The World Machine was published in 2024 by Seagull Books and the University of Chicago Press to coincide with the celebrations marking the centenary of Volponi’s birth.

It is a vivid and unforgettable novelistic portrait of rural Italy in the 1960s, exploring the nature of reality and the human condition.

The narrator is a small-time farmer living in central Italy, one of life’s misfits who generally manages to play his cards wrongly. He is the keeper of a great truth: that people are machines built by other beings who are machines themselves. Our true destiny is to build ever better machines so that society can become a techno-utopia in which friendship can be established among all people on earth. These notions bring him into conflict with the Church, politicians, his family, and his long-suffering wife.

Paolo Volponi’s unique novel examines the relationship between rural life and the modern city, as well as the subversive idealism of a society still firmly anchored in the past. The narrator’s ideas are extravagant and yet perhaps they are infused with a grain of truth, and his preoccupations about the role of technology seem as relevant today as they were then.

Originally published in Italian in 1965, La macchina mondiale, won the prestigious Strega Prize that same year.

THE AUTHOR

Paolo Volponi was born in Urbino, Italy, in 1924 and gained early recognition as a poet. His meeting with the enlightened social thinker and industrialist Adriano Olivetti and appointment as Olivetti’s director of social services had a profound effect on Volponi’s political thought. His eight novels, published between 1962 and 1991, explore the ills of Italian society in the years of industrial expansion, for which he was twice awarded the prestigious Strega Prize and the Viareggio Prize. He was an open supporter of the Italian Communist Party and elected to the Italian Senate in 1983. He died in 1994.

New Italian Books: Paolo Volponi in other languages: https://www.newitalianbooks.it/paolo-volponi-in-other-languages/

THE TRANSLATOR

Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His translations include works by Giacomo Leopardi, Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Antonio Moresco, Stefano Massini and Marcello Fois, as well as Italian contemporary poets.

His translations of Paolo Volponi’s The Javelin Thrower and The World Machine are published by Seagull Books with University of Chicago Press.

Interview with New Italian Books: https://www.newitalianbooks.it/interview-with-richard-dixon-translator-of-classic-and-contemporary-italian-literature/
Website: www.write.it

The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.

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The Collector of Leftover Souls, by Eliane Brum, tells the stories of lives no one sees, people generally marginalized or ignored by the rest of society. The book draws from Eliane’s years as a reporter first in her home state of Rio Grande do Sul and later in São Paulo and the Amazon. Some of these stories feature the traditional forest peoples of a territory known as Middle Earth, the midwives who catch babies in the Amazon, a former factory worker whose lungs, and life, were stolen by asbestos, and a young man who participates in an annual farm show in Rio Grande mounted on a hobby horse.

The English translation by Diane Whitty was published by Graywolf (US) and Granta (UK) in 2019, when the title was long-listed for a National Book Award in Translation.

Author bio
Eliane Brum is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker currently based in the Amazon. She is director of the trilingual journalism platform Sumaúma, author of Banzeiro Òkòtó and The Collector of Leftover Souls, as well as seven other books, co-founder of the Rainforest Journalism Fund, and columnist for El País.

Translator bio
Diane Whitty has translated more than a dozen nonfiction books from the Portuguese, including The Collector of Leftover Souls and Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum, Activist Biology by Regina Horta Duarte, and Our Immoral Soul by Nilton Bonder. Her translations have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, Atmos, and Glossalaia.

Links to buy book: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/collector-leftover-souls or https://granta.com/products/the-collector-of-leftover-souls/

Praise for The Collector of Leftover Souls

Eliane Brum makes her English debut with a profoundly challenging collection of portraits detailing the lives of those who are othered by mainstream Brazilian society and the dominant global order that feeds it. She asks us on every page to contemplate the privileged gaze-hers as well as our own-and to consider how it might be transformed into art and, ultimately, action.
- Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River

With lyricism and heart, renowned journalist Eliane Brum draws us into the lives of everyday Brazilians and their stories, until we see not one Brazil but many, each filled with nuance, contradictions, color, beauty and life. Brum's empathic, unflinching reporting bears witness to her subjects' loves and losses, their seething anger and their extraordinary grace. Thanks to Brum, the forgotten are remembered, the voiceless have a storyteller, and the meek have inherited a vast and irreducible space in our collective imagination.
- Frances de Pontes Peebles, author of The Air You Breathe

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