Silvio Raffo
| Silvio della Porta Raffo | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 6, 1947 Rome, Italy |
| Occupation | Writer, translator and teacher |
| Years active | 1960s-present |
Silvio Raffo (born December 7, 1947) is an Italian writer and translator. He is the most prolific translator of English and American women writers from English to Italian. A screen adaptation of his 1996 novel Voice from the Stone will be directed by Eric Howell.
Silvio Raffo was born in Rome, Italy. He graduated from the Università Cattolica with a thesis on Latin language. Since 1986 he has been the president of the literary club "La Piccola Fenice". A poet, writer and translator, he has lectured in Italy, Switzerland and Norway, and is a visiting professor in London.
He was shortlisted for the Strega Prize in 1997 for his novel La voce della pietra, and has won several poetry prizes, including the Premio Gozzano, Premio Cardarelli, Premio Montale, Premio Ada Negri, and Premio Jean Vigo.
He has long contributed to the leading Italian publishing house Mondadori as a translator and essayist. For Mondadori he translated into Italian Emily Dickinson's works, for which he is best known. He currently lives in Varese where he teaches Italian lecterature at Liceo Classico Cairoli.
He published his first poetry collection in 1976, followed by many others, notably Lampi della visione and L'equilibrio terrestre, both for Crocetti Editore. His work was praised, among others, by the Nobel Prize-candidate poet Maria Luisa Spaziani.
A prolific novelist, he has published eight novels, among which are La voce della pietra (Voice from the Stone, 1996), shortlisted for the Premio Strega in 1997, and Virginio, both published by Il Saggiatore. When it first came out, Voice from the Stone was greatly praised by the English novelist Muriel Spark.
To date, he is the most prolific translator of English women writers, having so far translated works by Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Brontë, Dorothy Parker, and Sara Teasdale, who he first translated and had published in Italy. The result of his many years' studies on Emily Dickinson, he published in 2009 the essay "La Sposa del Terrore" (The Terror's Bride). A new biography of the poet of Amherst is going to be published in 2011.
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