Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino (born October 15, 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas , Havana Province , Cuba , † September 19, 1985 in Siena , Italy ) was one of the most important Italian writers of the second half of the 20th century. Many of his books are popular and school reading in Italy today .

Luigi Silori and Italo Calvino from RAI , 1958

Life

Adolescence and World War II

Calvino was born in Cuba, where his parents worked temporarily, but grew up in Sanremo from the age of two as the son of a respected agricultural scientist and a botanist . The milieu of his parents' house was - in contrast to Catholic and Fascist Italy - enlightened, agnostic and non-conformist , but above all shaped by the spirit of scientific, here especially biological-ecological research and practice. The father ran a research station for floriculture, the mother worked for the Botanical Institute of the University of Pavia . So it was obvious that the young Calvino, although he was already more interested in literature, theater and cinema during his school days, began studying agricultural science at the University of Turin in 1941 and also successfully passed several exams. After the armistice on September 8, 1943 and Italy's change of front under the Badoglio government , he spent a few months in hiding in Sanremo to avoid being drafted into the army of the fascist republic of Salò . During this time his anarchically based nonconformism matured into a decided anti-fascism . In 1944 he and his younger brother Floriano joined the underground Communist Party of Italy and its partisan group "Brigate Garibaldi", with whom he fought against the fascist militias and the German occupiers in the Ligurian mountains under the code name "Santiago". His parents were held in kin custody by the Germans until the end of the war . In March 1945 he took part in the Battle of Bajardo , one of the last of the partisan war, which he wrote about almost 30 years later in his story Remembering a Battle .

post war period

After the war, Calvino studied literature in Turin and obtained his laurea in 1947 with a thesis on Joseph Conrad . At the same time he began to literarily process his experiences in the Resistancea , wrote his first short stories and a novel, but also remained active in the KPI, wrote articles for various newspapers and got involved with the left-liberal publisher Einaudi , first as a book seller, then in the Press and advertising department, finally in the editing department . So he got into the circle around the writers Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini , to whom Natalia Ginzburg , Norberto Bobbio and others also belonged. a. belonged. His most important patron, however, was Pavese, who discovered his literary talent, characterized him as the "squirrel of the pen" because of his light and agile style and made sure that his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno ( Eng . Where spiders build their nests ) , Published by Einaudi in 1947. In the foreword to the 1964 edition of this neorealist novel, Calvino emphasizes the autobiographical reference: he himself was the little boy Pin, while z. For example, the figure of the Comandante Ferriera in this partisan story would have worn the features of his then brigade leader Guglielmo Giuseppe Vittorio.

In the following two years Calvino worked as the cultural editor of the KPI newspapers L'Unità and Rinascita . At the beginning of 1950 he went back to Einaudi, again promoted by Pavese (who, however, took his own life on August 27, whereby Calvino lost his most important friend and “first reader”), and took up a position as a lecturer, which he - from 1961 as "external literary consultant" - was to keep until his death.

The 1950s

In 1951, as a member of the KPI, Calvino undertook a journey of several months to the Soviet Union , about which he reported in a travel diary that earned him his first literary prize. This was followed by other stories and the novel Il visconte dimezzato (1952, German: The Visconte Divided) , with which he should turn to a new genre - allegorical - fantastic literature . At the same time he immersed himself in a project of a completely different kind that occupied him for several years: a collection of Italian folk tales , which he took from older academic publications by collectors and folklorists and translated from the various Italian dialects into a generally understandable Italian. Today Calvino's Fiabe italiane (Italian fairy tales) published in Italy in 1956 are a house book similar to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in German-speaking countries.

