Eda Derhemi (Teaching Associate Professor, French and Italian) and Francesco Ferrari (PhD candidate, French and Italian) recently received an important translation award. Their translation of an Italian novel is now in bookstores in Italy, published under the title "Miele sul coltello” (Besa Editrice, 2020).

The novel, by Romeo Çollaku, is layered with bizzare characters whose lives intertwine in a remote village in the mountains of Southern Albania. The novel presents a real challenge in the translation of a plurilingual text that involves four different dialects, three languages, and linguistic formulas of opposing ideological conceptions during the communist era of Albania.

Mapping this structure into Italian has been a two-year undertaking. The book sold out within a week at the National Book Fair of Small and Medium Publishing in Rome, and its faithful rendering of the complex dialectal and stylistic structure of the original text in Italian has earned an award by The Translation Fund for 2020 of the Albanian Ministry of Culture & National Center for Books and Reading in Albania.