Mario Benzing

Who was Mario Benzing?

Mario Benzing was an Italian novelist and translator of German origins, often forced to sign as Mario Benzi because of the period's fascist Italian laws. Born in Como, Italy, he settled in Milan.

During the First World War, he enlisted in the Italian Army Medical Corps and in Milan he made the acquaintance of Ernest Hemingway.

Between the two World Wars he wrote several novels and biographies of historical figures in Italian. These figures included Messalina, Cleopatra and the Queen Christina of Sweden. As a literary translator from English, German and French, he specially devoted his work, often as first Italian translator, to Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Arthur Schnitzler, Lewis Carroll, D. H. Lawrence, P. G. Wodehouse, Edgar Wallace, Hugh Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe, Vicki Baum, H. G. Wells, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Ehm Welk, Eduard von Keyserling, Jakob Wassermann, Joseph Hergesheimer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sigrid Undset, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Guy Boothby, William Le Queux, Sax Rohmer, Rose Macaulay, Richard Marsh, Alice Muriel Williamson and many others, showing a special sensitiveness in translating original poems in Italian verses.