[An American educator, critic, and editor, Venuti has won several awards for his work as a translator. Frequently rendering Italian works into English, he has been the recipient of a Renato Poggioli Award for translation from International PEN, a National Endowment for the Arts translator's fellowship, a Columbia University Translation Center Award, and the Premio di cultura from the Italian government. In the review below, he remarks on the themes, plot, and stylistic features of The Iguana.]

Anna Maria Ortese's prolific career has been marked by paradox—the kind of critical recognition and reader indifference that often greet a writer who departs from the worn grooves of association cultivated by large commercial publishers. Born in 1915 and raised in the impoverished south of Italy, she has produced a steady stream of short-story collections and novels that provocatively combine realism and fantasy, autobiography and invention, and that address some of the most urgent social issues in Italy. Since the 1950's she has won several prestigious awards for both fiction and journalism. Yet her books have been more often praised than read, and she continues to live near poverty, an embittered recluse moving from city to city in search of an affordable apartment, alienated from an Italian reading audience that for the most part prefers American best sellers. Her neglect in Italy has meant that even adventurous American publishers have not wanted to risk translating her and only one of her books has been published here previously; The Bay Is Not Naples, a collection of stories, appeared in 1955.

Originally published in Italy more than 20 years ago, her extraordinary novel The Iguana is a powerful indication of what we've been missing. A Milanese nobleman, Count Aleardo di Grees, sets out on his yacht seeking real estate for his mother, "who intended within the next few years to see an exponential multiplication of the young man's holdings," and a literary property for his friend, "a young publisher of the nouvelle vague, extremely ambitious, but with still garbled finances." The sensitive, idealistic Aleardo is thoroughly disillusioned with such money-making schemes, insisting that any manuscript he brings back must be published "for the moral improvement of the public, nothing else." Off the coast of Portugal, he finds an uncharted island inhabited by a trio of indigent aristocratic brothers whose only servant is an iguana, named Estrellita by the oldest brother, a marquis. She talks and acts like a girl 7 or 8 years old, performs the most menial tasks for her employers and is forced to live in a dungeon-like cellar beneath their house.

The reptilian servant is only the first in a series of fantastic touches that transform the narrative into a satiric fable dense with echoes of Shakespeare's Tempest and Kafka's Metamorphosis. Miss Ortese's targets include the commercialism of publishers, the deluded philanthropic impulses of wealthy Milanesi and the class pretensions of parvenu Americans. The marquis, it turns out, is a nihilistic poet driven mad by the loss of his family's fortune and his hopeless love for one Perdita, whom he has idealized in an incomprehensible ode. Attracted by the possibility that the marquis may have written a marketable manuscript, but repulsed by his cruel treatment of the iguana, Aleardo offers to act as a literary agent and to purchase the island—hoping to restore his hosts to splendor and to liberate their oppressed servant so that she could return to Milan with him. But Aleardo's ridiculously misguided benevolence is frustrated because the marquis, however insane he appears, has already made more profitable plans: with the help of an archbishop, he has contracted to marry into a patrician American family so that he can retire to a vast estate in Venezuela.

The busy narrative is filled with surprising revelations and mysterious incidents that broaden the scope of Miss Ortese's satire and raise questions that are left unanswered until the climactic ending. Here the enigmas baffling Aleardo and the reader are resolved, and we discover the iguana's identity as the count experiences a deranging epiphany. While it would not be appropriate to give away the details of this resolution, I will say they bring the fable's main theme more clearly into focus. Miss Ortese is most concerned to show that class and sexual domination is exercised, often unwittingly, through stereotypical representations grounded in biological and metaphysical principles.

The complex fictional discourse of The Iguana poses many difficult problems for the translator, not the least of which is rendering the occasionally archaic sentence construction and the dazzling array of tones of voice assigned to the narrator. Modeled on 19th-century writers like Poe and Stevenson, Miss Ortese's prose abruptly shifts between direct addresses to the reader and more conventional third-person commentary on the characters, changing from cynical irony to righteous outrage to cool philosophical speculation often on the same page. Henry Martin has served the original text well, creating a richly textured style that catches these changes with very few infelicities. The Iguana is a superb performance which leaves one wanting to see more work by both writer and translator.