New Italian Books Interview

In your CV, you describe yourself as a writer and a translator. How important has each of those activities been in your past and present professional life—what percentage of your work is writing, what share is translating?

I love writing and I love translating. But I seem to have found my way into a particularly happy niche as a literary translator. I’ve done more than forty books for Europa Editions. At a modest count, I’ve done at least another hundred books over my career, and other material of various kinds, ranging from scripts and screenplays for TV and movies to advertising campaigns and all sorts of odd bric-a-brac. In particular I remember working with an investigative journalist on the story of how Giancarlo Parretti bought MGM in the 1990s. The headline was “How an Italian Thug Looted MGM, Brought Credit Lyonnais to Its Knees, And Made the Pope Cry.” Now that was fun. I have also done hundreds of articles and a couple of books in my career. Also fun. Generally speaking, though, journalism leads to financial problems. I tend to over-research. I also believe that good translation involves grueling research.