I grew up in Pennsylvania, although half my childhood was spent in the touring van of my parents’ theatre company, where the only way to escape the monotony of American highways was to become a voracious reader. After college in New York, I moved to Italy and began translating full-time in 2004.
For about the first five years, that meant translating everything. Financial statements, tourist brochures. Baroque descriptions of Baroque furniture. Leaflets for erectile dysfunction patches. Parallel to this I began working on a regular basis for a fellow translator’s tiny bilingual review, where I fell in love with contemporary Italian poetry, but that was never going to pay the bills. So, grain elevators. Bar equipment. On a good day, chocolate.
That was my real training. The seminars, summer schools, and workshops came later, were much more fun, and were unquestionably valuable. But it was mucking around in the unglamorous guts of language that taught me the necessity of research, intuition, healthy self-doubt, and the faith that any text can be translated. Staring with dismay at that first catalogue of yacht furnishings was the first step in learning how to stare at an experimental poem—or a convoluted critical essay, or a twenty-page sentence, or a transcript combining dialect with the speech patterns of schizophrenia—and think, after taking a deep breath: for better or worse, I will find a way to do this.
Most of what I didn’t learn there, I learned from my translation communities: commercial and literary, anglophone and italophone. Several years before I began translating at all, I stumbled across an Italian forum for literary translators and was riveted by their generosity, erudition, and enthusiasm, their willingness to argue for hours over a handful of words. By their devotion to someone else’s work—not in a self-abnegating way, but as a mode of creativity that was, by definition, never lonely. These were the people I wanted to be when I grew up. Or, failing that, the people I wanted to hang out with. And thinking back on the thousands and thousands of online conversations with colleagues that have shaped both my practical skills and my general approach, it’s painful to realize how lucky I was to start translating post-internet but pre-AI. In just the last few years, half of that world has been wiped away, and the parts that remain are like the buildings left standing—for now—in a bombed-out city. That’s one of many reasons why I don’t use LLMs at any stage of my work. They neither save me time nor improve the result, and the way they’ve been introduced has been terribly destructive to the planet and to my profession.
In short, the paths that led me and so many others to this craft have been beautiful in their unpredictability and diversity; I can’t help but mourn the fact that most no longer exist. But translation—that incredible ferrying of meaning from shore to shore, between mind and mind—taps into the deepest human needs: language, art, and connection. Humans have always translated, always will. And the only non-human assistance I need is already sitting on my keyboard.
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