Italo Calvino (1923 鈥� 1985) was an Italian writer and journalist. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952鈥�1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Admired in Britain, Australia, and the United States, Calvino was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death. He is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany.
As a young man my aspiration was to become a 鈥渕inor writer.鈥� (Because it was always those that are called 鈥渕inor鈥� that I liked most and to whom I felt closest.) But this was already a flawed criterion because it presupposes that 鈥渕ajor鈥� writers exist. Basically, I am convinced that not only are there no 鈥渕ajor鈥� or 鈥渕inor鈥� writers, but writers themselves do not exist 鈥� or at least they do not count for much. As far as I am concerned, you still try too hard to explain Calvino with Calvino, to chart a history, a continuity in Calvino, and maybe this Calvino does not have any continuity, he dies and is reborn every second. What counts is whether in the work that he is doing at a certain point there is something that can relate to the present or future work done by others, as can happen to anyone who works, just because of the fact that they are creating such possibilities.
Italo Calvino, 1967.
Alessandro Raveggi聽is an Italian author and scholar.聽His latest essay聽Il Romanzo di Babele. La svolta multilingue della letteratura聽was published by Marsilio (collana Saggi) in 2023.聽聽Research fellow in Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at Ca' Foscari University in Venice and in Italian Studies at the Universidad Nacional Aut贸noma de M茅xico (from 2009 to 2011), he was a professor in contemporary Italian literature at New York University from 2013 to 2020 and English Literature at Gonzaga in Florence since 2015. He worked in particular on Italo Calvino and the Americas (Calvino americano. Identit脿 e viaggio nel Nuovo Mondo, Le Lettere 2012 and, as a contributor,聽Calvino A/Z, Electa 2023, edited by M. Belpoliti), travel writing theory, Word literature theory, multilingualism and translation, and authors such as Pasolini, Volponi, C. Levi, Wallace (David Foster Wallace, Doppiozero, 2014), Bola帽o (A Citt脿 del Messico con Bola帽o, Perrone, 2022), Collodi, among others.聽He聽also wrote the novel聽Grande karma. Vite di Carlo Coccioli聽(Bompiani, 2020).聽He promoted the complete publication of Giovanni Papini's short stories (Clichy, 2022) with R. Bruni (editor of the volume) and V. Santoni. He is co-director of the Italian bilingual literary magazine 芦The Florence Review.
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