Philip Roth, December 2017A Meeting and an Interview* Interview conducted by Elèna Mortara A sunny winter day in New York, December 21, 2017. Shining sun, clear blue sky, and a pleasantly whipping wind: I'm walking in the Upper West Side of Manhattan towards my appointment with Philip Roth. Two months have passed since the publication in Italy of the first volume of Philip Roth's fiction in the most prestigious Italian literary series, Meridiani Mondadori (the Italian equivalent of the Library of America edition in the U.S.A. and La Pléiade by Gallimard in France): a leather-bound critical edition of about two thousand pages, including eight of his novels, 1959-1986, edited by me. And now I am on my way to meet with him in his apartment. At the entrance of the elegant multi-floor building close to the American Museum of Natural History and Central Park where he lives, there are some comfortable condominium armchairs, but I don't need to wait because the doorman immediately calls upstairs and announces my arrival. Up on the twelfth floor, near the threshold, just outside his open door, there is Philip Roth, welcoming me. When I enter, I am flooded with the light of the bright and spacious living room, with large balcony-windows over the opposite wall open to the sight of the city. Roth is wearing a slate-blue shirt and brown wool trousers. We sit in this light-flooded space, with a low table filled with books next to us, and start our conversation. It's a friendly conversation, moving from memories of his experience in Rome as a young man to family recollections, from his encounters with other writers to reflections on his books. There are moments of great laughter and sometimes surprising discoveries to be made in this conversation. Roth is not [End Page 3] only welcoming, but also looks in great shape. "I'm happy," he admits with all simplicity, when I ask him how he feels, now that he has just published a new splendid collection of essays (Why Write?, 2017) in the United States, while simultaneously in Europe the two most important literary series in Italy and France have independently started the publication of their prestigious critical collections of most of his fiction in their Pantheons, beginning, by some mysterious coincidence, at exactly the same time: October 2017. There appears to be an amazing simultaneous celebration, a sort of double Nobel Prize in Literature being awarded to Roth by these two European countries. Yet this is a thought I keep to myself, preferring not to touch on this awkward subject. I ask him why he requested Gallimard to revise their previous French translations of his books, while he insisted on keeping the existing Italian translations in our Mondadori edition. It's because the Italian translations were already good, he explains to me, while all his friends in France had told him that the French ones were not so good. We then start talking about his still probably most famous novel, the one that revolutionized American literature and his career, Portnoy's Complaint, in whose title the word "complaint" creates all sorts of problems for translators in all languages. "Lamento," he suddenly remarks, pronouncing the Italian word with a surprisingly good accent, "is not perfect," and he begins to explain the reasons for his perplexity. I wish to remember his precise words on such an important subject, so that's when I decide, with his agreement, to start recording our conversation. Elèna Mortara: We were talking about the word Complaint in the title of your Portnoy's Complaint, which in Italian is translated as Lamento di Portnoy. What can you say about the meanings of that key-word? Philip Roth: When I wrote "Complaint," what I was thinking of were two things. One is a lover's complaint, which is a phrase that you can use for certain English seventeenth-century poetry: a lover addresses his complaint to his beloved, who doesn't love him back in return. And secondly, as an illness: complaint. In the beginning of the book I have a definition of the illness...