Collaborations

The digital edition of Stories for a Year employs a rigorous and collaborative approach, which extends beyond our editorial process and translation team to include pedagogical and classroom partnerships with professors and students at numerous institutions. Each collaboration has been designed jointly by participating faculty together with the editors to ensure that student engagement with the translation process is tailored to the specific goals of each course.

Below, you will find a summary of our collaborative initiatives, highlighting both the method and outcome of each.

The editors are eager to continue developing new collaborative projects and encourage interested faculty or students to reach out to them directly with proposals or to begin a conversation by emailing: pirandellointranslation@gmail.com

#1. Professor Tullio Pagano (Dickinson College)

In 2022, Professor Tullio Pagano reached out to editors Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka to propose a collaboration between Stories for a Year and the undergraduate Italian translation course he taught at Dickinson College. The goal was to assign each student a story, which was done in consultation with the editors to help select suitable texts for them to work with; Professor Pagano then worked with his group to help produce polished drafts that could be considered for publication on the Stories for a Year website. Under Professor Pagano’s direction, the classroom was transformed into a workshop space where drafts were collectively critiqued, refined, and assessed not only for their fidelity to the source text but also for their literary resonance in English. In March 2022, the Stories for a Year editors joined the class virtually, working together with students to provide feedback on their drafts and to reflect together on the unique challenges Pirandello’s stories present to translators. The collaboration proved to be an especially dynamic and hands-on experience, allowing students to deepen their engagement with questions of linguistic precision while also grappling with the stylistic and cultural complexities posed by translating Pirandello’s prose.

Three stories translated by Professor Pagano’s students have now been published after going through the full editorial process and rigorous standards of the digital edition:

Jacob DeCarli, “Natale sul Reno” / “Christmas on the Rhine”

Ben Faintych, “Risposta” / “Reply”

Patricia Santos, “Prudenza” / “Prudence”

#2. Professor Lina Insana (University of Pittsburgh)

The collaboration between the Stories for a Year project and Prof. Lina Insana (University of Pittsburgh) began in the summer of 2023, just before the beginning of her advanced level “Italian Translation Workshop” course in fall semester of that year. The five students in that class started working on the first few pages of Pirandello’s “Sua Maestà” (1904) towards mid-semester, when Prof. Insana used the text to illustrate some of the challenges of literary translation, as well as the nuts and bolts of collaborative translation practices.

Two of the original five students continued to work on the translation sporadically throughout the following academic year, but it wasn’t until the spring of 2025 that one of them, Rafael Romero Lauro, established a rigorous work plan that allowed him to complete a full draft of the translation under Prof. Insana’s supervision.

In the summer of 2025, Prof. Insana approached the translator Stephen Sartarelli to ask whether he might be available to help workshop the draft and give some feedback to Raf, who by now had caught the translation bug. Mr. Sartarelli generously agreed, and the team expects to have a revised “His Majesty” ready for submission to the Stories for a Year editors by the end of 2025.

#3 Professor Thomas Harrison (University of California, Los Angeles):

In January 2023, a collaboration was initiated between Stories for a Year and Professor Thomas Harrison, who was leading a translation workshop for graduate students at UCLA. In his workshop, graduate students with varied linguistic competencies engaged in a combination of theoretical readings, research on publication venues, and hands-on practice in their respective languages. For the Italianists in the group, Professor Harrison recommended that they take on the challenge of translating short stories by Luigi Pirandello, selecting from a set of texts available for new English versions. Three students participated, each choosing a different story.

Professor Harrison encouraged students to work on stories that pose greater challenges yet yield richer literary rewards, and so the three titles selected for the workshop were: “L’imbecille,” “La levata del sole,” and “L’uccello impagliato.” 

In 2024, Colin Marston, one of the students from this workshop submitted his translation of “The Rising Sun” (“La levata del sole”), which then underwent the full, standard editorial process for publication in the digital edition of Stories for a Year. During that process, the editorial team collaborated with Marston to refine and finalize his translation, which is now published online, a significant outcome highlighting the potential of student-driven literary translation projects:

Colin Marston, “La levata del sole” / “The Rising Sun”