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ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9709-3255
Access Type
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
thesis
Degree Program
Comparative Literature
Degree Type
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
May
Abstract
The scholarly consensus is that the early essays “Il mare dell’oggettività” and “La sfida al labirinto” are two of the most important Italo Calvino wrote on his literary poetics, influencing the metaphors and problematics of his entire corpus: the sea of objectivity, the labyrinth, chaotic flux, a rational cogito subjectivity, binary oppositions etc. The essays were made available to a general public in the collection Una pietra sopra in 1980, part of a selection of texts handpicked by Calvino himself. Curiously, the 1986 English translation titled The Uses of Literature does not contain these important and influential essays, making them unavailable to an Anglophone audience. These essays are here now translated, accompanied by a critical commentary by the translator about their relevance and importance to Calvino’s corpus. The problematics discussed in these essays would re-emerge, with remarkable consistency, in the metaphorical imagery Calvino deployed throughout his career. Nevertheless, Calvino evolves the problematics significantly throughout his career, almost inverting his original stance. Rather than this being an inversion, however, the translator argues that Calvino’s evolution represents a dialectical movement propelled by contradiction, and that therein lies the actual poetics or the stylized mode of thought that these essays inaugurated. Viewing the essays in this light renders them, and Calvino’s entire corpus, ripe for dialogic encounter and collision with otherwise parallel philosophical traditions and schools of thought.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/28702410
First Advisor
Jim Hicks
Second Advisor
Jessica Barr
Third Advisor
Anna Botta
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Scriboni, Ken W. Jr, "Translating Calvino’s Dialectical Style" (2022). Masters Theses. 1219.
https://doi.org/10.7275/28702410
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/1219