Nicola Gardini challenges the idea that health is the opposite of disease. Nicola Gardini suggests that health is a creative process of self-fashioning culminating with death. It resembles translation – in particular, translation from poetry. Constructing health is constructing the ‘beauty’ of a new form.

An award-winning writer and a painter, Nicola Gardini is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford: https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/people/nicola-gardini