Maria Baiocchi was born in Rome where she graduated in Contemporary Italian Literature. Since then she has been working in editing and translating, mainly from English.
Maria Baiocchi talks about becoming a translator, translating J.M. Coetzee and about "how the translator mistook her writer for a hat"
Held at Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, 11 February 2010

THE BEGINNING
As a child I had a real passion for poetry, a passion that led me to read and reread the many many books that surrounded me at home. I remember translating a book of poems, Toi et Moi, by Paul Géraldy  when I was ten. Then that book disappeared, together with the exercise book where I wrote my translations, but the passion for translating stayed with me. And then came the time of another French poet, Mallarmé, but he had already been translated. There was a wonderful Italian translation by Luciana Frezza. 
It was reading her work that I started admiring the role of the translator, such a shadowy figure and at the same time so necessary. Then came the real work, which, although very badly paid (at least in Italy) seemed to me a gift from Heaven: someone was giving me money to do just what I loved to do! 
I started translating articles for university journals. Ok, they were not poems, but still it was the nearest thing to what I wanted to do.

TRANSLATING COETZEE
But lets move on to the interesting bit of this conversation: translating Coetzee.
Many people ask me what it is like to translate a Nobel Prize winner like John M Coetzee.
Well, I think it is a rare opportunity and honor, but also a terrible handicap. If you translate authors like him you are bound to have withdrawal crisis afterwards. His are the most intense pages I have ever translated. And I believe the books should be sold like cigarettes with warnings on them saying “Reading this may be addictive!”
Our meeting in 1994 was somehow odd. I had translated The Master of Petersburg and remember having worked at it with fury for seventeen days in row, hardly stopping to eat or sleep; a total immersion from which I emerged again breathless. 
What a writer!
And then, to  my  immense delight and wonder, the novel appeared first in Italian than in its original English. 
Coetzee was awarded the  Premio Mondello for the career. So I had a chance to meet the author, who came to pick up the prize.
We met at the airport in Rome to fly together to Palermo – Mondello is very close to Palermo, Sicily. He was shy and very kind, and attentive to whatever anyone else had to say. Nothing of the arrogance the journalists love to blame on him. 
One could say he was  shy to point of being “private”. But what’s wrong with that?
Nothing. I’d say it is even rather charming, except that – on this occasion - it forced me to face the eminent juries, since John, who sat next to me, when they called him whispered: “You go! Please, I cannot, I go blank!”... and there I was, reading from my translation and discussing it with Maria Luisa Spaziani, poet and head of the jury, while John Coetzee sat in the audience, and only joined me when the applause came, took his cheque, and gracefully said “grazie”.

As a translator do I want to get in touch with the author? one of the questions I often get asked
This is very much to do with the author. I had a great relation with a French  writer, Bertrand Visage, who after reading my translation of Bambini wrote to me seven pages filled  with ecstatic comments. He was so kind and generous that gave me the feeling I was not the translator of his work but rather the one who had made it say what he really wanted to say... only better. And I worship Coetzee. But it is rare that he interferes with my work. In fact it is sometimes the other way around and it can happen that I have to fight with the Italian publishers to make sure nothing is expunged from his work or the title is respected and so on. 
Such was the case with Life and times of Michael K where the English publisher of the new paperback edition had skipped a whole paragraph, near the end of the book, where the doctor that had Michael K in his ward is speaking. Not a bland paragraph as you can judge yourselves: 

The state rides on the backs of earth-grubbers like Michaels; it devours the products of their toil and shits on them in return. But when the state stamped Michaels with a number and gobbled him down it was wasting its time. For Michaels had passed through the bowels of the state undigested; he has emerged from its camps as intact as he emerged from its schools and orphanages. 

Other than that I do not meet the authors, nor try to get in touch with most of the ones I translate. For the vampire/translator the writer is an optional. It is enough to feed on his or her inky blood.

ONE OF THE ETERNAL THEMES ABOUT WHICH TRANSLATORS LOVE TO COMPLAIN IS THEIR INVISIBILITY 
but I think that is as it ought to be! After all, vampires are not reflected in mirrors.
As to  me –being even more shy than my favorite author- I thought translating was my ideal profession. It allowed me to hide behind the voice of the other. Even when in places like this, wonderful colonies that welcome writers and translators from all the world, I do not need to talk about myself, I can always move the conversation on to Coetzee, which is definitely more worth spending words on.

THE TRANSLATOR WHO MISTOOK HER WRITER FOR A HAT
Last year in March I was in another fantastic colony, Yaddo, in Upstate New York, and a young writer showed up there. At the beginning I did not remember her, but indeed we had met in Norwich, the previous June, when  she was sitting next to Coetzee at a conference held there. She is a young woman with an obsession for hats, and wears huge ones that make her look rather odd, as if coming back from an English country party.  But she has a theory: people will smile at you if you wear a hat and they will start talking to you.
Indeed I was flabbergasted and stared at her and when I met her eyes I smiled and said "I love your hat!" which was not what I was thinking. So she was somehow right. And  she seemed happy. And, last but not least,  as is always the case, when she realized I was translating John Coetzee, she started crying "Oh oh, how wonderfu!"
So, in a letter from Yaddo, I wrote to him and told him “You are  my hat”. Translating is my hat. 
This does not mean that I approve of the silence about translators. On the contrary, I believe that, in not quoting or commenting on the translators’ work, journalists and literary critics act in a  provincial way  and, though they  may not be aware of it, they damage a profession whose status is already so fragile.

TRANSLATING: CROSS AND DELIGHT
Till now I have told you about the joys of translating. As to my future I hope I can go on doing  fiction, maybe only  fiction (of the great ones) and poems. But I am afraid it will not be possible in this life. So I’ll get better organized for the next.
But if you asked me if I care to say more about  the shortcomings  of my profession I  would tell you about the immense solitude of our work. It is a life packed with ghosts. Talkative ghosts! 
Artists and writers are generally alone while working, but they know each other, meet, look at their respective works, read each other. But translators are minimal figures by definition and their invisibility in that respect is really painful. We  ought to do something to fight that isolated condition. Maybe the web today can provide some solutions. And then of course there are places like this one here, places that welcome us,  havens like the Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, to which goes my deepest gratitude! 

Addenda Coetzee On being translated
Sentence by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the sense that within the sentence syntactic constructions are unambiguous and logical relations between components as clear as I can make them. Where ambiguity occurs, there is usually a reason for it. On the other hand, I sometimes use words with the full freight of their history behind them, and historical freight is not easily carried across from one language to another. As for social freight, my English is rarely embedded in any particular sociolinguistic landscape, which relieves the translator of one potentially vexatious burden. On the other hand, I do tend to be allusive, and not always to signal the presence of allusion.” 

No matter how competent a translator may be in both languages, and how finely attuned to nuance, there are texts for which he or she will simply feel no sympathy. In an ideal world, the best course for the translator would be to decline to work on such texts; but in the real world such rectitude may not always be practicable.