William Weaver
William Fense Weaver was an English language translator of modern Italian literature.
Biography
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 which 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.According to his nephew, Weaver was probably born in Washington, D.C., but spent a portion of the year in Virginia during his childhood. 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 state.
Major translations
Italo Calvino
;Fiction- Cosmicomics. 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.
- The Uses of Literature. Harvest/HBJ.
Umberto Eco
- The 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.
- Travels 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 and Other Essays. Harcourt.
- Apocalypse Postponed. Indiana University Press.
Others
- 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.
- Private Renaissance: A Novel.. William Morrow.
- Incubus. Knopf.
- Antonio in Love. Knopf.
- The Ruin of Kasch. Belknap Press.
- The Helmsman. HarperCollins.
- An Arid Heart. Pantheon.
- Macno. Harcourt.
- Yucatan. HBJ.
- Remorse. Doubleday.
- Piazza Carignano. Atlantic Monthly Press.
- Misguided Lives: A Novel.. Atlantic Monthly Press.
- A Man. Simon & Schuster.
- Inshallah. Talese.
- For Love, Only for Love. Ballantine.
- The Sunday Woman. HBJ.
- That 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.
- The Lizards. Harper & Row.
- The Monkey's Wrench. Penguin Classics.
- If Not Now, When?. Penguin Classics.
- The Dust Roads of Monferrato. Knopf.
- Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I Little, Brown, & Co..
- The Serpent. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- What is this buzzing, do you hear it too?. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
- 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.
- History: A Novel. Steerforth Italia.
- Aracoeli: A Novel. Random House.
- 1934 : 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.
- Artists in Rome. Macmillan.
- The Boss. Knopf.
- A Violent Life,. Jonathan Cape.
- One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Marsilio.
- The Late Mattia Pascal. New York Review Books Classics.
- The Hard Thorn. Alan Ross.
- Extract from Capriccio italiano. In Art and Literature 2, pp. 88–97.
- The School for Dictators. Atheneum.
- The Story of a Humble Christian. Harper & Row.
- The Emerald: A Novel. Harcourt.
- The American Bride. Hodder & Stoughton.
- Zeno's Conscience. Vintage.
- The Verdi-Boito Correspondence. Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, eds. U. of Chicago Press.
- Zavattini: 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 Emili. 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.
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.