A Residency (or Two) at Chalet Mauriac
One of the great joys awarded by my profession is to be able to work anywhere you choose. And every once in a while you get to do residencies in places where you can translate intensively, isolated from the world but in contact with other colleagues. Last year I was lucky enough to receive one of the six-week scholarships offered annually by the Chalet Mauriac. The Chalet is the former summer home of François Mauriac, the Bordeaux author who wrote Thérèse Desqueyroux and Viper's Tangle and who won the ...
I pini di Roma
My second residency this year, after the fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in January, is in Rome. I’m spending the month of April at the Casa delle Traduzioni, working on a terribly difficult and terribly entertaining book by Gianni Rodari to be published by Editorial Juventud. I’m enjoying my time here tremendously, translating a lot and in good company. And of course the highlight of it all was attending the big tribute to Andrea Camilleri at the Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, a few days ago. The Centro Sperimentale ...
A Fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation
Do you know the one about the choreographer, the translator, the composer, the playwright, the photographer, the dantist, the filmmaker and the art historian in residence in a Ligurian villa by the sea, as fellows of the Bogliasco Foundation? How lucky to be working here, just outside Genoa, with this amazing group. It’s an honour to spend this sunny month of January with Christopher Williams, Anne LeBaron, Frank J. Avella, Wit McKay, Francesco Ciabattoni, Offer Egozy and George Gorse. Below you'll find a couple of home videos. This is Villa dei ...
Irene de la Torre Talks about Her Experience at CELA
It raises the spirits to see Irene de la Torre’s excitement in this article on the Escuela de Escritores website. She talks about her experience in Pisa with CELA, a European Union project for young translators recently set up which will continue for two years. What a superb ...
Off to Madrid to Receive the Esther Benítez Award on the 15th of December
I’m off to Madrid in a few weeks to receive the Esther Benítez Award, bestowed by ACE Traductores to honour the best translation published in Spain last year! I am on cloud nine, it’s really wonderful to have won this award, voted by literary translators from all over Spain! Furthermore, it’s for my translation of La noche de los niños (God Help the Child), a book by Toni Morrison that took me to BILTC at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and has brought me joy on ...
Bisogna cambiare tutto
I have finally found the time to start the long-delayed renovation of my website—it was vital, mostly for technical reasons. The original site dated back to the year 2000 and the design had stood the test of time quite well, but there were search-engine problems and size issues when using portable devices. Also, I hadn’t updated the information for quite a while, always thinking that I should just redo the whole thing from scratch. Which I am doing now. From now on, it will be much faster, more straightforward and ...