The truth is, just to hear other people speaking Italian is really worth it. It keeps the sound in your ear.

As the writer, you can choose the word that seems best in terms of meaning, nuance, sound, etc. As the translator you are unlikely to find a word in your language that exactly matches, so that you are always making a decision about which meaning or nuance to choose, or emphasize, over the others.

Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.

I think that physical actions are always hard to describe, to translate.

I think that being an editor, someone who works with words, is very good training for being a translator because it trains you to be attentive to words in a very specific, very concrete, very literal way.

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

I really had wanted to learn Italian for a long time. I think ever since - or even maybe even before I had read Dante. And I just sort of had this idea that I wanted to read Dante in Italian. And then in my office, we actually had a class - an Italian class.