Join us for an intimate conversation between three friends—fellow writers, fellow travelers—about what it means to translate books, beings, and existences.

Born in Rome in 1975, Andrea Bajani (2017 Italian Fellow) is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and three collections of poems. His novel Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins), published in the United States by Archipelago and translated by Elizabeth Harris, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. Bajani’s latest novel, Il libro delle Case (The Book of Homes), was finalist for the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello and is being translated in twenty countries. It will be published in the US by Deep Vellum. He is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Jhumpa Lahiri (2013 Resident), a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, which was published in Italy as Racconti italiani. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Roman Stories, partly translated by the author, will be published in fall 2023.

Michael F. Moore has recently completed a multiyear project of translating the great Italian novel, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (New York: Modern Library, 2022), into American English. His published translations range across genres, from modern classics to contemporary fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently: The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi; Agostino by Alberto Moravia; Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi; and Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi. Moore is currently working on a new translation of Moravia’s short-story collection, Rome Tales. For many years he served as the chair of the PEN Translation Committee and, subsequently, as the chair of the advisory board of the PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He was also the staff interpreter and translator of the Italian Mission to the United Nations. Recognition of his work includes an NEA Translation Grant, the first translator in residence at Princeton University, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. Moore has conducted literary translation workshops at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and at Literature House Ireland, as well as courses in Italian language and literature at Bard College, Hunter College, and New York University. He received his PhD in Italian studies from New York University, with a thesis on Petrarch commentaries in the fifteenth century.

The conversation will be held in English.

The event is produced with the collaboration of Maria Ida Gaeta.

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by C. Brian Rose (1992 Fellow, 2012 Resident, and Trustee Emeritus) in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.