Congratulations to Clorinda Donato and her team for winning the American Association for Italian Studies for an English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Scholarly Work!
The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle: The Secret of San Gennaro’s Blood by Francesco Paolo de Ceglia.
Transl. Clorinda Donato, Manuel Romero, Alessandra Balzani, Jaclyn Taylor.
Routledge Studies in Cultural History, 2024.
For their impressive work in translating Francesco Paolo de Ceglia’s The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle: The Secret of San Gennaro’s Blood, the AAIS awards the 2024 English Translation of an Italian Book-Length Scholarly Work to the team based at the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies at California State University, Long Beach: Clorinda Donato, director, Manuel Romero, associate director, Alessandra Balzani, instructional program coordinator, and Jaclyn Taylor, lecturer in Italian. In her foreword to the translation, Donato makes the case that this story deserves to be shared with the English-speaking world. It is a story recounted in different languages and genres over its long history—Church documents in Latin, a forged saint’s life in Greek, historical reports in Italian, and, of course, prayers in Neapolitan dialect. This translation provides an invaluable resource for readers of English eager to interpret the language of San Gennaro’s blood.