In-Library use, Literature Division
Interview with William Weaver: English Translator of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco...
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| Via Merulana, Rome |
spring 2002
This interview was conducted in William Weaver’s Greenwich Village pied-à-terre on a beautiful autumn day in October of 2000. Weaver also lives in the former house of Mary McCarthy on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, two hours north of New York City. He has been a permanent member of the Bard faculty since 1991, and he regularly teaches courses in translation as well as comparative studies that involve the interrelations of music, literature and the fine arts. Although he still maintains an apartment in Rome, in 1999 he sold the Tuscan farmhouse he had lived in since 1965.
In addition to his books on opera and a biography of Eleanora Duse, William Weaver has been the premier translator of Italian literature into English during the past fifty years. His renderings of Georgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, and most popularly, Umberto Eco, have brought him, as well as them, considerable acclaim. They also have helped the upward revaluation of translation as an art on its own terms...more
Calvino and His Cities
William Weaver
I first met ltalo Calvino in Rome, sometime in the early 1960s. Our meeting was unplanned; but, appropriately, it took place in a bookshop, the high-ceilinged yet somehow intimate Libreria Einaudi (now gone), which then stood at the curve in the Via Veneto where the cafes of Dolce Vita memory give way to more sober government buildings and undistinguished middle-range hotels. I was browsing happily when my friend Gian Carlo Roscioni, then an editor for Einaudi, the publishing house, came over to me and said: "Calvino is here and would like to meet you."
I recognized the tall, enviably thin and handsome Calvino from his photographs. Actually, I think I had even seen him once or maybe twice, at some large Roman literary bashes, which he attended infrequently, partly because he was never a bash sort of person and, more to the point, because he had never been a Rome resident for any length of time.
But now he was living in the capital, associated in some way with the Rome office of Einaudi, who had just recently brought out his latest book Le cosmicomiche. A few minutes after our introduction, Calvino asked me if I would be willing to translate this new book; and—though I hadn't read it (a fact about which I remained cautiously silent)—I immediately said yes...more
Calvino's Catalog
In addition to his books on opera and a biography of Eleanora Duse, William Weaver has been the premier translator of Italian literature into English during the past fifty years. His renderings of Georgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, and most popularly, Umberto Eco, have brought him, as well as them, considerable acclaim. They also have helped the upward revaluation of translation as an art on its own terms...more
Calvino and His Cities
William Weaver
I first met ltalo Calvino in Rome, sometime in the early 1960s. Our meeting was unplanned; but, appropriately, it took place in a bookshop, the high-ceilinged yet somehow intimate Libreria Einaudi (now gone), which then stood at the curve in the Via Veneto where the cafes of Dolce Vita memory give way to more sober government buildings and undistinguished middle-range hotels. I was browsing happily when my friend Gian Carlo Roscioni, then an editor for Einaudi, the publishing house, came over to me and said: "Calvino is here and would like to meet you."
I recognized the tall, enviably thin and handsome Calvino from his photographs. Actually, I think I had even seen him once or maybe twice, at some large Roman literary bashes, which he attended infrequently, partly because he was never a bash sort of person and, more to the point, because he had never been a Rome resident for any length of time.
But now he was living in the capital, associated in some way with the Rome office of Einaudi, who had just recently brought out his latest book Le cosmicomiche. A few minutes after our introduction, Calvino asked me if I would be willing to translate this new book; and—though I hadn't read it (a fact about which I remained cautiously silent)—I immediately said yes...more
Calvino's Catalog