In the same years Calvino came more and more into conflict with the ruling line of the CPSU and the KPI dependent on it. What he had in mind, however, was not a departure from the ideas of communism, but a reform or even re-establishment of the party in the spirit of democratic communism, similar to the parallel efforts in Poland, Hungary and other “people 's republics ”. After the Poznań Uprising in June 1956 was suppressed by the Polish army and then the uprising in Budapest and all of Hungary by the invasion of the Red Army in October 1956, Calvino's disappointment was so great that he finally officially resigned from the KPI in August 1957. His resignation (which soon became famous) was published in the party newspaper L'Unità . Despite all this, Calvino remained a serious discussion partner for level-headed KPI leaders like Enrico Berlinguer in the following years, despite all the distance .

In 1957 the novel Il barone rampante (Eng. The Baron in the Trees ) was published , with which Calvino also became internationally known, which was intensified when the allegorical-fantastic novel Il cavaliere inesistente (Eng. The knight who did not exist in 1959) ) appeared. Together with the Visconte dimezzato from 1952, these novels form a trilogy which is known and often reprinted under the title I nostri antenati ( Eng . Our ancestors) . In November 1959, thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation , Calvino embarked on a six-month trip to America, half of which he spent in New York , where he felt very comfortable. ("New York is my city," he wrote enthusiastically to his friends at Einaudi.)

The 1960s and 1970s

In 1962 he met in Paris the Argentine interpreter Esther Judith Singer, called Chichita know that when UNESCO was working and other international authorities; two years later they married in Cuba, where Calvino visited his birthplace in 1964 and u. a. met Ernesto Che Guevara (about whom he wrote a moving obituary after his death in 1967, see below under web links). After his return, he and his wife moved into an apartment in Rome , where their daughter Giovanna was born in 1965. In 1966 his friend and supporter Elio Vittorini died, causing Calvino to fall into an “intellectual depression”, which he himself described as an important turning point in his life: “I stopped being young [...]. I had been young for a very long time, maybe too long, and now I felt that I had to start my old age, yes, my age, perhaps in the hope of extending it by starting it early. "

Calvino spent the years 1967–1980 in Paris, where he was nicknamed "L'ironique amusé" by his French friends, but he felt more like a "Hermit", as he later wrote in the autobiographical text "Hermit in Paris" ( published posthumously in 1994 in the volume of the same name). As an “amused ironic” he frequented literary circles, met such famous authors as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss and was particularly interested in the Ouvroir de littérature potentialielle (Oulipo) , its (co-) founder Georges Perec and above all Raymond Queneau strongly influenced his further work. During this time, the “combinatorial” books Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969, a casual , serious gimmick with the narrative potential of tarot cards ) and Le città invisibili (1972, a singular, highly complex, all genre-defying piece of literature, which from 55 thumbnails on the type of prose poems in a frame and narrative is best described as a modern-broken "Weltpoem" with distant echoes of Dante could be defined). In the meantime Calvino had long been an internationally known author, the English translation of the Invisible Cities (The Invisible Cities , translated by William Weaver, New York 1974) quickly advanced to a cult book in American campuses - and literary circles - and has remained so to this day, see the American websites on Calvino (e.g. below under web links no. 1 and 2). In 1975 Calvino was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , and in 1976 he received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature . In the following years he traveled to Japan , Iran and Mexico and gave guest lectures at various American universities. In 1979 his most complex and at the same time most entertaining novel was published, also called meta-novel by the critics : Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (Eng. When a traveler on a winter night , 1983), which was perhaps his greatest success outside of Italy - a game with almost all literary genres of the 20th century.

The last few years

In 1980 Calvino returned to Rome. The last book he published himself during his lifetime, Palomar , 1983 (German: Mr. Palomar , 1985), is a collection of 27 (3 × 3 × 3) short texts about the everyday life of a gentleman who has many traits in common with the author : like Calvino, Mr. Palomar lives alternately in Rome ("above the roofs of the city") and in the Pineta di Roccamare on the Tuscan coast , like Calvino he has traveled to Iran, Mexico and Japan, and he has a lot in common with him (So ​​that there was a veritable academic debate among the "Calvinists" about whether or not Mr. Palomar was an alter ego of the author). The book ends with a meditation entitled “Try to learn to be dead”, the last paragraph of which - the last that Calvino published during his lifetime - translates as: “When time comes to an end - thinks Mr Palomar - , you can also describe it moment by moment, and each moment, while you are describing it, stretches out so long that you can no longer see its end. - From now on he decides to describe every moment of his life exactly and, as long as he has not described them all, no longer to think that he is dead. That is the moment when he dies. "

