Italo Calvino

1923–85

It is a particular challenge to introduce Calvino, an author who consummately introduced the works of innumerable authors, including his own. The copy he wrote in his many years working as an editor at Einaudi are capsules of literary criticism that turned editorial promotion into an art. Along with Umberto Eco, he remains the most widely read twentieth-century Italian author in English whose body of work yokes together folklore, neoRealism and postmodern literature. Almost all his writing, groundbreaking and intensely experimental, has been translated by the late, great William Weaver. This piece, one exception, was omitted from the novel Palomar (entitled, in English, Mr Palomar), published in 1983, in which the eponymous protagonist, who shares his name with a famous astronomical observatory in San Diego, California, describes the world with a philosopher’s detachment and a taxonomist’s precision. In the novel, the tortoise is described in the act of copulation, in an unforgettable chapter called ‘Mr Palomar in the Garden’. In this out-take, the same creature assumes a decidedly sagacious role, speaking for himself. This text is typical of Calvino’s double register: ironic and formal, phenomenological and playful, abstract and concrete. Structured as a formal dialogue that nods and winks both at Plato and Leopardi, it is about language, perception and point of view. It is also the only story in this volume that talks explicitly about translation. Calvino, who was born in Cuba, raised in San Remo and lived for thirteen years in France, was rooted to no single place or language. Obsessed with scientific lexicon, he looked repeatedly at the idiom of animals as a counterpart, and perhaps as an alternative, to human communication. One of the foremost literary luminaries of his time, he was invited to give the prestigious Norton Lectures in 1984 for Harvard University, posthumously published as Lezioni americane (in English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium), but died of a cerebral haemorrhage before he could deliver them.

Dialogue with a Tortoise

Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Sara Teardo

When leaving or returning home, Mr Palomar often bumps into a tortoise. At the sight of this tortoise crossing the lawn, Mr Palomar, always keen to entertain any possible objection to his line of reasoning, momentarily halts his stream of thoughts, correcting or clarifying certain points, or in any case calling them into question and assessing their validity.

Not that the tortoise ever objects to anything that Mr Palomar opines: the creature minds his own business and isn’t bothered by anything else. But the mere fact of his showing up on the lawn, trudging with claws that thrust his shell forward like the oars of a barge, amounts to asserting: ‘I am a tortoise’ or rather: ‘There is an I that is a tortoise’, or better still: ‘The I is also a tortoise’, and finally: ‘Nothing you think that purports to be universal is so unless it is equally valid for you, Man, and for me, Tortoise.’ It follows that, every time they meet, the tortoise enters Mr Palomar’s mind, crossing it with its steady stride. Mr Palomar continues to ponder his previous thoughts, but now they contain a tortoise, a tortoise who is perhaps sharing those thoughts, thus putting those previous thoughts to an end.