Virginia Jewiss received her PhD in Italian literature from Yale University and taught at Dartmouth College and Trinity College’s Rome campus before returning to Yale, where she is currently Lecturer in the Humanities and Director of the Yale Humanities program in Rome. She has translated the work of numerous Italian authors and film directors, including Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, and screenplays for Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores.

-   Professor Virginia, could you please share the story of your journey to become a professional literary translator and your current range of interests?

- I was born in the United States; I grew up in a small town in Connecticut, two hours from New York. I went to university and lived in different places the way Americans tend to do. I became interested in the Italian language on my very first day at the university. I have to say that I had no particular intention of studying Italian; it wasn't on my list of things [to do] at all. I needed to find a job at the university to help my family pay for my studies and because I spoke French, I went to the Romance languages department, where I was hoping I would find a job. Instead, I met a young and absolutely vivacious Italian professor who invited me to her office. She suggested that I could work for her even though the qualifications for the job required more than I knew at that time (for example, typing: this was before the invention of personal computers); certainly I did not speak Italian either. But there was an extraordinary feeling of sympathy between the two of us and the professor hired me anyway. I started helping make the arrangements for the summer program in Florence run by the University of Pennsylvania. My visit to Florence became my first love of the Italian language. As soon as I arrived in Italy, I felt as if I were home, as if I had been there before, as if I must have been an Italian in a previous life. With the encouragement of this professor, I decided to major in Italian, and then eventually, I did a Ph.D. in Italian literature on Dante. 

My academic training is in medieval Italian literature. I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the theology of angels and Dante in the Middle Ages. I ended up becoming a translator because of those angels who move quite seamlessly between two different spheres — heaven and earth — and bring with them the sublime and often mysterious communicable messages of God to human beings. Not that I claim angelic status but there's something about moving between these two different realms and making the non-communicable communicable. I think that appealed to me from a theological perspective and also from a practical perspective. My decision to become a professional translator is that Italian chose me and not vice versa. The profession of translation came to me, as it wasn't something that I sought out. The same professor who hired me on my first day of university was someone I went on to work with throughout my graduate career. In fact, after graduate school, when I had already moved to Rome, where I was teaching (where I am right now), she called and asked if I could help with a project that was proving to be quite difficult just in terms of getting everyone on the same page. Yale University (where I got my degree and where she was teaching) had agreed to sponsor a literary festival of the Italian language, contemporary Italian authors who had won The Strega Prize - the most important literary prize in Italy. There were lots of communication issues. Today it would have been much easier with the internet, but at the time, negotiating between a university in the United States and the literary foundation in Italy was not easy. So she asked if I could act as a liaison for these two organizations, and I did. And at a certain point, it occurred to us that none of the works of authors who would be coming to the United States had actually been translated into English. 

To make a long story short, I ended up translating selections of their works so that they could present their works in the US. One of the authors was Melania Mazzucco; her agent took the translation that I had produced of one chapter and went to the Frankfurt book fair with that sample in English and shopped it around. And sure enough, it [happened] that the world rights in English that Jonathan Galassi bought for Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) in New York, who then contacted me asking if I would be willing to translate the entire book. I became a translator through these series of interesting connections, none of which were things that I had planned strategically in any way. 

I do feel very grateful and fortunate. I think contacts with the right people opened different kinds of possibilities for me. When I first started to translate "Vita", (title of the novel, young girl's name but "vita" also means "life" in Italian), I found that I just loved doing the work and that it would be dinner time before I knew it. I had never sat still for so long in my life and I realized that I was finding a deep gratification in the work of translating—something that I had not considered before. I was eager to start working on new projects, and there it was. I received other offers, such as translating the second book of Melania Mazzucco and books by Roberto Saviano, and others. Once I had established myself as a literary translator, I began to work in the film production world, but that is a whole different chapter. This is a short story of how I ended up being a literary translator of the Italian language. 

 - Thank you, Professor Virginia, for such an elaborate answer. It is surprising that Italian was not your native language! The works that you translate are not simple at all; I was almost sure that Italian was your second native language.

 - I began to study Italian in the summer after my first year at university. When I found myself in Florence and was working on a study abroad program, I would go to Italian class in the morning and then do my administrative, organizational work in the afternoon and evening. I had also studied French, German and Spanish, so I had a deep love of languages but had no intention to study Italian seriously. But no language has captivated me the way Italian did. My tongue was happy speaking Italian. It just felt very natural, something that really resonated with every cell of my physical being and not just with my mind.

