Anita Raja (born 1953) is an Italian translator and writer who has translated many literary works from German to Italian, including those of Christa Wolf, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, and many others. Raja has been suggested as a possible candidate for the Italian author writing under the pen name Elena Ferrante.[1][2][3][4] Since 2016, journalistic investigations and scholarly work analysing financial records and textual similarities have led to reports that the books published under the Ferrante name are the work of either Raja, Domenico Starnone (Raja's husband), or both. Starnone has strenuously denied being the author in the press and in his books, arguing that any similarities between his writing and Ferrante's are due to commonalities in subject matter and context.[5]

Early life and education

Anita Raja was born in 1953[6] in Naples, Italy, the daughter of Golda Frieda Petzenbaum and Renato Raja. Anita's German-born Polish-Jewish mother Petzenbaum was born in Worms, her family leaving Nazi Germany in 1937 for Italy.[7][2][3][8] She was raised in Rome.

Career

Raja has translated many literary works from German to Italian; authors of these works include Christa Wolf, Franz Kafka, The Brothers Grimm, Hermann Hesse, and Bertolt Brecht, as well as Ilse Aichinger, Irmtraud Morgner, Sarah Kirsch, Christoph Hein, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Veit Heinichen. In 2008, she received a German–Italian translator award. Raja has also written articles on Italian and German literature and on the problems of translation.

Investigations linking Raja and Elena Ferrante

In 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published the claim that Raja was the author behind the pen name Elena Ferrante, based on an investigation of the payments to Raja from a publisher commensurate with certain sales of books.[1][2][3][4]

In 2017, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele A. Cortelazzo of the University of Padova in Italy published the results of their research comparing the use of the Italian language by Elena Ferrante in the author's 7 published novels with a corpus of 150 novels published in Italian over the preceding 30 years.[5] The corpus included novels by 39 authors who were:

(i) associated with Campania, as culturally and linguistically representative of Ferrante's Naples,
(ii) suggested by other investigators to be "the true identity" of Ferrante,
(iii) publicly successful in Italy, as judged by literary prizes awarded or numbers of copies sold, and/or
(iv) critically acclaimed for the literary value of their work.[5]

Intentionally omitted from the corpus were Anita Raja's translations (as well as other works both satisfying and failing to satisfy these criteria).[5] The attempt by Tuzzi and Cortelazzo to "identify the similarities and differences between [Ferrante's] work and those of other authors" proceeded using methods of principal component analysis to map content between the two sets of works using "word tokens" from each, and then a quantitative linguistics method to establish "intertextual distance", based on the work of Cyril Labbé, to measure similarity between the novels in each set.[5] The scholars conclude their research by stating:

Amongst the authors included, Domenico Starnone, who has been previously identified by other investigations as the possible hand behind this pen name, is the author who has written novels most similar to those of Ferrante and which, over time, [have] become progressively more similar... in graphical representations of the measures of similarity, the novels of these two authors are almost inextricably intertwined... Of the thirty-nine authors that have been taken into consideration, Starnone is the only author who demonstrates clear-cut and consistent similarities with Ferrante.[5]

However, in qualifying the results of their research—qualifications only represented here in part—Tuzzi and Cortelazzo note among other unanswered questions that the Ferrante works might be "...the fruit of a clear sit-down project, a meeting of minds—and hands—that consequentially resulted in writing that is unique to drafting and editing methods", noting also that:

There is... the possibility that the author who hides behind the pen name Elena Ferrante has never been identified or taken into consideration, either in our research or in that of other scholars. It is also possible their only creative act has been the writing of the novels signed by Elena Ferrante; if he or she is a writer who has never written other novels under their real name, then we would be lacking the textual data necessary for comparison against the work produced by Elena Ferrante. In this case it would be practically impossible to identify the author.[5]

Starnone, for his part, has "strenuously denied all... hypotheses that implicate him as the... hand behind... Elena Ferrante", doing so in his interactions with the press and in his books, arguing that the two sets of novels (his and Ferrante's) display the alleged similarities because of their shared Neopolitan contexts, common historical settings, and similar types of families and experiences.[5] Thus, the alleged associations by Gatti and Tuzzi and Cortelazzo of Ferrante with Raja alone, Starnone alone, or Raja and Starnone together, from these financial and linguistic investigations—as of 2023, both from single primary sources and neither yet substantiated by others—is suggestive, but remains to be further investigated.[1][2][5]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Gatti, Claudio (2 October 2016). "Wer ist Elena F.?" [Who is Elena F.?]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ.net) (in German). pp. 41–42. Retrieved June 12, 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Gatti, Claudio (4 October 2016) [2 October 2016]. "Die Deutsche Spur" [The German Trail]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAZ.com) (in German). p. 11.
  3. 1 2 3 Gatti, Claudio (2 October 2016). "The Story Behind a Name". NYBooks.com. New York, NY: NYREV, Inc. Retrieved June 12, 2023.
  4. 1 2 Note, the three references to works by journalist Gatti are to three presentations of the same investigation, in three periodicals, and therefore constitute a single research observation (and not three independent ones). See the foregoing NYBooks.com citation, which bears the following disclaimer: "[T]he two-part investigation of Elena Ferrante by Claudio Gatti was undertaken on behalf of Mr. Gatti’s Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. After the Il Sole investigation was completed and definitely scheduled to appear on October 2 in Il Sole as well as in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and on the French website Mediapart, an English version of both articles was offered to the NYR Daily for publication on the same day. We regret any confusion about the origins of the Il Sole investigation and publication."
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tuzzi, Arjuna; Cortelazzo, Michele A. (September 2018) [19 January 2018]. "What is Elena Ferrante? A Comparative Analysis of a Secretive Bestselling Italian Writer" (PDF). Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press on behalf of The European Association for Digital Humanities. 33 (3): 685–702, esp. pp. 685-688, 691, 698. doi:10.1093/llc/fqx066. Retrieved June 12, 2023. [Quote, p. 698] Elena Ferrante stands out as having a linguistic profile that is clearly defined and undeniably peculiar. To what this individuality is due, is not clear. Is Elena Ferrante representative of a different genre? Is she the initiator of a new method of writing? Or is her work the fruit of a clear sit-down project, a meeting of minds—and hands—that consequentially resulted in writing that is unique to drafting and editing methods? We do not have an answer to these questions as they require further research—both quantitative and qualitative. / ... / Domenico Starnone, both in one of his books [citing citation 4 therein] and his interactions with the press, has strenuously denied all of the hypotheses that implicate him as the mysterious hand behind the pseudonym of Elena Ferrante. According to what Starnone (2011) wrote in his novel Autobiografia erotica di Aristide Gambìa [Erotic Autobiography of Aristide Gambìa] he and Ferrante are similar because they tell the stories of similar families, set in a context that is the fruit of their common experiences in Naples and of a precise period in history. But in truth, [Tuzzi and Cortelazzo continue] it is rather difficult to imagine that Starnone has not played any role in the planning and/or the drafting of Ferrante's work.
  6. ↑ Agencies and ToI Staff. "Is Elena Ferrante the child of a Holocaust survivor?". www.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 2023-08-31.
  7. ↑ Platthaus, Andreas (2 October 2016). "Die wahre Frau hinter Elena Ferrante". FAZ.net (in German).
  8. ↑ Werger, Gundula (19 January 2017). "Golda Petzenbaum". Der Freitag. p. 17.
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