were things I liked to read aloud after dinner. There was a text by Giraudoux, and a few other things I thought were enchanting, and then someone said, ‘Well, why don’t you send them to a publisher.’” At the time, Howard was a dictionary editor and an aspiring poet.
Now he is a noted translator of French into English, and a nolonger-aspiring poet. A different sort of friendship and sharing was behind Richard Wilbur’s start as a translator. “My first experience with translation was when André du Bouchet, who’s now a rather well-established French poet, and I were fellow graduate students at Harvard. I would sit around with André trying to translate his poems into English, and he sat around trying to translate mine into French. It was fun. He made me sound like Baudelaire. I’m afraid I didn’t do quite as well by him. But knowing André, I was able to begin the translation of any one of his poems with a sense that I knew his tones of voice and his preoccupations.”* Wilbur, too, became a well-established poet, as well as a translator of such writers as Molière and Voznesensky. This sense of relationship with the translated author continued into Wilbur’s future translation work: “I couldn’t imagine beginning to translate anybody living or dead without at least having the illusion of some kind of personal understanding — some understanding of the range of his feelings beyond the particular work.”
William Weaver started translating so that he could read the prose and poetry of the friends he was meeting in Italy; he was there driving an ambulance during the Second World War and his Italian wasn’t good enough to understand what he was reading without a closer examination. Weaver’s first commissioned translation also came out of a friendship. “I did it,” he told me, “because it was by my closest Italian friend, and he needed the money to get married. He just assumed that I would translate it, because I watched him write it; I was living with his family.” And this translation-out-of-friendship continued. “I was living in Italy at the time and I knew a lot of these writers personally. In some cases I was the only translator they knew. And therefore they would always ask me to translate their books or recommend me to
publishers.”
15
