Angus Davidson

An “English expert on all things Italian” (Della Terza 1982), Davidson is considered by Robin Healey one of the ten greatest translators of Italian literature into English of the last seventy years (Healey 2019). He is first and foremost remembered as the main translator of Alberto Moravia. The Fancy Dress Party, the English version of La Mascherata (1941), published in London in 1947 and in New York for Farrar, Straus and Young around 1952, marked the beginning of a partnership sought by publishers and desired by the Italian author himself, as Davidson was “the only translator whom Moravia [would] now considered for his works” (Ó Cuilleanáin 2007). In less than forty years, Davidson translated more than twenty of Moravia's books and short stories, including his first novel Gli indifferenti (1929), which had already been published in the US in the early 1930s (The indifferent ones, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932), but was not well received, in part due to Aida Mastrangelo's “poor translation” (Healey 2019). Davidson's version, entitled The Times of Indifference (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953) was a considerable success, with The New Yorker reviewer declaring it an "excellent translation" («The New Yorker» 1953).

In addition to Moravia, Davidson translated many other novels from Italian, including Carlo Levi's Le parole sono pietre (1955) into Words are Stones: Impressions of Sicily (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958),  Aldo Palazzeschi's Le sorelle Materassi - whose "superb translation" was "in every sense a worthy presentation" in the US (Keene 1953) -, and Natalia Ginzburg's Tutti i nostri ieri (1952), the British version of which was reedited for American readers and the title changed to A Light for Fools (1957). Giuseppe Berto's first novel The Sky is Red (1947), published by New Directions in 1948, was also a great success, alongside Mario Praz's La casa della vita (1958) printed as The House of Life (Oxford University Press, 1964). The latter was praised by The New Yorker reviewer Edmund Wilson, who commented: “The translation of 'The House of Life,' by Angus Davidson, seems to me one of the best I have ever read. Davidson is such a good writer himself that if it were not that Praz is speaking about himself, it may pass for an original work” (Wilson 1965).