 - That's a beautiful way to say that your tongue feels happy when speaking this language! Since the books you translated, are very sophisticated and complex, for example, "ZeroZeroZero" and "Gomorrah" by Roberto Saviano, that also necessitates the knowledge of criminology, criminalistics, and particularly the worldview and philosophy of Southern Italy. How important is it to communicate with the author directly and discuss specifics of the book?

 - At the moment, I am putting the final touches to a translation of Dante Alighieri's "La Vita Nuova" (The New Life), and I certainly wish that I could ask him all kinds of things. But here we are celebrating the 700th anniversary of his death. When I think of the contemporary authors I've worked with most, they are: Roberto Saviano and Melania Mazzucco. I've had the extraordinary privilege to be directly in touch with both authors very closely. I would say, and this is true about many aspects of translation, every single project is different and every project requires something slightly different from the translator. "Gomorrah" by Roberto Saviano is explosive; it is an extraordinary work that took the world by storm. "Gomorrah" is a book about the mafia in Italy, which he authored as a young man in his 20s. The book brought him international fame and death threats. He has been living under police surveillance in hiding ever since. 

That work was a truly unique experience and when I first began working with Roberto and Jonathan Galassi, Farrar, Straus and Giroux asked if I would translate this work, this was before the death threats had come. At that point, there was a young man (Saviano) delightfully surprised with the success of his work, quite taken off guard by this international fame. Very eager to explain and communicate. In fact, he suggested that we go together to Naples and take me around on his Vespa and show places because he felt it was important for me to see what he was describing with my own eyes. So that I could be aware and have that visual horizon while working on the English version of the book. That trip to Naples never happened because the day before we had plans to go, these death threats came after him and Roberto was placed under police protection. 

The whole experience for me of translating "Gomorrah" was radically shifted at that moment into a work that took on an ethical and life-and-death urgency in a way that no other work has. Obviously, I became very worried and very protective of Roberto, and it became more complicated to work with him. He would come to my apartment and I would make him dinner because it was no longer possible to meet with him at a cafe and speak in public. So that work has a sort of unique complexity to it. That was compounded by the fact that my publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux decided to bring the book and make it their centerpiece at The New York Book Expo that year, which meant that my translation time shrunk dramatically as opposed to what we had agreed. Everyone was very concerned when Roberto Saviano received death threats and we were eager to release the English version of the book as soon as possible. That put enormous time pressure on me. I had to get the translation done as soon as possible and send it to my editor in New York. So rather than doing what usually a translator does (translating the entire work and then sending it to your editor, and then passing it to copy editors). Because of the time pressure, Jonathan Galassi asked me to send him chapter by chapter of what I was doing and he would respond by fax. I would get these wonderful handwritten critiques (he's such a brilliant editor!) that would be pouring non-stop out of the fax machine as I was working 24 hours a day on the next chapter. 

There wasn't time to stand back and evaluate the English version of "Gomorrah" as a literary work like [I would] with another work. It was a unique project. Here is an interesting anecdote about "Gomorrah" in terms of its translation history. The English version of this book was planned to be published in the UK as well as in the US. Certainly, there had to be specific changes, mostly lexical changes — differences between the way Americans and Brits express certain things — but that was not the issue. The British publisher bought my translation from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was going to "Englishize" it. However, after their editors and legal consultants reviewed the project, what became apparent is that slander and libel laws in the UK are very different from those in the United States. It means that the name of a particular mafioso, who had been accused of crimes but not yet found guilty, could not be included in the book. This became clear in the middle of summer. As people may know, in Italy, everything shuts down on August 15 as it is the major holiday when no one works; everyone is at the beach, except for the British publishers who do not have the same holiday schedule and Roberto and me were madly trying to figure out how to respond to some of the legal problems that arose of how we had to rewrite certain passages without however reworking the entire passage, as it had already been typeset.

It was one of those and incredible situations where, on August 14, the day before everything is going to shut down here, the book is about to go to press in the UK and the lawyers intervene at the press itself, where the machines are rolling and say that this or that paragraph has to be rewritten but it must take up exactly the same space. So there were many mental and linguistic gymnastics that we needed to do — not to mention removing the name of an alleged criminal. That book has many peculiarities related to the threats that he received - and the legal complications that vary from country to country. 