In the fall of 1984, Calvino received the invitation to hold the renowned Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures at Harvard University in the 1985/86 winter semester , an award that is given once a year to internationally known artists of all genres (previous winners were e.g. . Jorge Luis Borges , Octavio Paz , Leonard Bernstein , Czeslaw Milosz ). Calvino therefore spent the last nine months of his life preparing these lectures on poetics, which he wanted to turn into a kind of manifesto of his idea of ​​literature at the end of the 20th century. Under the working title Six Memories for the Next Millennium , he wanted to sift through and summarize what, in his opinion , should be taken and continued from the literature of the end of the millennium into the new millennium . Five of these six Harvard lectures had finished when he suffered a stroke on September 6, 1985 , which caused him to fall into a coma , from which he fell until his death on the early morning of September 19 in what was then the Siena Santa Maria Hospital della Scala did not wake up again. The Italian public followed his death with extraordinary attention. Every day the newspapers carried detailed medical bulletins on Calvino's condition. And on the day after his death, most of the papers came out with several pages full of detailed appraisals and obituaries . In the newspaper La Repubblica , for which Calvino had written frequently, a total of eight pages were devoted exclusively to the subject of “La scomparsa di Calvino”. Umberto Eco wrote there and at the same time in Le Monde : “When we read his 'Baron in the Trees', we ten years younger understood: He was the writer of our generation” and: “I can only say: He was the one I was most loved ”.

When the Harvard lectures appeared in 1988 under the title Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio , they became a veritable bestseller in Italy , which was also available at train stations and petrol stations.

Calvino's tombstone is in the cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia , a place on the Maremma coast west of Grosseto .

Political writer

The volume Eremit in Paris: Autobiographische Blätter contains autobiographical writings as well as a number of essays on politics and contemporary history (A Childhood under Fascism , My April 25, 1945 , Am I Stalinist, too ? , The summer of 1956) as well as the diary of his America- Journey in the winter of 1959/60, in which Calvino not only describes what comes to mind about the American way of life and customs, but also vividly describes a racist demonstration in Alabama and a brief encounter with Martin Luther King.

His political views are also clear in many of his stories from the time of the anti-fascist resistance and the post-war years, for example in the allegory The Great Lull in the Antilles (in the posthumous anthology A General in the Library) , in the Calvino under cover of the narrator criticized the immobility of the KPI towards the Christian Democrats in Italy in 1957.

