Translating the mysteries of Naples

One important quality is the city's contradiction between past and future, Guadagni says.

It is a city where people display strong feelings and preferences for what they like. It is also a city that has a strong sense of future because it is an important industrial city, especially in the fields of information technology and space technology.

"In Ferantte's books, you can find all these elements," the author says.

What attracts Guadagni most about Ferrante's take on Naples is the distinctive identity traits the writer presents.

"She hates the city, but also loves it. She wants to escape from it, but finds an inerasable connection between herself and the city," she says.

"The book I wrote was to show people around the city through Ferrante's narrative architecture, and to see the complexity hidden beneath the surface."

In answer to Guadagni's question about how she dealt with the language to convey the social identities of Ferrante's characters, especially those from the lower classes, Chen says that there are counterparts for many of the words the Italian writer uses in Chinese dialects, but that she did not want a person from Naples to sound like they were speaking a dialect from Shandong or Shaanxi province, not to mention that in general Ferrante's language is elegant, and obviously influenced by classical literature.

"So I tried to show their social identities in the different ways they speak," Chen says.