Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) (Italian pronunciation: was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels.

His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Journalist, short story writer and novelist, experimental writer whose imaginative fabulations made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. Calvino's career as a writer spanned nearly four decades.
"After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language." (from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988)
Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba.
ولد في كوبا
I will begin by saying that I was born under the sign of Libra," he once said. (Libra is the 7th sign of the zodiak, operative September 24-October 23; the word for book in Italian is libro.) Both of his parents, Mario and Eva Calvino, were botanists.
والداه يعملان في حقل الزراعة
Calvino moved with his family in Italy in his youth and spent his early years in San Remo, where his father was the curator of the botanical gardens.
تنقل مع والديه في ايطاليا
Between 1941 and 1947 Calvino studied at the University of Turin.
درس في جامعة تورين ما بين عامي 1941 و1947
In 1940, he was drafted into the Young Fascists and participated in the Italian occupation of the French Riviere,
تم تجنيده في الجيش الفاشي وشارك في احتلال الريفيرا الفرنسية
but at the age of nineteen he left and sought refuge in the Alps.
لكنه ترك الجندية وهو في سن التاسعة عشرة ولجأ الى جبال الالب
There he joined the Communist Resistance in the Ligurian mountains.
هناك انضم الى المقاومة الشيوعية
From these experiences he drew inspiration for his first stories.
من هذه التجارب اشتق اولى قصصه
"The sea rose and fell against the rocks of the mole, making the fishing boats sway, and dark-skinned men were filling them with red nets and lobster pots for the evening's fishing. The water was calm, with just a slight continual change of color, blue and black, darker farthest away. I thought of the expanses of water like this, of the infinite grains of soft sand down there at the bottom of the sea where the currents leave white shells washed clean by the waves." (from 'The Argentine Ant' in Adam, One Afternoon, 1949)
After the war Calvino graduated from the University of Turin and worked for the communist periodical L'Unitá in 1945 as a journalist and for Einaudi publishing house from 1948 to 1984.
بعد انتهاء الحرب تخرج من جامعة تورين وعمل صحفي للمجلة الشيوعية وعمل في دار نشر منذ عام 1948 وحتى عام 1984
He wrote for various periodicals throughout his life, including L'Unitá, La Nostra Lotta, Il Garibaldino, Voce della Democrazia, Il Contemporaneo, Cittá Aperta, and La Republica. Between 1955 and 1958 Calvino had an affair with the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, who was married to Count Sandro Contini Bonacossi.
ارتبط بعلاقة غرامية مع ممثلة متزوجة بين الاعوام 1955 و1958
Excepts from his letters were published in an article in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera in 2004.
From 1959 to 1967 Calvino edited with Elio Vittorini the magazine Il Menabó di letteratura. In 1952 he travelled to the Soviet Union and in 1959-60 to the United States.
سافر الى الاتحاد السوفيتي عام 1952 والى الولايات المتحدة عام 1959 – 1960
In 1967 he moved to Paris, and then to Rome in 1979.
انتقل الى باريس عام 1967 ثم الى روما في العام 1979
While living in France, Calvino met the Argentinian translator Ester Judith Singer (Chichita), they were married in 1964 in Havanna.
تزوج عام 1964 من المترجمة الارجينتنية ايستر
Following in the footsteps of Cesare Pavese, Calvino signed up with the Turin-based publishers Einaudi. Calvino's first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947) depicted resistance movement, seen through the eyes of a young boy and in Neorealistic manner. The work was noted for its fablelike twists in the narrative. Il visconte dimezzato (1952) marked Calvino's break with the common themes connected with the experience of war.
كانت روايته الاولى عن ما يدور في الحرب
It told the story of a man cut in half by a cannonball during the Turkish-Christian war. The publication of the novel provoked a debate of realism by the Italian Communist party.
In the 1950s published fantastic tales, hovering between allegory and pure fantasy, brought Calvino international acclaim and established his reputation as one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. Il visconte dimezzato was followed by Il barone rampante (1957), in which an 18th-century baron's son climbs a tree and ends up spending his life in various treetops. Il cavaliere inesistente (1959) completed the trilogy, which gave precedence to fantasy outside the general neorealistic vein. Behind the playful spinning of tales also can been seen Calvino's questioning about the relationship between the individual conscience and the course of history. In Marcovalco (1963), a collection of fables, Calvino satirized the modern, destructive urban way of living. Marcovalco is a Chaplinisque character, an ordinary working man and a father, who desperately longs for beauty and sinks in his daydreams whenever he can. When everybody leaves the city in August, he enjoys the empty streets. His peace is interrupted by a television group – it wants to interview the only person who is not on holiday.
