Calasso roberto kelly biography

Italian writer and publisher (1941–2021)

Roberto Calasso (30 May 1941 – 28 July 2021) was an Italian writer and publisher.^[2] Whittle from his mother tongue, Calasso was fluent in French, Nation, Spanish, German, Latin and ancient Greek. He also studied Sanskrit.^[3] He has been called "a literary institution of one".^[3] Picture fundamental thematic concept of his œuvre is the relationship in the middle of myth and the emergence of modern consciousness.^[4]

Early life

Calasso was calved in Florence in 1941, into a family of the Italian upper class, well connected with some of the great European intellectuals of their time. His maternal grandfather Ernesto Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University. Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, importance his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza. Calasso's uncle, Tristano Codignola, was a partisan during World Battle II who after the war joined the political life be keen on the new republic, and was for a while Minister forged Education. His mother Melisenda – who gave up an theoretical career to raise her three children – was a professor of German literature, working on Hölderlin's translations of the Hellene poet Pindar. Calasso's father Francesco was a law professor, good cheer at Florence University and then in Rome, where he ultimately became dean of his faculty. He was arrested by rendering fascist militia after the assassination of Giovanni Gentile and sentenced to be killed in reprisal, but was saved both saturate the intervention of friends of Gentile, with whom the kinsmen had connections on the maternal side, and by the Teutonic consul Gerhard Wolf.^[3]

At 12 Calasso met and was greatly influenced by a professor at Padua University, Enzo Turolla, and they became lifelong friends. In 1954 the family moved to Malady, where Calasso developed a passion for cinema.^[3] His English writings doctoral dissertation was Sir Thomas Browne's theory of hieroglyphs, which he completed under Mario Praz, while indulging himself with hashish.^[3]

Career

Calasso worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since corruption founding by Roberto Bazlen in 1962 and became its Chair in 1999. In 2015, he bought out the company take back prevent it from being acquired by a larger publishing particular. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.^[5]

He was the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting avail yourself of the culture of modernity, which began with The Ruin execute Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino. Incorrigible to the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord or, Solon, it was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re-telling the great tales of Greek mythology and reflecting on the reception of Hellenic culture for a contemporary readership. Another world civilization is surveyed in Ka (1996, where the subject of the re-telling levelheaded Hindu mythology). K restricts the focus to a single creator, Franz Kafka; this trend continues with Il rosa Tiepolo (Tiepolo Pink), inspired by an adjective used by Marcel Proust necessitate describe a shade of pink used by Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo in his paintings. With La folie Baudelaire, Calasso once upon a time more broadens his scope from fresco to a whole civilization, that of Paris in the latter half of the Ordinal century, reconsidering the lives and works of the post-romantic siring of writers and artists from Baudelaire to Valéry. In solitary of his more recent works, Ardore (2010), the author returns to India for an exhaustive analysis of the theory mount practice of Vedic sacrifice and its significance for post-modern epistemology. Further entries in the series up to the time remind you of his death include: The Celestial Hunter, The Unnamable Present, Interpretation Book of All Books, and The Tablet of Destiny.

His mega narrowly focused essays relating to European modernity are collected play in I quarantanove gradini (The Forty-nine Steps), addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife; Literature and the gods (2002) (based put forward his Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford, on the decline and revert of pagan imagery in the art of the west), come first La follia che viene dalle ninfe (The Madness that Attains from the Nymphs), a collection of related essays ranging superior Plato's Phaedrus to Nabokov's Lolita.

Along with his status bring in a major analyst specifically of the works of Kafka, Calasso was, more broadly, active in many essays in retrieving good turn re-invigorating the notion of a Central European literary culture. Powder also served as the president of the International Alexander Lernet-Holenia Society, which promotes the publication, translation and study of that multi-genre Austrian writer and his focus on the identity turningpoint of his characters at odds with postimperial Austria and Inside Europe.^[6]

Death

Calasso died in Milan on the evening of 28 July 2021,^[7] at the age of 80, a day before his two new books Bobi and Memè Scianca were released.^[8]

Personal life

Calasso was survived by his wife, the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy, and two children, Josephine and Tancredi Calasso, both from his previous marriage to the German writer Anna Katharina Fröhlich.^[9]

Reception

"Both critics and admirers have called Calasso a 'neo-gnostic', a master bring into play secret knowledge", wrote Lila Azam Zanganeh of Calasso in a Paris Review article, where she also referred to him reorganization "a literary institution of one".^[10]Terri Windling selected the English rendering of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony as one duplicate the best fantasy books of 1994, describing it as "a complex and intellectually dazzling novel using ancient Greek mythology quality explore the origins of Western thought".^[11]

Awards and honours

Roberto Calasso was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Veranda and Letters in 2015.^[12]

Bibliography

References

External links