William Weaver
William Fense Weaver was an English language translator of modern Italian literature.
Weaver was best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, but translated many other Italian authors over the course of a career that spanned more than fifty years. In addition to prose, he translated Italian poetry and opera libretti, and worked as a critic and commentator on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
Biography
William Weaver was born in Virginia in 1923, and attended boarding school starting at age 12. Educated at Princeton University, he graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude in 1946, followed by postgraduate study at the University of Rome in 1949. Weaver was an ambulance driver in Italy during World War II for the American Field Service, and lived primarily in Italy after the end of the war. Through his friendships with Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia and others, Weaver met many of Italy's leading authors and intellectuals in Rome in the late 1940s and early 1950s; he paid tribute to them in his anthology Open City.Later in his life, Weaver was a professor of literature at Bard College in New York, and a Bard Center Fellow. He received honorary degrees from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and Trinity College in Connecticut. According to translator Geoffrey Brock, Weaver was too ill to translate Umberto Eco's novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
Weaver died in Rhinebeck, New York.
Major translations
Italo Calvino
;FictionCosmicomics. Harvest/HBJ.T zero. Harvest/HBJ.The Watcher and Other Stories. Harcourt.Invisible Cities. Harvest/HBJ.The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Harvest/HBJ.If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. Harvest/HBJ.Marcovaldo, or, The Seasons in the City. Harvest/HBJ.Difficult Loves. Harvest/HBJ. Mr. Palomar. Harvest/HBJ.Prima che tu dica 'Pronto'. Under the Jaguar Sun. Harvest/HBJ.;Non-fictionThe Uses of Literature. Harvest/HBJ.
Umberto Eco
;FictionThe Name of the Rose. Harvest/HBJ.Foucault's Pendulum. Ballantine.The Bomb and the General. HBJ.The Three Astronauts. HBJ.The Island of the Day Before. Penguin.Baudolino. Harvest/HBJ.;Non-fictionTravels in Hyperreality. Harcourt.Serendipities: Language & Lunacy. Harvest Books.
- "A Rose by Any Other Name", in the Guardian Weekly, January 16, 1994
- Postscript to The Name of the Rose. Harcourt.Misreadings. Harcourt,.How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays. Harcourt.Apocalypse Postponed. Indiana University Press.
Others
Bassani, Giorgio The Heron. Harcourt.Five Stories of Ferrara. HBJ.Behind the Door. HBJ.The Smell of Hay. Quartet Books.The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Harcourt.Bellonci, MariaPrivate Renaissance: A Novel.. William Morrow.
Berto, GiuseppeIncubus. Knopf.Antonio in Love. Knopf.
Calasso, RobertoThe Ruin of Kasch. Belknap Press.
Capriolo, PaolaThe Helmsman. HarperCollins.
Cassola, CarloAn Arid Heart. Pantheon.
De Carlo, AndreaMacno. Harcourt.Yucatan. HBJ.
De Céspedes, AlbaRemorse. Doubleday.
Elkann, Alain
- Piazza Carignano. Atlantic Monthly Press.Misguided Lives: A Novel.. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Festa Campanile, PasqualeFor Love, Only for Love. Ballantine.
Fruttero, Carlo & Lucentini, FrancoThe Sunday Woman. HBJ.
Gadda, Carlo EmilioThat Awful Mess on Via Merulana: A Novel. George Braziller.
- "The fire in via Keplero". In Art and Literature 1, pp. 18–30.Acquainted with Grief. Peter Owen.
- A Day of Impatience. Farrar, Straus, Young.
Levi, PrimoThe Monkey's Wrench. Penguin Classics.If Not Now, When?. Penguin Classics.
Loy, Rosetta
- The Dust Roads of Monferrato. Knopf.
Malerba, LuigiThe Serpent. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.What is this buzzing, do you hear it too?. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Montale, Eugenio
- Butterfly of Dinard. In Art and Literature 9, pp. 54–60.