In the post-1956 period, marked by the events in Hungary which were to cause Calvino to leave the Italian Communist Party, Calvino devoted himself more to journalism than to fiction; he also continued to write for Il contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly. When Calvino left the Party he felt deeply distressed and wrote: "Having grown up in times of dictatorship, and being overtaken by total war when of military age, I still have the notion that to live in peace and freedom is a frail kind of good fortune that might be taken away from me in an instant." In one article Calvino asked, "Was I Stalinist Too?"
ترك الحزب الشيوعي احتجاجا على تصرفات ستالين وقد شعر بكآبة شديدة لتركه الحزب
Calvino visited New York first time in 1959 and came to regard it as "my city". His 'American Diary 1959-60' consisted of letters written to colleagues. Calvino was amazed of the size of the fridges and how ignorant Americans were of Italian writing. In 1964 he went to Paris to strengthen his ties with the latest innovative trends. However, in La nuvola di smog (1965) the author returned for awhile to the social-realistic mode to satirize the industrial society. Le cosmicomiche (1965) set the concepts of evolution against cosmic scales. Through the boasting accounts of Qfwfq, who is as old as the universe, Calvino questions all the basic concepts of scientific theories. Qfwfq changes constantly – it has been a fish, and the last dinosaur. When his dear friend says, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!", this outburst of general love initiates "at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitation universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat..." In Il Castello dei destini incrociati (1973) Calvino found his source of inspiration in two ancient packs of tarot cards. The novel represented a type of open text that allows for a similar variety of possible readings.
"Waiting in line, Mr Palomar contemplates the jars. He tries to find a place in his memories for cassoulet, a rich stew of meats and beans, in which goose-fat is an essential ingredient; but neither his palate's memory nor his cultural memory is of any help to him. And yet the name, the sight, the idea attract him, awaken an immediate fantasy not so much of appetite as of eros: from a mountain of goose-fat a female figure surfaces, smears white over her rosy skin, and he already imagines himself making his way towards her through those thick avalanches, embracing her, sinking with her." (from Mister Palomar, 1983)
Of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979), Salman Rushdie declared: "He is writing down what you have always known except that you've never thought of it before."
Calvino died of cerebral hemorrhage in Siena, on September 19, 1985.
مات عام 1985بسبب نزيف دماغي
Cuba
Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture.[ Born 47 years earlier in San Remo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist". In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.
في احد مقالاته كتب عن والده انه كان من الفوضويين ثم تحول الى الاشتراكيين وعمل في المكسيك وغادر الى كوبا حيث ولد ايتالو عندما كان الوالد في سن السابعة والاربعين
Calvino's mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while still a junior lecturer at Pavia University. Born into a secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated in the "religion of civic duty and science".[4] Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict.
وصف والديه بأنهما كانا مختلفين في الشخصية وهو ما يعكس علاقة صعبة
As an adolescent, he found it hard relating to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents’ openness to the laborers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.
Early life and education
In 1925, less than two years after Calvino's birth, the family returned to Italy and settled permanently in San Remo on the Ligurian coast. Calvino's brother Floriano, who became a distinguished geologist, was born in 1927.
انتقلت العائلة بعد ولادته بعاميين الى ايطاليا من كوبا
The family divided their time between the Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture station which also served as their home, and Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista. On this small working farm set in the hills behind San Remo, Mario pioneered in the cultivation of then exotic fruits such as avocado and grapefruit, eventually obtaining an entry in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani for his achievements. The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent in Calvino's early fiction such as The Baron in the Trees derives from this "legacy". In an interview, Calvino stated that "San Remo continues to pop out in my books, in the most diverse pieces of writing." He and Floriano would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favorite adventure stories. Less salubrious aspects of this "paternal legacy" are described in The Road to San Giovanni, Calvino's memoir of his father in which he exposes their inability to communicate: "Talking to each other was difficult.
يصف في مذكراته علاقة والديه الصعبة وقال انهما وجدا صعوبة في التواصل
Both verbose by nature, possessed of an ocean of words, in each other's presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni." A fan of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book as a child, Calvino felt that his early interest in stories made him the "black sheep" of a family that held literature in less esteem than the sciences. Fascinated by American movies and cartoons, he was equally attracted to drawing, poetry, and theatre. On a darker note, Calvino recalled that his earliest memory was of a socialist professor brutalized by Fascist lynch-squads.
