Elena Ferrante (1)
To be honest I have never seriously read Ferrante until very recently, although I claim myself as a big fan since long ago.
It was back in the last year of high school, when I became relatively free post-application. I spent a huge portion of time in bookstores, mainly Renda Mingde next to RDFZ’s east gate, Douban, and Wansheng. At the same time the first book of Neapolitan series, L’amica geniale, was translated and published in China. The sorta-weird Chinese title and the well-designed book covers appeared in front of me nearly everyday. Concurrently I was exposed to countless articles, critics, praises, and interviews online. I was fancied by the topic and storyline yet somehow I never purchased the book.
Ferrante was so popular that their books became a part of socializing from time to time. With information I gathered from articles and TV series clips I appeared as a fan in many occasions. Looking back, it seemed a bit hypocritic.
Nonetheless, the mystery of Ferrante actually helped me academically multiple times. Once for a presentation in a law course at LUISS, I used Ferrante as an example to discuss how copyright laws in different regions handle works published in pseudonyms. How should you register copyright under pseudonym, what is the life cycle of copyright if the author remain anonymous, what if the identity is revealed voluntarily, or even forcedly, what should you be careful about translation and publishing in another country, is any country requiring a real legal name registered in a public database, how other relatively old pseudonyms, such as Ellery Queen, are right now? It was a fun little research at the time.
Another case is Authorship Attribution, a popular topic in Natural Language Processing. There are many efforts made to unveil Ferrante’s true identity, including papers analyzing a huge of amount of candidates’ novels to perform unsupervised learning. Mentioned methods include Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Correspondence Analysis, Principle Component Analysis, Labbe’s “intertextual distance”, etc… It almost became a project for a NLP course I took before, yet it was not feasible as many corpora were not accessible.