Remembering John Domini
We are deeply saddened to learn of John Domini’s passing. A prolific critic, author, translator, and champion of small presses, John left an indelible mark on the literary world. John passed away on Thursday, March 27, in Morocco. He lived in Des Moines, Iowa, and traveled frequently, particularly to his father’s hometown of Naples. Recipient of an NEA fellowship and the Iowa Major Artist Award, John authored four novels, three short story collections, a memoir, and an extensive body of criticism.
Jacob Appel of the National Book Critics Circle writes of his friend, “He was a gentleman and a scholar in the finest senses of both words. His nature was to look for the best in his fellow human beings and in their writing, and he always managed to find it—his assessments true and authentic, but also big-hearted and munificent. In short, John displayed the rarest of pairings: a sharp mind and a gentle soul.”
John’s criticism was incisive, thoughtful, and, like his fiction, invoked both historicity and a broad range of literary references, hinting at the expansiveness of his reading life. Reviewing Archipelago titles, John paid careful attention to the work of translators. In his review of Antonio Tabucchi’s story collection Time Ages in a Hurry, he turns to the original Italian, pointing out the particular difficulty in rendering Tabucchi’s Socratic-sounding sentences in English. John was a longtime supporter of the press, and wrote almost entirely about books published by independent publishers. In correspondence with him, one had the sense that he was beaming out a love of life to whoever was on the other end of the line.
Mandana Chaffa remembers her friend in the words of one of his favorite authors. “Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh, wrote: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’ John Domini was a classic.”