Works

  • Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno , 1947 (German where spiders build their nests , translated by Heinz Riedt , S. Fischer , Frankfurt / M. 1965, newly translated by Thomas Kolberger, Hanser , Munich 1992)
  • Ultimo viene il corvo , 1949 (German. Last comes the raven . Stories, translated by Nino Erné , Julia M. Kirchner and Caesar Rymarowicz , Volk und Welt , Berlin (GDR) 1979)
  • Our ancestors:
  • Il visconte dimezzato , 1952 (German: The divided Visconte. Roman, translated by Oswalt von Nostitz , S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1957)
  • Il barone rampante , 1957 (German: The Baron on the Trees . Roman, translated by Oswalt v. Nostitz, S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1960)
  • Il cavaliere inesistente , 1959 (German: The knight who didn't exist. Roman, translated by Oswalt v. Nostitz, S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1963)
  • Fiabe Italiane , 1956 (German Italian fairy tales , selection, translated by Lisa Rüdiger, Manesse , Zurich 1975; The bride who lived on air and other Italian fairy tales , selection, translated by Burkhart Kroeber , Hanser, Munich 1993 ; New edition, both selections in one volume: Italian fairy tales , Fischer TB, Frankfurt / M. 2014)
  • Racconti , 1958 (German stories , people and world, Berlin (GDR) 1979, compiled from partial translations by Nino Erné, Die überfallene Konditorei , Nymphenburger , Munich 1960, by Julia M. Kirchner, Erzählungen , Suhrkamp , Frankfurt / M. 1964, and by Caesar Rymarowicz, The poisonous rabbit , people and world, Berlin (GDR) 1964)
  • La giornata di uno scrutatore , 1963 (German: The Day of an Election Helper , translated by Heinz Riedt, S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1964)
  • Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città , 1963 (German partial translations by Julia M. Kirchner, Marcovaldo or adventures of a simple man in the city, told according to the calendar , S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1967, and Heinz Riedt, Marcovaldo or Die Seasons in the City , Frankfurt / M. 1967). New edition with 22 colored and numerous black and white illustrations by Doro Petersen, from the Italian by Nino Erné, Heinz Riedt and Caesar Rymarowicz Edition Büchergilde , Frankfurt am Main, 2015.
  • Le Cosmicomiche , 1965; expanded new edition Cosmicomiche, vecchie e nuove , 1984 (German Cosmicomics , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1989; as a TB at dtv in two volumes: Das Gedächtnis der Welten , 1991, and On the traces of the galaxies , 1992; New edition, expanded by three stories: Alle Cosmicomics , Fischer TB, Frankfurt / M. 2015)
  • La formica argentina , 1965 (German: The Argentine Ant and other stories , translated by Helene Moser, Benziger, Zurich / Cologne 1972)
  • Gli amori difficili , 1970 (German Difficult Liaisons . Collected stories, with afterword by Volker Breidecker, Hanser, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24325-5 ; contains the translations of the Racconti that have already appeared , supplemented by some first translations by Burkhart Kroeber)
  • Orlando furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino , 1970 (German Ludovico Ariost's Rasender Roland, retold by Italo Calvino . With selected passages from the original in the German translation by Johann Diederich Gries. Translated, arranged and commented by Burkhart Kroeber, Die Andere Bibliothek vol . 232, Eichborn, Frankfurt / M. 2004; new edition Fischer TB, Frankfurt / M. 2015)
  • Le città invisibili , 1972 ( The invisible cities . Roman, translated by Heinz Riedt, Hanser, Munich 1977; newly translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 2007)
  • Il castello dei destini incrociati , 1973 ( Eng . The castle, in which destinies intersect. Story, translated by Heinz Riedt, Hanser, Munich 1978)
  • Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore , 1979 (German: When a traveler on a winter night . Novel, translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1983)
  • Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e società , 1980 (German cybernetics and ghosts. Reflections on literature and society , selection, translated by Susanne Schoop, Hanser, Munich 1984)
  • Palomar , 1983 (German: Mr. Palomar , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1985)

Works published posthumously

  • Sotto il sole giaguaro , 1986 (German: Under the Jaguar Sun , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1987)
  • Lezioni americane: sei proposte per il prossimo millennio , 1988 (German: six proposals for the next millennium. Harvard lectures , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1991)
  • La strada di San Giovanni , 1990 (German: The garbage can and other stories , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1994; new edition Der Weg nach San Giovanni and other stories , Fischer-TB, Frankfurt / M. 2016)
  • Perché leggere i classici, 1991 (German: Why read classics?, Translated by Barbara Kleiner and Susanne Schoop, Hanser, Munich 2003)
  • Prima che tu dica "pronto" , 1993 ( Ger . A general in the library and other stories , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 2004)
  • Eremita a Parigi: pagine autobiografiche , 1994 (German hermit in Paris: Autobiographische Blätter , translated by Burkhart Kroeber and Ina Martens, Hanser, Munich 1997)

