Dead Vincenzo Mantovani, translator of Roth, Vonnegut, Bellow- Corriere.it

Farewell to one of the greatest Italian editorial translators, for many generations of readers the “Italian voice of Philip Roth” but also of many other great American writers: Hemingway, Bellow, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Harper Lee, Capote and countless others. Vincenzo Mantovani, born in Ferrara in 1935, he had approached translation almost by chance, but he had become one of the first true “pure” editorial translators: he often recounted his beginnings, with the first translation by Doris Lessing, and recently he had shown enthusiasm for the great undertaking that saw him edit the new translation of the complete work of Kurt Vonnegut, for Bompiani.

He considered himself “a craftsman”, and during an interview with the “Corriere” he described himself as a “translator with a passion for the profession, and not as a substitute for another place in the publishing houses. Such a translator has boundless ambitions: I’d like to retranslate Moby Dick, or all Shakespeare». He loved to recall, alongside his immense Rothian bibliography for Einaudi (his translation of American pastoral care1998), also other colossal undertakings: the almost thousand pages of the novel JR by William Gaddis for Alet, in 2009 (“Fifteen years of effort, even to find a publisher. I became a traveling salesman for Gaddis”) and, in 2019, what he familiarly called “il Vonneguttone”, a volume of 1,295 pages containing All the stories by Vonnegut, for Bompiani.