Antony Shugaar has been a professional translator since the winter of 1976. While attending the Università per Stranieri in Perugia as a questing undergraduate between schools in America, he took a job translating an English-language essay on economics into Italian, in pen, on the ubiquitous graph-paper pages of an Italian school notebook. He learned two things in that context: 1) translating from your mother tongue into a language you’re just beginning to understand is a dreadful mistake, 2) details like the fact that Italian school notebooks have graph-paper grids instead of the lined pages American students are used to is the kind of bread-and-butter observation that a translator has to make on a regular basis.
He returned to the United States with a diploma from the Università per Stranieri authorizing him, “in the name of the Italian people,” to teach Italian and to translate. He finished a degree in Italian at UCLA (where he made the acquaintance of future Dr. Clorinda Donato), took a master’s in journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and returned to Italy where he worked as the managing editor of FMR magazine in Milan. He has worked extensively in journalism, publishing, and even four-color printing. He has published extensively as a free-lance journalist, written a few books, and is currently working on a book about translation. But above all he has translated.
He is currently translating his fortieth book for Europa Editions, the innovative and acclaimed New York/Rome publisher. He is currently translating his second novel by Roberto Saviano, for Farrar Straus & Giroux (FSG). He has translated four Strega award winning novels, Story of My People by Edoardo Nesi (2011), Resistance Is Futile by Walter Siti (2013), Ferocity by Nicola Lagioia (2015), and The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati (2016), and has just received his second NEA fellowship to translate The Desire to Be Like Everyone by Francesco Piccolo (2014), his fifth Strega. He has translated for such publishing houses as Farrar Straus & Giroux, Viking Penguin, Harper Collins, Melville House, Other Press, Atlantic Books (London), New York Review Books, and many university presses, including University of Chicago Press, Columbia University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, the Brookings Institution, and others. He has translated illustrated books for Princeton Architectural Press, the Getty Trust, the Art Institute of Chicago, Vendome Press, Abrams, FMR, and Rizzoli International. He regularly translates essays and articles from the French for the New York Review of Books. He has translated many scholarly essays for the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He has translated children’s books, for Abrams, Eerdmans, and others. He has translated graphic novels, for One Peace among others.
He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for the translation of Sandokan, by Nanni Balestrini, and as mentioned above, a second, for Francesco Piccolo’s 2014 Strega Prize winning novel. He translated two books by Primo Levi in the new complete works, just out from W. W. Norton: If Not Now, When and Other People’s Trades.
He is also a freelance writer. He has published articles, on paper and online with the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, New York Newsday, the Village Voice, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Sunday Times of London, the Madrid daily El Mundo, and the Milan daily Il Corriere della Sera, as well as many other publications (including articles in the long-defunct but legendary magazine Spy).
He translates screenplays, including work by such noted Italian authors Paolo Giordano and Niccolò Ammaniti. He translated six of the eight episodes of Oscar-winning Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s new HBO mini-series, The Young Pope, starring Jude Law and Diane Keaton.
He lives in San Diego, California, with his wife and daughter.