يقول ان اولى ذكرياته هو عن بروفسيور اشتراك عومل بصورة وحشية من قبل الفاشيين
"I remember clearly that we were at dinner when the old professor came in with his face beaten up and bleeding, his bowtie all torn, asking for help."
اذكر تماما اننا كنا نتناول طعام العشاء عندما جاء ذلك الدكتور وهو ينزف وقد ضرب على جهه يطلب المساعدة
Other legacies include the parents’ masonic republicanism which occasionally developed into anarchic socialism. Austere, anti-Fascist freethinkers, Eva and Mario refused to give their sons any religious education. Italo attended the English nursery school St George's College, followed by a Protestant elementary private school run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling was completed at the state-run Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini where, at his parents’ request, he was exempted from religious instruction but forced to justify his anticonformist stance. In his mature years, Calvino described the experience as a salutary one as it made him "tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs”. During this time, he met a brilliant student from Rome, Eugenio Scalfari, who went on to found the weekly magazine L'Espresso and La Repubblica, a major Italian newspaper. The two teenagers formed a lasting friendship, Calvino attributing his political awakening to their university discussions. Seated together "on a huge flat stone in the middle of a stream near our land", he and Scalfari founded the MUL (University Liberal Movement).
Eva managed to delay her son's enrolment in the Fascist armed scouts, the Balilla Moschettieri, and then arranged that he be excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional acts in church. But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the Avanguardisti, and was forced to participate in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera in June 1940.
World War II
In 1941, Calvino dutifully enrolled at the University of Turin, choosing the Agriculture Faculty where his father had previously taught courses in agronomy. Concealing his literary ambitions to please his family, he passed four exams in his first year while reading anti-Fascist works by Elio Vittorini, Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese, Johan Huizinga, and Pisacane, and works by Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein on physics. Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a "provincial shell" that offered the illusion of immunity from the Fascist nightmare: "We were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women."
Calvino transferred to the University of Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams in agriculture. By the end of the year, the Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and setting up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò in northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading intensely in a wide array of subjects, he also reasoned politically that, of all the partisan groupings, the communists were the best organized with "the most convincing political line".
رفض الانضمام للخدمة العسكرية للفاشيين وهو في سن العشرين واختفى عن الانظار
In spring 1944, Eva encouraged her sons to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of "natural justice and family virtues". Using the battlename of "Santiago", Calvino joined the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group and, for twenty months, endured the fighting in the Maritime Alps until 1945 and the Liberation.
والدته شجعته على الانضمام للمقاومة الايطالية عام 1944 وقد شارك فعلا بالمقاومة وقد انتحل اسم سانتياغو وقاتل مع الشيوعيين لمدة عشرين شهرا
As a result of his refusal to be a conscript, his parents were held hostage by the Nazis for an extended period at the Villa Meridiana. Calvino wrote of his mother's ordeal that "she was an example of tenacity and courage… behaving with dignity and firmness before the SS and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage, not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena"
كنتيجة لرفض والديه الانضمام الى الحركة النازية قام النازيون باحتجازهم لمدة طويلة وكتب كلفانيو عن ذلك ووصف امه بأنها كانت شجاعة في مواجهة الحجز والتعذيب مثل خلال الاعدام الوهمي لزوجها ثلاث مرات امام اعينها
Turin and communism
Calvino settled in Turin in 1945, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. He often humorously belittled this choice, describing Turin as a "city that is serious but sad".
استقر عام 1945 في مدينة تيرن والتي وصفها بأنها مدينة حزينة
Returning to university, he abandoned Agriculture for the Arts Faculty. A year later, he was initiated into the literary world by Elio Vittorini, who published his short story "Andato al comando" (1945; "Gone to Headquarters") in Il Politecnico, a Turin-based weekly magazine associated with the university. The horror of the war had not only provided the raw material for his literary ambitions but deepened his commitment to the Communist cause.
الرعب من الحرب لم توفر فقط المادة الخامة لاماله الادبية وانما زادات من الزامه بالشيوعية
Viewing civilian life as a continuation of the partisan struggle, he confirmed his membership of the Italian Communist Party. On reading Vladimir Lenin's State and Revolution, he plunged into post-war political life, associating himself chiefly with the worker's movement in Turin.
In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party.
غادر الحزب الشيوعي عام 1957 بسبب رفضه لاحتلال الاتحاد السوفيتي لهنجاريا
In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member of the American Academy. Awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1976, he visited Mexico, Japan, and the United States where he gave a series of lectures in several American towns. After his mother died in 1978 at the age of 92, Calvino sold Villa Meridiana, the family home in San Remo.
ماتت امه عام 1978 عن عمر 92 سنه ومات هو عام 1985