style and to the comparative efficacy of rival Italian translations of the novel.

One final trend also evident here is worth noting: in the 1970s and 1980s not only does Calvino turn back to Italian classics such as Ariosto, but he also rereads a number of ancient texts, such as Homer, Xenophon, Ovid and Pliny. His creative writing in this period is also informed by this new aspiration towards classical qualities: in the central section of Invisible Cities, for instance, the city of Baucis explicitly recalls the myth in the central book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, discussed at length in the essay in this volume. Similarly the central definition of Pliny in the 1982 essay (‘the measured movement of [Pliny’s] prose … is enlivened by his admiration for everything that exists and his respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena’) throws interesting light on the creative work Calvino was composing at this same time: in one sense Mr Palomar (1983) is a modern, or post-modern, Pliny, its smooth prose encompassing his interest in all flora and fauna. Calvino’s appetite for French literature also embraces contemporary writers such as Ponge and Queneau, the essay on the latter reflecting the Italian author’s interest in that innovative blend of literature and mathematics that was characteristic of the French author and his friends in the OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle); while Ponge’s defamiliarisation of quotidian objects echoes Mr Palomar’s attempt to see the universe with fresh eyes, whether it be waves on a beach, the sky at night, or the blades of grass in a lawn. The collection as a whole thus offers a kind of rear view into the everyday workshop of a great creative writer: what Calvino read was often metamorphosed creatively, intertextually, into what Calvino wrote.

Despite the variety of texts discussed here, and their suggestion of the author’s evolution, there are important constants. There is an extraordinary consistency in his appreciation of those works that celebrate the practicality and nobility of human labour, a line that Calvino traces from Xenophon to Defoe and Voltaire before reaching Conrad and Hemingway. On the stylistic side, these essays demonstrate how Calvino consistently appreciated the five literary qualities that he regarded as essential for the next millennium: lightness (Cyrano, Diderot, Borges), rapidity (Ovid, Voltaire), precision (Pliny, Ariosto, Galileo, Cardano, Ortes, Montale), visibility (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert), multiplicity or potential literature (Borges, Queneau). Perhaps, then, a further definition of what a classic is could be added to the fourteen definitions put forward in the elegant title essay, ‘Why Read the Classics?’: ‘A classic is a work which (like each of Calvino’s texts) retains a consciousness of its own modernity without ceasing to be aware of other classic works of the past.’

Any quotations from non-English original texts about which Calvino is writing are my own translations, either based on the original ‘classic’ text or on the translation used by Calvino. Given the wide-ranging nature of these essays I have of course been helped by a number of experts to whom I here express my deep gratitude: Catriona Kelly, Howard Miles, Jonny Patrick, Christopher Robinson, Nicoletta Simborowski, Ron Truman.

Christ Church, Oxford Martin McLaughlin

Notes

1 They appeared in Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine. Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1987), with the following tides: ‘Why Read the Classics?’; ‘The Odysseys Within The Odyssey’; ‘Ovid and Universal Contiguity’; ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’; ‘The Structure of Orlando Furioso’; ‘Cyrano on the Moon’; ‘Candide: an Essay on Velocity’; ‘The City as Protagonist in Balzac’; ‘Stendhal’s Knowledge of the “Milky Way”’; ‘Guide to The Charterhouse of Parma for the Use of New Readers’; ‘Montale’s Rock’.

Preface

In a letter dated 27 September 1961 Italo Calvino wrote to Niccolò Gallo: ‘As for collecting essays as occasional and disparate as my own, one should really wait until the author is either dead or at least in advanced old age.’

Despite this, Calvino did begin to collect his non-fiction in 1980, with the volume Una pietra sopra (Closing the Door), followed in 1984 by Collezione di sabbia (Collection of Sand). Subsequently he authorised for his overseas readership a selection which was the English, American and French equivalent of Una pietra sopra, but which was not identical to the Italian original: it included the essays on Homer, Pliny, Ariosto, Balzac, Stendhal and Montale, as well as the title essay of the present volume. Later still he modified some of the tides of these essays — and in one case, the article on Ovid, he added another page which