Norman Thomas di Giovanni has, to date, lived several lives - or, perhaps more accurately, lived a single life in several places.
He was born in 1933 in a corner of Newton, Massachusetts, called Thompsonville, which at the time was a small community of working-class Italian immigrants, in the main from the old country's mountainous central province of L'Aquila.
He was educated in three of Newton's excellent state schools and then at a small university in southwest Ohio. His intellectual interests - one continuous thread - have always revolved around writing, translating, and that pure form of communism known as anarchism. This last no doubt stems from his father's exile from Fascist Italy, in 1926, and a childhood association in America with a range of Italian anti-Fascists.
For several years, after returning from Ohio, di Giovanni lived in New England, first in Boston's Italian quarter, which in the late 1950s he gave up for a long tour of sunshine on a citrus plantation in Puerto Rico, following which he took up residence in rural New Hampshire.
In 1967, he set aside work on a novel when he met Jorge Luis Borges in Cambridge, and for the next few years, threw himself into translating Borges's stories and poems in direct collaboration with the Argentine writer, with whom he also toured numerous American and British universities. Their work together began in Massachusetts and a year later shifted to Buenos Aires, where di Giovanni went to live. The venture resulted in English versions of a score of Borges's books, some of which are still unpublished.
With impending civil war in the Argentine and the United States engaged in a war in Vietnam, in 1972 di Giovanni chose to take up residence in Britain, where he has lived in London, Oxford, St Andrews, Devon, and, at present, in Hampshire. He was naturalised a British citizen in 1992. A year earlier, the Argentine government had appointed him a Commander of the Order of May.
In America, di Giovanni's own writing had begun to appear in The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and the old New Republic. His Borges translations, for which he received an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and was made a Guggenheim Fellow, appeared regularly in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, Playboy, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others. At one time, he was the first and only translator ever under contract with The New Yorker. A book of essays on Borges, The Lesson of the Master, appeared in 2003.
Di Giovanni first travelled to Italy in 1964 to research the lives of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who, in 1927, were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; his next journey to Italy took place in 1975, when he studied backgrounds along the Po for his novel 1900, which he was commissioned to write and which was based on a screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci. More important, perhaps, this was the first time he set foot in the Abruzzi, his ancestral birthplace, and visited the grave of his Socialist, Protestant grandmother.
In recent years he has become a frequent traveller to Italy and has been contributing occasional pieces to Departures (on Borges and on his father's village in the Abruzzi) and to the Weekend Financial Times (on Buenos Aires, on Mantua and Cremona, and on the Dalmatian island of Hvar).
This website will present several aspects of di Giovanni's work, past and present - including essays, fiction, poetry, commentary, and translations - along with literary work by a handful of his esteemed associates.
