Dava Sobel is a science writer. She spent many years as a journalist, writing a column for The New York Times, as well as freelance articles for many magazines, including Science Digest, Discover, and The New Yorker. She has since written four books, including Galileo’s Daughter (1999), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology. This historical memoir incorporates letters from Galileo’s daughter, which were translated from Italian to English by Sobel herself. A More Perfect Heaven (2011), her most recent work detailing the life of Copernicus, is a nonfiction narrative surrounding a short play titled “And the Sun Stood Still.” In 2013, she will be the Joan Leiman Jacobson Writer-in-Residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. LC: What prompted you to take such different approaches with your presentations of Galileo and Copernicus’ lives? DS: Well, they’re different stories, and I think the story shapes the telling of it. So for Galileo’s Daughter, I had a rich resource in her letters. So that shaped the book, the actual letters and the establishment of their relationship through that resource. There’s nothing like that available for Copernicus. I wouldn’t have done it the same way even if there had been, but what had interested me in the Copernicus story from the beginning was the unlikely visit from the young mathematician from Germany and trying to imagine their conversation, which I’d always thought of as a play. It just took me a long time to get up the nerve to try to write a play. (67)
LC: So you never thought of doing Copernicus’ story through excerpts of his letters or his correspondents’ letters or anything like that? DS: Well there are only seventeen letters that survived, so they just don’t have it. It’s not as though I chose not to use it; it’s not there. Galileo left more than a thousand letters.You really have something to work with. Whereas with Copernicus, partly because it was longer ago, partly because of the war situation in Poland, so much material was lost. These seventeen letters all existed in the original between World War I and World War II, and now it’s a good thing copies of them were made, because the originals are gone for several more. Any time you look at a region where there’s been bombing, fires, and all the awful things that come with war aside from the human costs, records and artifacts disappear. LC: Do you feel as though your different styles in both books, because of those letters, lent to giving Galileo and Copernicus very distinct personalities? DS:Yes, well, they had distinct personalities, and that much becomes clear from reading their work and reading what remains of Copernicus’ correspondence, especially his notes about the time he spent in charge of the church’s lands. He had to be visiting the peasants and signing off on their land transactions. I thought the notes he made and the way he settled things showed him to be a very fair, even-handed person.
MOUNT HOPE