It was one thing to read only Italian when living in Italy, where the winds were favourable, where my state of voluntary literary exile made sense. I read with an adolescent’s zeal, transported to another dimension, standing before a new group of gods. I had an Italian teacher who came to my home twice a week and, at the start, brought me chapters and excerpts equipped with footnotes for elementary readers. I befriended Italians who mentioned authors I had never heard of before. I began frequenting bookstores, especially those that sold secondhand volumes, combing the shelves for their works. I purchased them and read them, and copied down sentences by hand, taping them over my desk for inspiration. I realized that, for the first time in decades, I was reading to satisfy only myself. I was no longer influenced by the expectations and broader cultural consensus that dictate what one should be reading – such frames of references had fallen away. The more people remarked on my new inclination – But don’t you miss English? – the more I clung to my newfound freedom, not wanting it to end.

But it did end; while in Italy, I was offered a job at Princeton University to teach Creative Writing, and so my family and I returned to the United States. Crossing the Atlantic, I read Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), a first book which recounts the eleven months that Levi, a young chemist from Turin who became one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, spent imprisoned in a German concentration camp before it was liberated in 1945. It was my first time reading that work in Italian, and the pure truth and beauty of those pages that transform one man’s experience of hell into a masterpiece of literature transformed not only the hours on the plane but also me personally, instilling in me an abiding awe – there is no other word for it – that even today governs my own newfound liberty as both a reader and a writer.

Teaching at Princeton, I wanted to transmit this awe, to share my admiration for Levi and the other Italian authors who had spoken to me deeply, who had taught me so much and who were now a part of me. And given that my classes were held in English, the only way to do so was to teach them in translated form. And so I searched for English versions of the works I wanted to talk about. I was struck by how many translations were either out of print or outdated, difficult to track down, and I was even more struck by the many great Italian authors who had scarcely been translated at all.

After dinner that evening at Caterina’s, she and I wandered from the kitchen into her study and began pulling books off her shelves. I already had a dozen authors in mind, and Caterina suggested a dozen others. I took out my diary and wrote all the names down, twenty-four in total. Of that group, twenty-three are represented in the current volume. The authors jotted down that evening comprised a wish list. Back in Princeton, I made do with photocopies of translations that I hoped my students would enjoy. Then, not long after my second semester had come to an end, Penguin Classics asked me to assemble this anthology.