Russian Amarcord. I Remember

From a southern seaside town of the thirties — to the center of intellectual and creative life in the capital; such is the path not only of the hero of a famous Italian film but also of the outstanding translator and poet Evgeny Solonovich. After graduating from the Institute of Foreign Languages in the fifties, he immediately began working with the classics — Dante, Petrarch — and quickly became the "main one for Italian poetry" in Russia, a title he still holds. A student of greats — Ilya Goleniщev-Kutuzov and Sergey Sherwinsky — he became a teacher himself: from his seminar at the Literary Institute emerged many translators; one of them is Mikhail Wiesel, co-author of this book. In conversations with his younger colleague, Solonovich discusses the difficulties and nuances of translation, recalls his childhood and evacuation, his first steps in the translating profession, the everyday life of this "joyful workshop" and trips to Italy, his work with the texts of Montale, Umberto Saba, and Giuseppe Belli, his own poems — and everything that happened to him and to the country over the nine decades of his life.