Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso (born 1941 in Florence) is an Italian publisher and writer. He studied English Literature at the University of Rome and graduated with a thesis on "The hieroglyphs of Sir Thomas Browne" supervised by Mario Praz. 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.Fact|date=July 2007

He has been apparently pursuing a self-alliterating course of titles: "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" (on Cadmus and Greek mythology); "The Ruin of Kasch" (on Kush and modernity); "Ka" (on Garuda and Hindu mythology); "K" (on Franz Kafka); and "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).

Bibliography

Bibliography in Italian

Novels:

* "L'impuro folle" (1974)
* "La rovina di Kasch" (1983. Translated in English as "The Ruin of Kasch")
* "Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia" (1988. Translated as "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony")
* "Ka" (1996. Translated as "Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India" and "Ka: The Story of Garuda")
* "K." (2002. Translated as "K")

Essays :

* "I quarantanove gradini" (1991. Translated as "The Forty-nine Steps")
* "Sentieri tortuosi. Bruce Chatwin Fotografo" (1998. Translated as "Winding Paths: Photographs by Bruce Chatwin")
* "La letteratura e gli dèi" (2001. Translated as "Literature and the Gods")
* "Cento lettere a uno sconosciuto" (2003)
* "La follia che viene dalle Ninfe" (2005)

Lectures and articles:

* "L'editoria come genere letterario", lecture given October 17 in Moscow, for an exhibition on the Adelphi publishing company; published on the on-line literary review "Adelphiana", November 16 2001 http://www.adelphiana.it/pdf/Calasso.pdf

English translations

* "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony", translated by Tim Parks, New York: Knopf, 1993.
* [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CALRUI.html "The Ruin of Kasch "] , translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, Harvard University Press, 1994.
** Winner of a Critics' Choice Award, Compiled by the "San Francisco Review of Books" and "Today's First Edition", Translations Category.
* "Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India", translated by Tim Parks, New York: Knopf, 1998.
* "Winding Paths: Photographs by Bruce Chatwin", 1999.
* "Erotic Anger: A User's Manual", with Gérard Pommier, 2001. Psychoanalysis.
* "Literature and the Gods", translated by Tim Parks, New York: Knopf, 2000. Based on Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford.
* "The Forty-nine Steps", translated by John Shepley, 2001.
* "K", translated by Geoffrey Brock, 2005.
* "Ka: The Story of Garuda", retold by Geeta Dharmarajan, illustrations by Suddhasattwa Basu, Katha, 2005.

External links

* [http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1135 Roberto Calasso at PEN American Center]