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WEAVER
Calvino was in some ways not difficult to translate, because the works are very literary, and literary or writerly language is much easier to translate than dialect and popular speech. In another way, he was not easy to translate. With him, every comma and sound has an importance, and it isn’t only a question of getting the words right. It’s a question of not spoiling the rhythm, of getting the cadences and the tone exactly right. Although he was not a scientist, both of his parents were, and he liked to read scientific works. He had an entire technical and scientific vocabulary that I don’t have. He would fall in love with technical terms, and he would rewrite the translation because he was actually rewriting the Italian. I had problems with Calvino because he thought he knew English. He would fall in love with English words. Every now and then he would fiddle with a sentence in his English. At one point he fell madly in love with the word feedback, and he didn’t realize that in America feedback is like closure or spinning out of control, something you hear constantly on television. It’s jargon and cliche, and you can’t use it anymore. The word is dead to literature, but to him it was new and fascinating. He thought it was fun and so he kept putting it into this story where it really didn’t belong, and I kept taking it out. Finally the last proofs came, and I took it out definitively. And I’m sorry to say he died before he had the book in his hands, so he never knew that I’d done this to him.
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