In her autobiographical novel Lessico Familiare (Family Lexicon), the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg recounts the tendency of her relatives to believe themselves to be poets and politicians, and to believe, therefore, that “everything could be transformed into poetry and words”. This was a delusion; language can be empty, or misleading, or full of conceit. “It was necessary for writers to go back and choose their words, scrutinise them to see if they were false or real, if they had actual origins in our experience,” Ginzburg wrote, almost by way of a veritable manifesto for her own rich and unsparing body of work.

The writer Gini Alhadeff – who newly translated two short and potent essays by Ginzburg for Equator – remembers reading Lessico Familiare as a teenager. Here, she recounts the intersections of Ginzburg’s life and writing with her own.

Gini Alhadeff

I think I was 13 and in a small messy room overlooking a pond in Tokyo when I first held Lessico Familiare in my hands and began to discover, slowly, that you could make something of all the languages, the linguistic tics, of a family as steeped in them as Natalia’s, and ours, was. The novel, largely inspired by her own childhood, is unforgettable in part because of how the different members of her family speak – the expressions they invent, and the language they use, which is idiosyncratically made to measure.

I remember the cover clearly. The books published by Einaudi had white slip-jackets, and a window on the cover with an image, usually a painting. In this instance it was a watercolour by Cesare Segre of a young woman seen from the back and lying horizontally across the centre of the cover, her head slightly turned in our direction, her long russet hair tied in a ponytail by a wide ribbon. She wore a green-and-white striped shirt with billowing sleeves and looked nothing like Natalia, who had black hair and wore it cut radically short around a face of unavoidable forthrightness. But I didn’t know that at the time. I fell in love with Natalia’s voice. If I’ve ever learned anything about writing, that was when I began to do so.

Much later I put together some pieces of the puzzle: how had this book reached me? The answer was via Turin, where Natalia worked as an editor for years at Einaudi, along with Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. They published a great deal of American literature back then, and I think that was how their Italian had shed some of its ornament and beautiful complication. It was somewhat American in Italian.

I am told that in Alexandria, where we lived, I interpreted for my mother from Arabic but was mostly brought up by an aunt whose first language was French. I’d had to learn Italian properly at the age of six when our family left Egypt for Italy, and then suddenly a few years later had to learn English when we left Italy for Tokyo. Like many stranded young Jewish men in the aftermath of the war, my father had been hired by Olivetti, the famed manufacturer of typewriters and calculators, and was entrusted with bringing its products to Japan. Because Olivetti was based in Ivrea, which was near Turin, he came into contact with intellectuals and architects who were also being hired by the company. (I recall that the head of personnel, for instance, was himself a brilliant novelist.) And that’s how I imagine the book with the watercolor on its front cover entered our world, along with many other Einaudi titles.

Later, I came to know Natalia’s own life story: a long exile in Abruzzo during the war, a husband tortured to death in prison. The brilliance of her writing has to do with the way she soars over vast areas of dereliction and grief from an almost angelic altitude. Seeing without dwelling. A swiftness for which we might have her mother to thank. Towards the end of her life, as she collected her writings for an anthology, Natalia declared in the preface that her short novel, The Road to the City, which she considered one of her best, and one in which she said she had invented nothing, had been written trying above all not to bore her mother, who often found books unnecessarily long and dreary. Natalia surveyed suffering at a distance, removed from herself.

Another formidable artist, Leonora Carrington, told me decades ago in Mexico City, that in times of anguish she would “put another head” above her suffering head which would be above the anguish and free of it. Natalia had that second head from the moment she put pen to paper. To her own suffering head, she gave no voice. But as you’ll see from the following texts, she gave voice to the suffering of others.

Every so often, the Equator team will recommend the five best things they’ve read (or re-read) in the past week or two. Today: building love out of antagonism; bulldozing Baghdad; a classic profile of “Im the Dim”; our sharpest analyst of caste; and the secret history of Indian science fiction.

