Lara Gochin Raffaelli has produced a new and authoritative English translation of a masterpiece of Italian literature. L'Innocente (1892) is a psychological novel written by the renowned Italian author Gabriele d'Annunzio. Set in turn-of-the-century Rome, the tale follows the story of Tullio Hermil, a man struggling with his moral weaknesses. After the unabridged new version of Pleasure (2013), Raffaelli presents an uncensored version of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s famous novel, skillfully adhering to the original work. During our interview, she illustrated the challenges she faced whilst translating Innocence.

What are the main challenges in translating d'Annunzio?

Translating D’Annunzio means stepping into a rich, textured, linguistic world that resists being flattened. His language is sensual, symbolic, and often elliptical — full of images glimpsed “as in a mirror” or behind a veil. One of the great challenges is retaining this sense of suggestiveness without slipping into vagueness or overwrought prose in English. He also delights in uncommon syntax, archaisms, and subtle shifts in tone — so the translator must constantly decide how much to explain and how much to let shimmer just beyond the reader’s grasp.

At the end of your work, you compare it with past translations. What are the most obvious differences?

The older translations of L’Innocente tended to euphemize or soften the more visceral, disturbing aspects of the novel, especially anything to do with the body, sexuality, or Tullio’s darker reflections. My version sought to preserve d’Annunzio’s tonal complexity and sensory intensity. That meant allowing the metaphors to remain raw when needed, letting the syntax stretch or spiral where it does in Italian, and refusing to moralize the characters. I wanted to restore the psychological and aesthetic tension that is central to his work — the way beauty, desire, and cruelty coexist without resolution.

The earlier translations often softened or bowdlerized the text, especially when it came to the physical, erotic, or psychologically disturbing aspects. I’ve tried to retain the rawness and ambiguity of d’Annunzio’s language: his metaphors, his breathless syntax, his willingness to let disgust and desire coexist. For example, where a previous version referred to a character as “penetrated,” I kept d’Annunzio’s original: “violated… in that original wound that bleeds and stinks.” Where older translations call him “content with weak justifications,” I used “full of cowardly complacencies… in a house where the air had become fetid.” I also aimed to preserve his rhythm: the breathless quality of some passages, the slow, reflective pacing of others.

It’s not just about vocabulary. It’s about tone, rhythm, and moral texture. I tried to preserve his unflinching gaze, his layered metaphors, and the breathless quality of his syntax. I didn’t want to clean him up — I wanted to let the beauty and brutality speak at once.

Why should contemporary readers approach d'Annunzio's writing?

D’Annunzio offers something rare: a window into the aesthetic and philosophical currents of fin-de-siècle Europe, wrapped in intoxicating language and unnerving insight. His explorations of desire, identity, and art feel startlingly modern — and yet his work also challenges us with its theatricality, its contradictions, and its refusal to moralize. In a world of plain-speaking prose and quick consumption, d’Annunzio demands that we linger. That, in itself, is a gift.

After translating Il Piacere, why did the next choice fall on L'Innocente?

L’Innocente felt like a natural continuation. Where Il Piacere dwells in aestheticism and the inner torments of the cultivated man, L’Innocente shifts toward rawer emotional terrain — jealousy, possession, and moral ambiguity. It also reveals d’Annunzio at a different stylistic pitch: more direct, almost brutal at times. The contrast intrigued me. Translating it felt like peeling back another layer of his persona.

Over time, d'Annunzio seems to have lost the international stature that others (Proust, Wilde...) have maintained. What could be the reason, in your opinion?

I think there are several reasons. His nationalist and fascist associations have understandably made readers cautious — and rightly so. But stylistically, too, d’Annunzio is not always an easy fit for modern taste. Where Proust offers psychological nuance and Wilde offers wit, d’Annunzio offers atmosphere, symbolism, and excess — things that require a particular readerly patience.

But I believe his time is returning. We are once again interested in language, in surface, and in the instability of the self. He belongs in that conversation. And there are many signs of renewed engagement: a d’Annunzio encyclopedia is currently in development, and major international volumes — like D’Annunzio and World Literature — are re-situating him as a writer of global modernity. He is no longer read as an isolated, decorative figure but as someone whose contradictions speak powerfully to the present. I recently learned something that stopped me in my tracks: D’Annunzio’s Pleasure is on the required reading list for comparative literature students at the University of St Andrews.

That in itself is extraordinary — he’s a complex, controversial figure, not always granted space in the contemporary curriculum. But the added honor is that they’re reading it in my translation (Penguin Classics, 2013). To know that my version is the one carrying d’Annunzio into a new generation of readers — in such a storied institution — is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.

May I ask if there are any future d'Annunzio translations planned?

There are always ideas. But translation is a question of time, funding, and — quite honestly — stamina. I would love to continue with his prose, especially some of the shorter works like Giovanni Episcopo, which draws me in for its affinity with the Russian novels of that period, or Forse che sì, forse che no, which remains oddly under-translated. It’s also a novel that stays with me because of its difference from the others—its modernity, above all. It hasn’t yet had a full, faithful English version — and there’s a reason for that. The wordplay, the syntax experiments, the tonal volatility… it’s the kind of novel that makes translators lie down with a cold cloth on their forehead. The title“ alone—“Maybe Yes, Maybe” No”—captures d’Annunzio’s worldview: seductive, ambivalent, veiled.

Chronologically, the next in line would be Trionfo della morte, but it’s heavy — heavy like damp velvet, draped over a half-suffocated psyche. It’s d’Annunzio at his most tortured and mystical, and again, one of the most bowdlerized in early translations. I’d need considerable emotional energy to take it on.

For now, I’m letting these novels sit on the shelf. They’ve been good companions — intense, complicated ones — and I’ll see what calls next.

Notes

Innocence.