Why I Love Translating Italian

There are many reasons why translators do what they do. Naturally, one reason is very mundane - to make a living. But when you're translating unknown books, published in a foreign language 100 years ago or more, the likelihood of making a living off it is extremely slim.

My reasons are more personal. First, I love the Italian language. I love how it sounds. I love how structured and regular it is (with some exceptions, of course, as in all languages, but not nearly as many as English or French). It is a thrill for me to listen to it, to read it, to write it, and to know that it comes down to us in a straight line from the language spoken by the ancient Romans 2,000 years ago. It is also the language of a great people who live life fully and who have excelled in all aspects of culture (they gave us the Renaissance, for goodness sake!).

Translating is like unlocking a door, decoding a secret cache of documents. And translating older, unknown books makes the whole enterprise even more special to me. I feel as though I am opening a window for millions of people who would otherwise go their whole lives not hearing about the things in these books, not even knowing what these books were about.

Francis Bacon said that books are ships which pass through the vast seas of time.
That is exactly how I think of them, as time capsules, the closest thing we can come to time travel (right now, anyway). What a thrill to translate the thoughts and feelings of a person a century ago speaking of something familiar to you today! You can picture yourself standing next to him or her, wanting desperately to talk back! Imagine how I feel knowing that a description of some joyous, devastating, or even everyday event so long ago would be lost, lost forever, if not for this one obscure portion of a text, and that I am showing it to the English-speaking world. I can almost sense the gratitude of the people whose lives were touched by it. "We were there, and you remember us!" Now imagine that each book contains dozens, hundreds of such events. It is overwhelming! It is also a responsibility, and one that I take very seriously.