During that time she began writing a biography of Svevo. Later, a friend, Lina Galli, helped her complete it. But she had as much trouble finding a publisher as Ettore had had. At last it appeared, as Vita di mio marito (Life of My Husband) in Trieste in 1950. A charming, affecting, usefully informative work, it has subsequently been reissued and translated.

Svevo’s widow lived to see her husband established as a modern Italian classic, but the “Svevo case” continued to provoke discussion. One of the thorniest questions surrounding Svevo was, quite simply, his Italian. In La coscienza di Zeno, the narrator complains about his own Italian. Like all his fellow Triestines, Zeno’s first language is the local dialect. For Ettore Schmitz, his first language was also Triestino; his second, German. Italian was an acquired tongue, and from the beginning of his career critics have insisted that his Italian is clumsy. “The Italian of a bookkeeper” is a recurrent jibe. In his preface to a reissue of Livia’s Vita di mio marito, Montale tackles the question:

But the smell of warehouse and cellar, the almost Goldonian chatter of the Tergesteo, the unmistakable “late Ottocento” painting in some of his rare expanses of landscape and his numerous “interiors”—are they not the sure presence of a style? A commercial style, true, but also the only one natural to his characters.

If Svevo—or rather, Zeno Cosini—writes like a bookkeeper, that may be because he is a bookkeeper. At the suggestion of the Bolognese publisher Cappelli, Svevo actually took the step of having a professional, non-Triestine writer, Attilio Frescura, examine his manuscript. For some time Svevo’s papers have not been accessible. They are in packing-cases stored in the Trieste library, which is being “renovated” (renovation, in institutional Italy, is likely to be an endless process). So we have no idea what Frescura’s proposed revisions were, nor do we know to what extent Svevo accepted them.

In making this translation—and here I must adopt the first person singular—I have steadfastly resisted the temptation to “prettify” Svevo’s prose. And as I progressed, the temptation became less frequent, as that prose worked its charm on me. What could sometimes at first seem flat, unaccented, even opaque was, I realized, an essential part of Zeno’s character, like his subtle irony, his cockeyed ratiocination, his quiet humor. In his important study, In Praise of Antiheroes, Victor Brombert devotes an acute chapter to Zeno, an antihero in the great European tradition, where the bumbling importer Zeno Cosini ranks with that other great creation, the good soldier Schweik.

I first read Svevo’s novel when I was a college senior, in the English translation by Beryl de Zoete, under the title Confessions of Zeno. I fell in love with the book, and a few years later, when my Italian was more fluent, I read it again in the original and loved it even more. Beryl de Zoete must have been a fascinating woman. Her published works include scholarly studies of Oriental dance; she was the companion of the great translator and scholar Arthur Waley, and thus lived in the magic circle of Bloomsbury. She also translated Senilità and, later, one of Alberto Moravia’s early novellas, the splendid Agostino.

In the 1920s, when she worked on La coscienza di Zeno, she was translating the work of an eccentric, virtually unknown Italian writer. Seventy years later, when I began my translation, I was dealing with a text of world renown, universally loved. There are times when a translator must also be something of a salesperson, and I suspect that Beryl de Zoete, in her admiration for Svevo, was also eager to sell him to an uninstructed public. Her translation did just that, and she must have been pleased, rightfully, with her achievement.

But, more than novels, translations age. The translators whose work illuminated my youth—Constance Garnett, Helen Lowe-Porter, Dorothy Bussy, C. K. Scott Moncrieff—have all been challenged and, in some cases, replaced. And I expect—admittedly without enthusiasm—that a new generation will retranslate the works of Gadda, Calvino, Eco, whom I introduced to English readers.

While I was working on this translation, I left my old, college-days copy of Confessions of Zeno on the shelf. When I had finished, or almost finished the job, I took two or three peeks at de Zoete’s work, to compare a few of her solutions to mine.