Italo Calvino in the World: Visual Translations

Italo Calvino is one of the best known, most widely read and therefore translated Italian writers in the world. The first translation into a foreign language is in French and dates from 1955: it is that of Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount). Although France is, for biographical reasons (the writer lived in Paris for thirteen years) but above all for poetic reasons, the country most congenial to Calvino’s circulation and success, his books have been translated into many other countries and languages: from Bulgarian to Brazilian, from Basque to Russian, from Czech to Swedish, from Greek to Croatian, from Hebrew to Japanese, from Chinese to Polish, to name but a few. Among his most translated titles are Se una note d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveller), Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities), Palomar, Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees), Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales) and Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics).

It was in Paris, in 1995, that the first Fondo Calvino Tradotto was created, starting with a gift from Esther Singer Calvino to the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, which at the time was directed by Paolo Fabbri – the creator of the project. The original nucleus of the Fondo Tradotto has been enriched over the course of time, to the point of now counting some 530 translations preserved in the ‘Babelic’ rooms of the Hôtel de Galliffet.

As far as Italy is concerned, since 2017 the first foreign editions of Calvino’s books have been kept in the Fondo Italo Calvino (which until 2015 bore the name of Fondo Calvino Tradotto) and is now deposited at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome. This book collection, which comes from the writer’s personal library in his home in Rome – again a donation from Esther Singer Calvino and Giovanna Calvino –, includes the first foreign editions kept by Calvino himself and those collected by Esther Singer Calvino since 1985, and is still constantly updated with new publishing releases.

For Calvino, ‘translating is the true way of reading a text […] for an author, reflecting on the translation of his own text, discussing it with the translator, is the true way of reading himself, of understanding well what he has written and why’. Translation, therefore, is an extremely important and delicate operation in the life of a literary work. And indeed, the writer, who closely follows the editorial processes and events of his own books (and in particular the translation, especially in the languages he has mastered, i.e. French, English and Spanish) considers the translated text to be inevitably ‘impoverished, flattened’. At the same time, it is not surprising that Calvino had a privileged relationship with intellectuals such as William Weaver and François Wahl, who were not only his translators, but precisely other eyes with which to reread and observe his pages from a new perspective.

Even the covers determine, accompanying it, the life of a book. It is known that Calvino, in the words of Giulio Bollati ‘an excellent cover creator’, often chose or participated in choosing the covers of his books. For the first Einaudi editions, he favoured works by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso; to these names were added those of René Magritte, Maurits Cornelis Escher, Albrecht Dürer, and even Saul Steinberg and Sergio Tofano. As time went by, the covers, ‘thresholds’ of the book – to use Genette’s words – became veritable paradigms of reading. This is the case, for example, with the dust jacket of Collezione di sabia (Collection of sand), a visual Calvinian work par excellence, published by Garzanti in 1984, which represents one of the “fish-eyes” of the Codex Seraphinianus reviewed in the book.

The exhibition that follows presents a selection of covers of foreign editions of Calvino’s books, from the Fondo Calvino Tradotto in Paris (as can be seen from the labels visible on the volumes), with the aim of highlighting them as thresholds of the (translated) texts and, in a certain sense, also as their visual translations. From kaleidoscopes made of books to cities made of tram wires or tentacles, from the mise en abyme of novel covers to shells or spiral-shaped fossils, from famous paintings or overcrowded miniatures to stylised, cartoonish drawings, these covers show how the imagery triggered by Calvino’s vivid writing is as universal as it is singular.

Greta Gribaudo, Université d’Aix-Marseille –  Università “La Sapienza” di Roma

The exhibition ‘Italo Calvino in the world: visual translations’ was realised with the collaboration of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris