Isabel Madeleine Quigly

After completing her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, Isabel Quigly entered the publishing industry and worked for Penguin Books from 1948 to 1951. In 1953, she left for South Africa where she planned to start a university career and reunite with her fiancée. However, during her journey, Quigly stopped in Florence to visit her sister Clarice (Cita), who had recently married an Italian doctor. She never made it to South Africa, as she met and married the charming sculptor Raffaello Salimbeni. This experience inspired her first and only novel, The Eye of Heaven (Collins, 1955), which marked her literary debut. Her work was also published in the United States by Harcourt Brace as The Exchange of Joy (1955). Quigly soon began her career as a translator, making her debut with Alba de Céspedes’s The Secret, published in London in 1957 and in New York the following year. Elsa Morante's novel Arturo's Island soon followed in 1959, published simultaneously by Collins in London and Alfred A. Knopf in New York. The 1960s saw the publication of three translations of Giorgio Bassani’s works. These were instrumental in bringing the author to public attention in North America. Collins in the UK and Atheneum in the US published simultaneously Gli occhiali d'oro (1960) and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1965). However, the latter's translation was deemed unsatisfactory by Simon Bessie, editor of Atheneum, Bassani himself, and ALI agent Eric Linder. Following thorough revision, the translation was approved, in part also because of William Weaver's prior engagements which prevented him from accepting the task. Even though Quigly's version received favourable reviews, Weaver was now given the task of bringing Bassani's newer works to the Anglo-American audience. This was accompanied by a new edition of Bassani's previously translated and published novels.

Quigly translated works by a number of authors who were highly acclaimed in the US, including de Céspedes (besides The Secret, she translated her Between Then and Now, Houghton Mifflin, 1960), Carlo Cassola (Fausto and Anna, Pantheon Books, 1960), Lorenza Mazzetti (Rage: a novel, David McKay Company, 1965), Silvano Ceccherini (The Transfer, George Braziller, 1967), and Oriana Fallaci (Nothing, and so be it, Doubleday & Company, 1972). Still active in the late 1980s, Quigly translated over 100 works from Italian, her favourite language, from French and Spanish. Robin Healey lists her among the ten greatest translators of Italian literature into English in the last seventy years, along with Angus Davidson, Frances Frenaye, Eric Mosbacher, and William Weaver.

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