But to address your specific question about working with the author, it was essential for me to work with Roberto on this. I was very grateful to him for being so available. There were certainly lots of references that he could help me with, that he could explain. One of the wonderful things about translating is that you are connected. Translation seems like a very solitary work and it is in so many ways, yet nothing has connected me to more people. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances from various regions in Italy so that I can get advice on what the true connotations of a phrase and dialect mean as opposed to what I might standardly translate. What does this place really mean when someone says the name of the city? What are the nuances of mentioning this or that political or historical figure? I have friends who help me, but also my brother. He is a police officer in the United States, he is the person I go to for anything having to do with weapons, how you describe the use of various firearms to make sure that I'm saying the right things; I count on him when translating crime-related works. I have an uncle who is a mechanic, so you want to make sure you're describing correctly the way a car works, how it breaks down. No translator can know all of these technical things. I can also ask my sister, an architect, to make sure I use proper terminology while describing buildings and spaces. It's an incredibly connecting process and not just with the author but with many other people. 

I could say the same thing for the translation process of Vita and working with Melania Mazzucco. It was her first work to be translated into English. A large part of that work consists of conversations in the dialect of Minturno, which is the hometown of her family. Vita is a story of her family ancestors who emigrated from Italy to the United States. Some of them stayed and some of them went back. And it's a beautifully researched story that's both grounded in archives at Ellis Island, in her own family archives and yet what she couldn't find out, she made up as a terrific novelist. So here was a brilliant land of fiction and historical research but with inclusions of Minturno dialect, which was incomprehensible to most translators around the world and me. So she provided a glossary from Minturnoese to Italiano for her translators, and it was absolutely essential and exciting to many of my Italian friends who were reading the novel in Italian. But for a translator, it is important to comprehend the essence of what is being written. My Italian friends certainly could understand the gist of this Minturno dialect but not the specifics. So when they found out that I had the Italian version, my Italian friends would call me and say what exactly did she mean "on page 79 in Minturnoese". It was a wonderful way to connect with my Italian friends who were reading the novel to the novel itself. This very solitary work becomes something dynamic, connecting and rich. 

 - Could you please speak about how books that you have translated impacted you? After all, translators are extremely careful readers, we know every comma and every syllable of every word. 

[In the cases of Gomorrah and ZeroZeroZero], deeply emotional, not just for the reasons that I described of knowing that the author was [in] hiding under police protection and living with that feeling with him for all of those months. But also, as you know, he tells gruesome and graphic violence stories. I found that was a very difficult experience to live through because you do your best to explain how someone has dismembered another person with a chainsaw; on the one hand you are looking for almost an essay of poetics and yet, on the other hand, conveying the power and the gruesomeness. Roberto is a beautiful writer and I wanted to honor the rhythm of the images that he uses, which meant that I had to let these scenes of horrific violence seep into my mind and live in my head. I think that's a hard space certainly for the author and also for the translator. 

[As a translator] you must take on personally the works themselves. For instance in the case of Melania Mazzucco's books or some of the characters of Luigi Pirandello's short stories, [the situation] is that I "live" with some characters for 8 or 10 months or even a year - they really become people you know and spend so much time with. It's hard to let them go. I find that I am almost in mourning when I send off a project because I'd like to spend more time with those characters. And that really speaks about the strength of those writers who create such wonderful worlds that I feel their worlds have become very real to me. One of the things I'm careful about while working on the translation of a long novel is to not read many other things and not to watch a lot of TV and movies because I want to stay in the world that this author has created for me. There's a form of disconnectedness in a way that the imaginary world becomes my new world for some time. That's how the translation impacts me. You had asked in one of your emails about how much time it takes to do a translation. When I decide to work on a project, even if I am not in front of my computer or reading that work, or doing research related to the work, in a sense, I am always working and I don't mean that in a lamenting way. I mean that when I go to meet some friends for dinner, as I listen to people, it strikes me and I realize that this is the perfect word for what I wanted one of the characters to say. I always have a notebook with me because I'm always listening to the cadence of people's speech. 

I'm finishing a translation of Dante's Vita Nuova, which is [a mixture of] prose and poetry. This is my first attempt translating lyric poetry and I started listening to a lot of rap music, hip hop, and contemporary spoken public performers to see how slant rhymes or rhythms can really affect the way we feel. I do that so I can be more "tuned" to the process of translating poetry in a way that is dynamic and yet still respectful of Dante's medieval language. 

-Thank you so much, Professor Virginia, for such an insightful, captivating, and sincere talk.

-Thank you Kanykei, it was such a pleasure to talk with you.