A kind of parallelism is noted between Marisa Madieri’s short story La conchiglia and the novella Lei dunque capirà by Claudio Magris. In La conchiglia there is a she (Madieri the author) who writes in the voice of a he (the narrator and surviving spouse) who recalls another she (his deceased wife Naipuni) and their life together. A similar stratagem can be seen in Lei dunque capirà, though in the novella there is a he (Magris the author) who writes in the voice of a she (the narrator Eurydice) who talks about another he (her poet husband Orpheus) and their moments together. The lives reflected in these immagini speculari which mirror one another compose a kind of love song, one (the surviving spouse’s hymn) a simple tender one, the other (Eurydice’s song) no less devoted but more complex, knotty. Both songs are perhaps a projection of how the protagonists might have wanted to appear to the person they love. The parallel is not perfect, though in each case the projection compensates for a lost reality.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Appel, A. M., (2025), "Mirror Images of Remembrance in Marisa Madieri’s La conchiglia and Claudio Magris’s Lei dunque capirà: A Translator’s Notes", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Appel, Anne Milano. "Mirror Images of Remembrance in Marisa Madieri’s La conchiglia and Claudio Magris’s Lei dunque capirà: A Translator’s Notes." Quaderni d'italianistica 32 (1): 2011. 37-47. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v32i1.15933. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.