Italian speakers have complained of the stilted way Morante’s prose comes out in English ... Ann Goldstein’s deft translation is an exception; it gives a clear sense of Morante’s love of the romantic, while preserving a lightness of tone that prevents the lyrical prose from calcifying.
Morante’s vision is so baroque, and her prose so operatic, that after reading her I needed some alone time, with cucumber slices over my eyelids ... Morante delivers epic emotions ... Morante’s themes are not subtle. Arturo’s Island, even in Goldstein’s adroit translation, is a sledgehammer performance. But her writing, once you acclimate to its gargoyle extravagance, has the power of malediction.
[Ann Goldstein's] new version of Arturo’s Island...is not always an improvement on [the 1959 version by Isabel] Quigly’s. It is literal—that is, word-for-word accurate—and keeps to the Italian sentence structure throughout, resulting in often stilted English ... Despite such objections, I am pleased that Arturo’s Island is having a second life, as, no doubt, the novel will garner its neglected author the new readers she deserves ... I must confess that I am no longer as enthralled as I once was. I am instead struck by its heavy-handed treatment of misogyny, homophobia and jealousy. In addition, and perhaps due in part to Ms. Goldstein’s overly literal translation, Morante’s writing seems often bombastic and repetitive. Yet there are marvelous exceptions[.]
This lovely new translation by Goldstein will hopefully go a long way toward re-establishing Morante’s reputation among English-speaking readers. It’s a magnificent novel, breathtaking in its psychological acuity ... there are moments of striking beauty. Arturo’s early ramblings on the island have an unearthly quality, as ethereal as the later sections are grounded and precise. Morante’s style might seem old-fashioned, at first, to contemporary readers, but they’d do well to overcome that initial impression. The book is brimful with insight and with beauty ... By turns devastating and otherworldly, Morante’s novel is a classic, and Goldstein’s new translation should return to it the attention it deserves.
Arresting ... The novel’s relationships are usually triangular, acute rivalries marked by 'marvellous hateful attractions' and abrupt Dostoyevskian shifts from veneration to malice. Morante’s style is well-suited to the adolescent narrator who, marooned on an island, experiences particularly intense bouts of enchantment and disillusionment, making for a captivating novel.
