absorbed: she was amazing but able to destroy people». But how did Serena Vitale’s prodigious literary career begin? Yes, of course, the basics, the outstanding high school in Brindisi and an uncle with an extensive library, but then she met Angelo Maria Ripellino, a university professor of Russian language and literature, and the author of the unforgettable Magic Prague. It was at his home that Serena Vitale met her first husband, the poet Giovanni Raboni. «Ripellino, my teacher, possessed all the beauty of a Sicilian baron. Most elegant, he would prepare his lectures at length, and was quite a charmer. We were desperate when the lectures ended. Moving away from him, going to Milan, was crucial for me. The fascination with both the person and his writing were such that I would have become a useless replicant. The last time I met him he was in bed, near death, talking in all kinds of languages, speaking in tongues: French, Greek, Ancient Greek, Turkish... I was speechless».

Serena Vitale also owes her passion for Czech literature, and for Prague, to Ripellino, as well as for meeting her third husband, the painter Vladimír Novák. An amazing story as only she could have, of a love interrupted by the invasion of the troops of the Warsaw Pact in ‘68 and magically resumed (precisely, Magic Prague), after the Velvet Revolution, in 2000. In 1966, Serena Vitale had begun to visit Prague for summer courses taught by Ripellino’s students. «I have met the best Czech writers, and at one point even Kundera: he lived in a narrow alley in the city center across from the secret police. He had already been harassed. I asked him, ‘How come, Milan, you live right here?’ And he said, ‘They spy on me and I spy on them’. This was his type. He was fond of mystification and rumor has it that when he got married for the second time he sent a friend in his place and he acted as a witness. He now lives in Paris but is unreachable, he deleted himself as if he had used an eraser, he wants nothing further to be known about him. I know that he has secretly returned to the Czech Republic, where he is not very popular, whereas they adore Havel, who spent five years in prison. They find it hard to understand Kundera, they struggle to understand him». Out of his books, which one do you prefer? «Farewell Waltz, which I translated. It is constructed in a perfect way: a four-part composition, a quartet». It is impossible not to ask Serena Vitale about her second husband, the charming Dmitri Nabokov, the only son of Vladimir and his wife Vera Slonim. She downplays: «On paper only, we were married for three years: a wedding in Las Vegas, it must have been ‘92 or ‘93. You walk into a room, the wedding march starts, the first passerby is picked up as a witness. Mostly I was curious, I wanted to experience the Vegas wedding movie scene». Yes, and he was also very handsome, and an opera singer, a race car driver, and a multilingual translator of his father’s books: «But even after seeing Pasternak’s son I would have kissed his feet.

I rang the door, he answered it, and he was exactly like his father, dressed like him. I suffer from this, from falling in love with a man of literature. Dmitri was also the portrait of his father. I met him when I went to see him to review the translation of The Gift. He lived in the villa that had belonged to his mother, in Montreux. For as long as Vladimir had been alive, he and Vera had lived in the hotel. Nabokov used to say that when one reaches a certain age, either the servants are the same as the ones in childhood, or else a hotel is better. There was nothing going on in Montreux. There was only the Jazz festival and the people you would run into on the street and they would say ‘Bonjour, Madame’ or ‘Bon après-midi, Madame’, or ‘Bonsoir, Madame’. A deadly bore. Dmitri had a love for Ferraris. He had raced and burned the top of his head in an accident. When I was in Montreux to oversee the translations, after twenty minutes he would get a scowl on his face and say, ‘Serena I can’t take it anymore’. Whereas the yachts and the sea... We went to Sardinia together, but not on a yacht as I would have liked, it was a prototype which could explode at any moment». Serena Vitale is always amazing. Before she leaves us, she has a question for me: «What’s the song you like the most right now?» I think about it and answer, «Musica leggerissima». «Colapesce and Dimartino! Delicious. I always listen to it before going to bed... But they made a terrible mistake». Oh God, which one, I hadn’t noticed: «deafening silence». I intended to write to him, how can you use such a predictable oxymoron?». Damn, ever since she told me that, I’ve been wanting to write to the two of them myself. Please change the lyrics! Hire Serena Vitale!

Biography

Serena Vitale was born in Brindisi in 1945, a student of Angelo Maria Ripellino, she taught Russian language and literature in a number of Italian universities, including the University of Naples «L’Orientale» and the Università Cattolica in Milan, from 1971 to 2015. She was married to the poet Giovanni Raboni, to Dmitri Nabokov and, from2003, to the Czech painter Vladimír Novák. Through her translations or curations, she has dealt with authors such as Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Brodsky. Her narrative texts are published by Mondadori and Adelphi. Currently she is working on a book about a famous trial held in Russia in the 20th century.