William Fense Weaver (24 July 1923 – 12 November 2013) was an English language translator of modern Italian literature. Weaver was best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, but translated many other Italian authors over the course of a career that spanned more than fifty years. In addition to prose, he translated Italian poetry and opera libretti, and worked as a critic and commentator on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.

Biography

William Weaver was born in Virginia in 1923, and attended boarding school starting at age 12. Educated at Princeton University, he graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude in 1946, followed by postgraduate study at the University of Rome in 1949. Weaver was an ambulance driver in Italy during World War II for the American Field Service, and lived primarily in Italy after the end of the war. Through his friendships with Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia and others, Weaver met many of Italy's leading authors and intellectuals in Rome in the late 1940s and early 1950s; he paid tribute to them in his anthology Open City (1999). Later in his life, Weaver was a professor of literature at Bard College in New York, and a Bard Center Fellow. He received honorary degrees from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and Trinity College in Connecticut. According to translator Geoffrey Brock, Weaver was too ill to translate Umberto Eco's novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana 2004). Weaver died in Rhinebeck, New York.

Major translations

Italo Calvino

Umberto Eco

Others

Bassani, Giorgio Bellonci, Maria Berto, Giuseppe Calasso, Roberto Capriolo, Paola Cassola, Carlo De Carlo, Andrea De Céspedes, Alba Elkann, Alain Fallaci, Oriana Festa Campanile, Pasquale Fruttero, Carlo & Lucentini, Franco Gadda, Carlo Emilio La Capria, Raffaele Lavagnino, Alessandra Levi, Primo Loy, Rosetta Luciani, Albino Malerba, Luigi Montale, Eugenio Morante, Elsa Moravia, Alberto Moretti, Ugo Parise, Goffredo Pasolini, Pier Paolo Pirandello, Luigi Rosso, Renzo Sanguineti, Edoardo Silone, Ignazio Soldati, Mario Svevo, Italo Verdi, Giuseppe and Arrigo Boito Zavattini, Cesare

As editor

Original works

Monographs

Articles and contributions

Interviews

Awards

Quotes

Sources