Biography
Di Giovanni was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1933 and was named after Norman Thomas, leader of the American Socialist Party.He graduated from Antioch College in 1955. Over the next ten years, he collaborated with the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, then on the faculty of Wellesley College, as editor of a collection of translations in English of fifty of Guillén's poems by eleven translator-poets including di Giovanni himself. The collection was published in 1965 as Cántico: a Selection.
Di Giovanni first met Borges in 1967 while the latter was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Di Giovanni proposed that they collaborate in publishing an edition of Borges's poems in a manner similar to the Cántico selection. Twelve translator-poets were involved, including John Updike who worked from a literal translation by di Giovanni. First published on several occasions in The New Yorker, the translations appeared in book form in 1972 as Selected Poems, 1923-1967 with the Spanish and English versions on facing pages.
After Borges returned to Buenos Aires he invited di Giovanni to join him there and begin working with him on English versions of ten of his books. The first product of this collaboration, The Book of Imaginary Beings, was published by E.P. Dutton and Company in 1969. An account of their collaboration, which lasted until 1972, appears in Di Giovanni's 2003 book The Lesson of the Master.
In an interview at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April 1980, Borges stated that Norman Thomas di Giovanni claimed his translations were better than Borges's originals.
After the death of Borges in 1986, his widow, Maria Kodama renegotiated the rights to the works of Borges. The translations by Di Giovanni, which involved an agreement with Borges that was unusually generous to Di Giovanni as translator in spliting royalties equally between author and translator, were not reprinted, but new translations were commissioned and published under terms that did not disadvantage the Borges estate.
Di Giovanni also wrote the novel Novecento, published in the US and UK as 1900, based on the similarly titled film by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Read more about this topic: Norman Thomas Di Giovanni
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