Sonzogni is warm, animated, amusing, digressive and unguarded. He’s got what Italians call gusto, and would be a great dinner-party guest. “I’m Italian, so there’s an occasional hotheadedness. My blood is thick – medically thick, you know! Hence the clots.” He also admits to “a little workaholism”, writing and translating from around 9pm until around 1.30am at his Brooklyn home. “I can function fine on five hours’ sleep.” Wife Julia, now a yoga and meditation instructor, has got him onto both practices. Teaching, research, writing academic articles and admin take up most of his time. An advocate of small classes, he tailors his classes in Italian language, literature and culture to individual students, from first-year through to postgraduate level. “I’m privileged to have young, vibrant minds teaching me just as much.” Translation informs his teaching, and vice versa. “Translation is a conversation that connects people. I see teaching as a translation too: you receive knowledge and, if it stops with you, if it’s self-centred, it’s useless. Our responsibility is to pass it on.” His mother, father and grandmother were all teachers, and so is his brother. “It’s a calling, I guess.” From 2011 to 2015, Sonzogni was the director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria, bringing some of the world’s best translators and translation scholars to New Zealand. This month, with a group of colleagues, he’s organising the university’s inaugural Creativity Week (21–25 November), with public events featuring international and national speakers and performers. The headline act is a how-to-be-creative lecture by British creativity professor and Lego consultant David Gauntlett at 6pm on 22 November, at Rutherford House. Sonzogni considers himself a poet first and foremost. He wrote his first poem as a teenager after glimpsing a girl waitressing at a bar. “She didn’t pay the slightest notice to me. There it started and ended.” But it started a lifetime of writing poetry. He’s published five poetry collections in Italy, and is working on his sixth, all in Italian. “It’s Italian I feel in my body, and it’s a creative obligation to my native tongue and traditions.” He’ll read his poetry alongside others at LitCrawl Wellington session, Polylingual Spree, on 12 November. The pull to translate poetry by other writers comes partly from a desire to open windows into other cultures. “Translating poetry requires a huge amount of reading and
knowledge of the source language and culture. I’ve devoted 25 years to studying Seamus Heaney and Italian poet and Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale [1896–1981].” He’s currently translating (into Italian from English) Heaney’s posthumously published translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, written in Latin. How’s that for an ode to translation? While some talk of translating the spirit not the letter of the words, this award-winning translator ensures the words remain the poet’s own. “As a Heaney poem goes, remember the giver.” He kept this in mind when translating Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s poetry into English (with US translator Harry Thomas). Sonzogni has also translated the work of Swiss-Italian poets from Italian to English, and is working on a new translation in partnership with the Swiss Arts Council. Sonzogni grew up near the Swiss border, with a gift for languages. He spoke the local dialect with his father, and his mother taught Greek and Latin. He learned those languages, then studied English, Russian, Italian and Linguistics at the University of Pavia. At 21, he tossed up between a scholarship to St Petersburg to study Russian, and one to Dublin to study English. “My grasp of English was better.” After a master’s and PhD, he entered academia. After 12 years in his “cultural home” of Ireland, Sonzogni learned his teaching fellowship was ending, briefly looked at jobs online and spotted one at Victoria. “There was a 24 hour-window before applications closed.” After a phone interview with bad reception but a good outcome, he said yes quickly. “I didn’t overthink it. I knew where New Zealand was and I knew of Edmund Hillary, Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow and of course the All Blacks, who I now follow as closely as [soccer team] Inter Milan. I said ‘I'll discover the rest’. My mum said, ‘But New Zealand’s the last stop before the South Pole!’ It is far.” He goes back usually each year to visit his parents, brother and friends. They were proud when, in 2013, Sonzogni received Italy’s Order of Merit for services to culture. “Moving here was the best possible decision,” says Sonzogni, who’s since edited two New Zealand short-story anthologies. “Wellington is such a walkable, creative city, and New Zealand has given me the freedom to think, write and teach in a country that’s peaceful, open and tolerant. These are gifts in today’s world – never to be taken for granted.”
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