Dario Ferrari crosses the Atlantic with Playtime is Over
Seán McDonagh receives the PEN Grant to translate La ricreazione è finita, a novel of university life and Italian political memory.
Dario Ferrari’s La ricreazione è finita is moving towards a new English-language life. PEN America has awarded Seán McDonagh the $5,000 Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature for his project Playtime is Over. The novel follows a student who almost accidentally enters a doctoral programme and becomes absorbed in the biography of an intellectual connected to Italy’s Years of Lead. According to the judges, McDonagh’s translation preserves the book’s shifts between humour, tenderness, suspense and moral responsibility. The grant supports completion of the work and its path towards English-language readers. Across the same edition, PEN America distributed a total of $90,000 to sixteen writing and translation projects whose recipients come from more than twelve countries.