Elisabeth The Mother

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PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
After Colm Tóibín's 'Testament of Mary'… but with a difference: Lavagnino is writer, scientist and woman. In ‘Elisabeth The Mother’ she weaves her knowledge of arthropods – arachnids in particular – into the metaphorical web in which, with deep empathy, she holds and explores the inner life of her heroine, the mother of John the Baptist.

Harbinger of Christianity as the Old World becomes the New, John’s life is no myth. Scholars around the world acknowledge his historicity, and today, uniquely, the prophet is revered by Christians and Muslims alike.

Meanwhile, John’s mother has all but been ignored.

Chosen without warning to play a key role in the divine drama, Elisabeth’s inexplicable pregnancy is at first far from welcome. As her wild, unpredictable son grows up, she develops an unholy precognition of the horror of his martyrdom, and when she sees that for all her love for her son, God is more alive in John than she will ever be, she is impelled to acquiesce to a special kind of sanctity.

In Lavagnino, St Elisabeth has at long last a biographer equal to the task, one capable of connecting emotionally with her subject, mercilessly to lay before us her inner turmoil. Realistically, and in the universal context of the most secret impulses of woman, she reveals what ‘God’s will’ really means.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alessandra Lavagnino was born in Naples in 1927, and grew up in Rome where she graduated in Biology. Since then she has lived in Palermo, where she undertook her postgraduate research, taught at the University, worked on the worldwide campaign to eradicate malaria, and became Associate Professor of Parasitology.

In 1969 her first novel, I Lucertoloni was awarded the Premio Inedito, and four years later was published by Harper & Row in New York. Since then, Lavagnino has become a grande dame of Italian letters, serving as a judge on The Strega Prize, Italy’s equivalent of The Man Booker, while in her own writing continuing to pursue her interest in arthropods and in that of her inner life, the one always revealing of the other and interpretive of the individuated existence of which we sense, with wonder and horror, we are a part.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
The recent revival of interest in Lavagnino’s work beyond Italy is largely due to the efforts of the English poet and translator Adam Elgar, with whom the author has built an extraordinary rapport and understanding, the fruits of which are evident in the present translation of Elisabeth The Mother, the opening chapters of which won Elgar recognition at the prestigious John Dryden Translation Awards.

Elgar translates from French as well as Italian, working in fiction, psychoanalysis and art history. His poems have appeared in Stand, Poetry Review, Warwick Review, Magma, Orbis, New Walk and Iota. His translations of sonnets by Ugo Foscolo and Gaspara Stampa have appeared in The Keats-Shelley Review, Ezra and Able Muse.