Aldo Busi

Aldo Busi (born 25 February 1948) is a contemporary Italian writer and translator, famous for his linguistic invention and for his polemic force as well as for some prestigious translations from English, German and ancient Italian that include Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Lewis Carroll, Christina Stead, Giovanni Boccaccio, Baldesar Castiglione, Friedrich Schiller, Joe Ackerley, John Ashbery, Heimito von Doderer, Ruzante, Meg Wolitzer, Paul Bailey, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Third son of Marcello Busi (1913 – 1982) and Maria Bonora (1914 – 2008) he was raised in poverty conditions with his father, mother and siblings getting noticed for his predisposition to writing (according to the writer himself already since he attended the third year of elementary school his essays were awaited).

He decided to live abroad, first in France between 1969 and 1970 (Lille and then Paris), then in Britain (London between 1970 and 1971), Germany (Munich, 1971 and 1972, Berlin in 1974), Spain (Barcelona in 1973) and in the US (New York, in 1976) working as waiter, sweeper, night porter or kitchen boy.

He therefore learned several languages (French, English, German, Spanish) and kept on revising Il Monoclino (his debut book which in 1984 was published with the definitive title of Seminar on Youth).

[2] Back in Italy he worked occasionally as an interpreter (experience that was at the basis of his second novel The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman[3] and he engaged in his first translations from English and German.

[4] Among Busi's spiritual fathers appear Laurence Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Miguel de Cervantes and Marcel Proust.