While writing The Little Book of Passage, I was tenaciously trying to take root: to recognize myself in a body and in a place, to make my home in the world. This is why images of shoes and feet often recur. But the earth on which I tried to place them was collapsing. . . The clothing I was trying to find, melting in the light. . . The painful sensation was that of not being able to move forward, of being relegated to a fixed sequence of events. But perhaps this is, as Emily tells me, nothing but a way of “fill[ing] the Gap” by “insert[ing] the Thing that caused it”: an apparent repetition through which change can occur. A medical drug, a “pharmakon”—both “remedy” and “poison” in ancient Greek—that brings pain inside the same pain, to transform it. For this to happen, a blank open space is needed, a space of waiting. It is this emptiness that punctuates the book into sequences.
In dialogue with my translator John Taylor, «The Bitter Oleander» Vol. 25, N. 2, Autumn 2019.
Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor, “Until the Stones Start Walking”: A Dialogue about Poetry and Translation, «Gradiva. International Journal of Italian Poetry», n. 68, Fall 2025, pp. 276-283.
Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor, What Brings us to a Halt: An Ongoing Dialogue about (and because of) Translation, Hopscotch Translation, 27 may 2025.
Domenico Segna, An Interview with Franca Mancinelli, The Antonym, January 27, 2024.
Adele Bardazzi, Roberto Binetti, An interview with Franca Mancinelli, Translated from the Italian by John Taylor, Asymptote, 2023.
John Taylor, «A Beauty not yet visible to our eyes». A dialogue with Franca Mancinelli, Eurolitkrant, April 2022, Eurolitkrant (adapted, and expanded version of the radio conversation Italian poet Franca Mancinelli in conversation with translator and poet John Taylor, Trafika Europe Radio, February 15, 2022.
Franca Mancinelli, John Taylor, From «Distance is a root». A dialogue between Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor, Hopscotch Translation, July 13, 2021.
Anindita Bose, Interview with Franca Mancinelli, Verseville, 2019.
Brooke Bierhaus, “Italian Poetry in Kolkata”, VidBee, August 15, 2019.
John Taylor, Dialogue with Franca Mancinelli, «The Bitter Oleander» Volume 25, Number 2, Autumn 2019, pp. 46-56.
