Vashon weaver biography of william

Writer and translator Susan Bernofsky loves to blog about all things translation. Click here to find her on Twitter.

The history of the education of the ante-bellum Negroes, therefore, falls into two periods.

William Weaver, one of the greatest translators of all time — and also my teacher, mentor and friend — died this week at the age of It was a privilege and also a pleasure to know him. He liked to sit with his guests on the broad front porch of his house on the Bard College campus, enjoying the pre-dinner hour, very much the Southern gentleman with his seersucker jackets, his exuberant hospitality and his love of storytelling.

But I had a pony! Neither one of them seemed to drive, though, and so sometimes I would pick them up for a trip to the grocery store or the movies. I guess his driving skills had gotten rusty during the many post-war years he spent in Rome, and then in New York and Rome, and then in Annandale-on-Hudson, where he lived in a house whose previous occupant had been his dear friend Mary McCarthy, and taught courses on translation, literature and perhaps his greatest love opera.

I grew up reading volume after volume of his translations of Italo Calvino. He liked to quip that the success of that book made it possible for him to add on a room to the country house he owned outside Arezzo. And he turned out a staggering quantity of books, which I find particularly astonishing given the fact that I never saw him working, nor displaying even the faintest hint of stress over an impending deadline.

He would just disappear into his basement office for a given number of hours each day and, with genteel savoir-faire or so I imagine it , work through knotty passage after knotty passage until they flowed as smoothly as a length of silk. He was reassuring with his students too.

Carmen is married to our very own, Mr Vashon Weaver, who is also on staff and they have 3 gorgeous children; Jada.

He taught the only translation workshop I ever took, at Princeton University, where I enrolled in his undergraduate translation workshop as a grad student because the chance to study with such a master was too great an opportunity to pass up. He taught us patience and to revise our work with meticulous attention to detail. He was a brilliant, incisive editor.