Roberto Calasso

Author profile

born

May 30, 1941 in Florence, Italy

gender

male

genre

Nonfiction, Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Roberto Calasso (born 30 May 1941 in Florence) is an Italian publisher and writer. He was born into a family of the local upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time. His maternal grandfather Giovanni Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University. Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, just like his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza. His uncle Tristano Codignola, partigiano during the Resistenza, after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education. His mother Melisenda – who gave up a promising academic career to raise her three children – was a scholar of German literature,...more Roberto Calasso (born 30 May 1941 in Florence) is an Italian publisher and writer. He was born into a family of the local upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time. His maternal grandfather Giovanni Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University. Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, just like his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza. His uncle Tristano Codignola, partigiano during the Resistenza, after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education. His mother Melisenda – who gave up a promising academic career to raise her three children – was a scholar of German literature, and had worked on Hölderlin’s translations of the Greek poet Pindar. His father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty. He has been working for Adelphi Edizioni since its founding in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. His books have from 1990 been translated into most European languages. After a successful career in publishing he has become a leading intellectual.[citation needed]

He is the author of a work in progress, that started with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book welcome by Italo Calvino, dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand and to a reflection on the culture of modernity. This was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a book where the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re-writing the great tales of Greek mythology and reflect on the reception of Greek culture for a contemporary readership. The trend for portraying whole civilizations continues with Ka (where the subject of the re-writing is Hindu mythology). K. instead restricts the focus to one single author(Franz Kafka); this trend continues with Il rosa Tiepolo, inspired by an adjective used by Proust to describe a shade of pink used by Tiepolo in his paintings. With his latest book, La folie Baudelaire, Calasso goes back to the fresco of whole civilisations, this time re-writing the lives and works of the artists that revolutionised our artistic taste, the symbolist poets and impressionist painters.

His essaystic production is collected in a few books: I quarantanove gradini (The Forty-nine Steps, a collection of essays about major authors and thinkers in European modernity addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife). His Oxford lessons are collected in Literature and the Gods. In 2005 Calasso published La follia che viene dalle ninfe, a collection of essays on the influence of the nymph in literature, which is discussed through authors ranging from Plato to Nabokov.(less)

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Books by Roberto Calasso

Average rating: 4.14 · 838 ratings · 111 reviews · 21 distinct works

	The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks (translator) 4.27 avg rating — 430 ratings — published 1988 — 20 editions	My rating:
	Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks (Translator) 4.15 avg rating — 169 ratings — published 1996 — 8 editions	My rating:
	Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks (Translator) 3.85 avg rating — 71 ratings — published 2001 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso, William Weaver (Translator), Stephen Sartarelli (Translator) 4.17 avg rating — 58 ratings — published 1983 — 9 editions	My rating:
	K. by Roberto Calasso, Geoffrey Brock (Translator) 3.83 avg rating — 35 ratings — published 2002 — 10 editions	My rating:
	Tiepolo Pink 3.74 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 2006 — 9 editions	My rating:
	Forty-Nine Steps by Roberto Calasso, John Shepley (Translator) 3.73 avg rating — 11 ratings — published 1991 — 4 editions	My rating:
	La follia che viene dalle Ninfe 3.25 avg rating — 8 ratings — published 2005 — 3 editions	My rating:
	L'ardore 3.20 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 2010	My rating:
	La Folie Baudelaire 3.75 avg rating — 8 ratings — published 2008 — 6 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Roberto Calasso

“The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.”
― Roberto Calasso

3 people liked it

“Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.”
― Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods

2 people liked it

“The gods are fugitive guests of literature. ”
― Roberto Calasso

2 people liked it

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