I began translating in high school—Goethe’s Faust, or at least the first scene of it. In college I discovered the Odes of Horace and made a few of them into modern poems. Then years intervened, years when my work with language mostly involved teaching and writing literary criticism. It was singing that brought me back to translating. My chorus was learning some Monteverdi madrigals, and the published translations weren’t getting at what I thought was the nub of those tight, puzzling, complicated Italian poems. So I began to make my own translations.
I learned that many of those madrigals were settings of poems by Giovanni Baptista Guarini, a courtier from Ferrara whose lyrics seemed to travel all around Italy and were being snatched up by dozens of composers. That’s what led me to my first book of translations, A Poetry Precise and Free: Selections from the Madrigals of Guarini (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2018; available at Michigan Press or Amazon). 
“Precise and free” is how Guarini describes a singer he heard, and for me it marked the combination in his work of superb craftsmanship and inventive improvisation. A reviewer wrote about my book, “Jones’s treatments of the verse read naturally in English, rather than as stilted emulations of sixteenth-century Italian, and perhaps most importantly, they convey the spirit of the poems to present-day readers. The translations are, indeed, poetic, and they offer a fresh perspective on the centuries-old yet perennial expressions of Guarini’s madrigals” (Renaissance Quarterly).
My second translation book is also from Italian—The Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro: A New Translation with Commentary (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2025, also available at Michigan Press or Amazon; if your local public library doesn’t have it, please ask them to order it).
The book, first published in 1504, is well known to Italian speakers, but has only once before been translated into English. It is a story of a young man from Naples who leaves home after a disastrous love affair and voyages to the imaginary (Greek) land of Arcadia, where he becomes a shepherd. He and his friends occupy themselves with festivals and rituals and above all, with singing (that is, with improvising poems). Lovesick and sorrowful, the shepherds console each other, and by the end, in a remarkable undersea journey, the narrator returns to Naples, only to find it a wasteland–as indeed, it was in 1504, repeatedly invaded and its government basically taken over by the Spanish. Sannazaro’s picture of an idyllic—but also flawed—Arcadia went on to influence European writers for centuries.
I have translated many madrigals and motets from Italian, Latin, and some other languages. Most of them can be found at the Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL), an excellent resource for finding scores, texts, and translations for choral music. Follow this link to see my contributions.