Letters

  • I libri degli altri (Lettere 1947-1981) , ed. v. Giovanni Tesio, Turin 1999, and Lettere (1940–1985) , ed. v. Luca Baranelli, Milan 2000 (Eng. I regret that we don't know each other. Letters 1941–1985 , selection from both volumes, selected and commented by Franziska Meier, translated by Barbara Kleiner, Hanser, Munich 2007)

Opera libretti

  • In 1980 Calvino wrote a text for Mozart's unfinished Singspiel Zaide for the Batignano Festival, where the opera was performed in its adaptation in 1981: Testo per Zaide di Mozart (German Mozart's Zaide. A story of love and adventures , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, illustrated by Quint Buchholz, Hanser, Munich 1991).
  • Calvino also wrote the libretto Un re in ascolto for Luciano Berio . However, Berio changed the text so much that Calvino did not travel to the world premiere ( Salzburg Festival , 1984) because "only the title" was left of his draft (Eng. A King is listening , translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Universal Edition , Vienna 1984).

Honors

Before his sudden death, Calvino was a hot contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature .

literature

  • Focus: Italo Calvino. In: Zibaldone , magazine for contemporary Italian culture . Volume 1 (1986), Piper-Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-492-05011-5 .
  • Heike Maybach: The told reader. Studies on the role of the reader in Italo Calvino's novel "When a traveler on a winter night" . Materialis Verlag, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-88535-129-3 .
  • Gerhard Goebel-Schilling, Salvatore A. Sanna, Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus: Resist. Notes on Calvino's narrative work . Materialis Verlag, Frankfurt 1990, ISBN 3-88535-126-9 .
  • Christine Lessle: World reflection and world reading in Italo Calvino's late narrative work . Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 1992, ISBN 3-924888-92-2 .
  • Album Calvino , ed. v. Luca Baranelli et al. Ernesto Ferrero, transl. v. Andreas Löhrer, S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2013

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Santiago de las Vegas (not to be confused with Santiago de Cuba ) is a southern suburb of Havana, not far from the José Martí International Airport, incorporated since 1976
  2. ↑ On his youthful enthusiasm for cinema in the 1930s, cf. Calvino's 1974 essay autobiography of a viewer in the posthumously published volume La strada di San Giovanni , 1990, Eng. The garbage can and other stories
  3. ↑ In the volume published posthumously in 1990 La strada di San Giovanni , dt. The garbage can and other stories
  4. ↑ after Romano Lupi, in the weekly newspaper Liberazione , on April 25, 2002
  5. ↑ Taccuino di Viaggio in URSS di Italo Calvino , not translated into German in 1951
  6. ^ "Il viaggio dura sei mesi" (Cronologia, p. XXXII) in: Calvino, Italo - "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore", Oscar Mondadori edition, Milan 2009
  7. ↑ His American Diary , published posthumously in the volume Eremita a Parigi , 1994 (Eng. Eremit in Paris , 1997), gives eloquent testimony to his encounter with America
  8. ↑ Cronologia, S. XXXVI in: Calvino, Italo - "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore", edizione Oscar Mondadori, Milan 2009
  9. ^ Honorary Members: Italo Calvino. American Academy of Arts and Members, accessed March 7, 2019 .
  10. ^ Gore Vidal , " La morte di Calvino " (The New York Review Of Books, November 21, 1985) in: Sagarana, n. 3 (Italian).
  11. ^ Website archive of the city of Siena: Italo Calvino. Siena ricorda. ( Memento of the original from April 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed April 19, 2014 (Italian) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archivio.comune.siena.it
  12. ^ Domenico Scarpa: Calvino, Italo . In: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani . Retrieved July 6, 2014 (Italian).
  13. ^ The Mind of Italo Calvino: A Critical Exploration of His Thought and Writings, p. 3
personal data
SURNAME Calvino, Italo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de las Vegas , Cuba
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1985
Place of death Siena