Translating the World of 'Skylark Farm’

EDITOR'S NOTE: The New York Times named Skylark Farm to its Editor's Choices in February 2007.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Geoffrey Brock’s translation from Italian of the debut novel by Antonia Arslan, brings the story of her family’s struggle for survival in the Armenian genocide to the English-speaking world. The Kirkus Review calls Skylark Farm an “Armenian Schindler’s List.” The Bloomberg reviewer praised the “impressive subtlety” of Brock’s translation of Arslan’s “powerful account.”

Brock is assistant professor of creative writing and translation in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

In the prologue to her novel, Arslan remembers herself as a small child savoring the names of relatives who lived all over the world. She thinks of Arussiag in Beirut, Zareh in Aleppo, Nevart in Fresno and Michel in Copacabana as travelers.

In fact, they are among the few survivors from her family of the Armenian genocide of 1915, and she uses bits of memories to write a novel that tells their story and the story of those killed. Arslan grew up in Italy, the granddaughter of an Armenian who was living in Venice at the time of the genocide. The men and boys of his family back home in Anatolia were killed one night in May and buried beneath the tennis court of the family’s country house, Skylark Farm.

Brock, an award-winning translator of other Italian authors, seeks to recreate the literary experience of a work in translation. In the case of Arslan’s novel, even the translation of the title was a question. In Italian, the novel’s title is La Masseria delle Allodole.

“It was a difficult title to translate,” Brock said. “The word 'masseria’ refers to a kind of farm, though it isn’t the standard word for farm. And in the novel, it’s used specifically to refer to a house that presumably used to be a farmhouse but is now really a country house. I strongly considered The House of Skylarks as a title, but the phrase in Italian has a strong rustic overtone that I wanted to maintain.”

Acknowledging the many who helped reconstruct that tragic time, Arslan thanks “all the gentle, daydreaming Armenians who, in Milan and Rome and the world over, welcomed me and nourished me with ancient images and unforeseen kinship and gave me the gift of treasured memories.”

Brock noted that the novel has been very popular in Italy and is being made into a film by Italian directors, the Taviani brothers.

Brock received the 2006 Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association for his translations of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. In 2006, he also received the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine for his translation of a poem by Giovanni Pascoli. His current projects include an anthology of 20^th century Italian poetry, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a second collection of his own poems, tentatively called Voices Bright Flags.

The American edition of Skylark Farm is published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.