• It is still hard to believe that Asad Haider, one of the most brilliant young Marxist intellectuals of his generation, the co-founder of Viewpoint magazine, and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (2018), is no longer with us. Haider died on 4 December, and since then I’ve been returning to his essays and was reminded of his bracing moral clarity when re-reading “When the Cry Rings Out” (2017), which weaves together numerous intellectual and spiritual threads – from Jewish ethical traditions and Marxist poetry to the raw energy of airport protests – to show that our liberation is always linked to the liberation of others. By moving beyond “pet ideologies” and embracing the “joy of disobedience,” Haider rendered a specific political moment into a timeless call for an egalitarian world where no one is a stranger. — Gavin Jacobson

• Walter Benjamin famously remarked that Eugene Atget photographed the streets of Paris as if they had been the scene of a crime. For the Iraqi writer and photographer Nabil Salih, born in Baghdad, who called a recent exhibition “A Requiem for Baghdad: Postcards from a Crime Scene,” there is no “as if”. His hometown was scarred by one of this century’s great criminal operations. In this new dispatch, he charts the government's $100 billion programme to redevelop the city – ostensibly to ease traffic and “encourage private investment” – which has produced “a polluted, anti-human playground where practically no green space has been left un-privatized.” — Jonathan Shainin

• I wind up rereading Aatish Taseer’s classic profile of the former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan at least twice a year since its 2019 publication, but it’s probably been more frequent of late, since Khan has been so much in the news. The on-the-record quotes Taseer gets about “Im the Dim” (“as he has long been known in London circles”) are really beyond belief: “You might say he’s a duffer; you might say he’s a buffoon.” (The source is his ex-wife.) It’s the gold standard, to me, for bringing the best of glossy, almost belletrist magazine journalism to bear on parts of the world, and world leaders, who don’t usually get that kind of treatment. (If you have any ideas in this spirit, needless to say, please pitch Equator.) — Krithika Varagur

• Why is Anand Teltumbde barely known outside India? The upper-caste pontificators in the international media – recall that “pundit” is originally a term of respect for Brahmins – have not so much as profiled our sharpest analyst of caste, let alone engaged with his ideas. And so it is that Teltumbde – historian, columnist, civil rights activist; former corporate CEO and recently released political prisoner – awaits his wider discovery. You should read his jail memoir, or his biography of Ambedkar, or his investigation of an anti-Dalit pogrom, or really, any of his books.
  
  But start with this essay in Scroll on the public humiliation of BR Gavai, then chief justice of India, who had a shoe thrown at him by an upper-caste thug (and lawyer by profession) at a press conference this October: “The transformation of crime into virtue and humiliation into spectacle marks a profound moral inversion in India’s public life. State silence, media complicity, and digital celebration convert what should be collective shame into ideological pedagogy. It teaches the public that violence in defence of religion is honourable, caste subordination is natural and the Constitution itself must bow to the idols of faith.” — Ratik Asokan

• In a new magazine called Alter, the constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia dons his other hat – as an author and editor of science fiction – to excavate the long tradition of the genre in India. Through the 20th century, writers linked their imaginations of the future to the stark social and technological changes they saw around them. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana's Dream (1905) depicted a world in which machines do all the work, people travel in hydrogen-powered aircraft, and the artificially regulated climate delivers no shocks. Men, rendered rather redundant, retire from public life, letting women live for pleasure alone – a dream sprung from the ongoing fight for women's rights.
  
  Subsequent novels and short stories rode other currents: the utopian promise of the Soviet Union, the anti-caste movement, the computing revolution. Of late, Bhatia writes, several grimly modern dystopias have also emerged: “In a world in which technology is often too quickly – and too easily – presented as a solution to intractable social problems, one of the roles that Indian SF is occupying, as articulated through these novels, is that of an anti-technocratic literature.” — Samanth Subramanian