Translator's Blues

This funny, engaging book tells the story of an Italian naif who both visits America and travels around his home country, reflecting humorously and movingly on the oddity of what he finds in each place. Through the eyes of his guilelessly perceptive imaginary traveler, Franco Nasi reminds us anew of the fundamental strangeness of the world when it is viewed with fresh eyes. It is the space between that experience of new discovery, Nasi shows, and the version of it that we put into words--and set awry when we attempt to translate it into a new language--that generates melancholy and even disenchantment. At once a winning story and a reflective essay, this brief book by one of Italy's most celebrated writers on translation is a celebration of the gap between languages, of the spaces that both unite and divide us.