- "Italo Svevo, on the centenary of his birth." In Art and Literature 12, pp. 9–31.
Moravia, Alberto1934 : A Novel.. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Life of Moravia. Steerforth Italia.
- "Two Germans". In Conjunctions:38, Rejoicing Revoicing. Bard College.Boredom. New York Review Books Classics.
Parise, GoffredoThe Boss. Knopf.
Pasolini, Pier PaoloA Violent Life,. Jonathan Cape.
Pirandello, LuigiOne, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Marsilio.The Late Mattia Pascal. New York Review Books Classics.
Rosso, RenzoThe Hard Thorn. Alan Ross.
Sanguineti, Edoardo
- Extract from Capriccio italiano. In Art and Literature 2, pp. 88–97.
Soldati, MarioThe Emerald: A Novel. Harcourt.The American Bride. Hodder & Stoughton.
Svevo, ItaloZeno's Conscience. Vintage.
Verdi, Giuseppe and Arrigo BoitoThe Verdi-Boito Correspondence. Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, eds. U. of Chicago Press.
Zavattini, CesareZavattini: Sequences from a Cinematic Life. Prentice-Hall.
As editor
Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome: Ignazio Silone, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Carlo Emilio Gadda. Steerforth Italia.Original works
Monographs
A Tent In This World. McPherson & Company. Duse: A biography, London: Thames & Hudson OCLC 11063020 The Golden Century of Italian opera from Rossini to Puccini. Thames and Hudson.Puccini: The Man and His Music. E. P. Dutton, Metropolitan Opera Guild composer series.The Puccini Companion : Essays on Puccini's Life and Music.. W.W. Norton. Seven Puccini Librettos in the Original Italian. W.W. Norton Seven Verdi Librettos: With the Original Italian. W.W. Norton The Verdi Companion. W.W. Norton Verdi, a Documentary Study. Thames and Hudson.Articles and contributions
- "Pendulum Diary", Southwest Review Vol. 75 #2, pp. 150–178
- Biguenet, John and Rainer Schulte, The Craft of Translation, essay in . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa. Steerforth Italia.
Interviews
- "" The Paris Review, Issue 161, Spring 2002.
- "An Interview with William Weaver", by Martha King. Translation Review 14, 1984. pp. 4–9.
- Lawrence Venuti, “The Art of Literary Translation: An Interview with William Weaver,” Denver Quarterly 17/2 : 16-26.
Awards
- National Book Award for Translation
- * 1969, for Calvino's Cosmicomics
- PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
- * 1984, for Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
- * 1990, for Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
- 1991 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation
- The John Florio Prize for Italian Translations from The Society of Authors
- * 1969, for Pier Pasolini's A Violent Life
- * 1971, for Giorgio Bassani's The Heron
- * 1971, for Italo Calvino's Time and the Hunter
- * 1992, for Rosetta Loy's The Dust Roads of Monferrato
- The Lewis Galantiere Prize from the American Translators Association
- Member, The American Academy of Arts and Letters
Quotes
- "Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics." — On the fact that Calvino's English translations have never been best-sellers, but have instead steady, consistent sales year after year.
- "Translating Calvino is an aural exercise as well as a verbal one. It is not a process of turning this Italian noun into that English one, but rather of pursuing a cadence, a rhythm—sometimes regular, sometimes wilfully jagged—and trying to catch it, while, like a Wagner villain, it may squirm and change shape in your hands."
- "Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, 'buon giorno' for instance. How to translate that? We don't say 'good day,' except in Australia. It has to be translated 'good morning' or 'good evening' or 'good afternoon' or 'hello.' You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it's taking place, because in some places they start saying 'buona sera' at 1:00 P.M. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it's evening for them. So someone could say 'buona sera,' but you can't translate it as 'good evening' because the scene is taking place at 3:00 P.M. You need to know the language but, even more, the life of the country." — From the Paris Review interview, 2002.