Il traduttore del mese

The international translation agency Studio Kosmos has recently named Dante Was  Fantasy Writer author Dario Rivarossa "Il traduttore del mese" (Translator of the Month).

Taken form the Studio Kosmos blog (which is in Italian), here is a translation of Dario's statement regarding the art of translation:

Translator (why otherwise would I be here? By the way, thanks to Daniela Fava [the Kosmos boss] and hello to readers), blogger (like everybody ...), writer (a late but quite successful one: the book Dante was a Fantasy Writer, recently released, has already been published also in America), journalist (with a glorious future behind), lecturer (much appreciated), illustrator (but not a prophet in his homeland, because my publishers and collectors are all in the U.S.). I try to deal with serious topics as science-fictionally as possible.

In addition to Kosmos, where I work out the Italian version of specialist articles, novels and websites, my main task consists in the translation of sci-fi novels for the classic series "Urania", with a slew of titles made in a few years.

Moreover, in these last two years, and again for at least a year, I was absorbed almost 100% in the pool of translators who takes care of the international project "The Complete Works of Raimon Panikkar," an Indo-Spanish thinker.

In my opinion, the first requirement to translate well from English is to know Italian and enrich the nuances of words, so I cultivate a series of mental gymnastics:

- Sit-com conversations with my sweet wife;
- Epic, philosophical, experimental poetry, such as Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Milton;
- The lucid, witty, evocative art of Hokusai and Surrealism;

- The alternative science, from "what-ifs" to the most funny theories;

- The cosmic philosophy of Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche;
- All, in the balance between the Piedmontese ironic Guido Gozzano and English epic Beowulf