Italo Calvino: Year of Living Keenly
As a former student of Italian, I am ashamed to confess that I have only ever read Italo Calvino in translation. I console myself with Calvino’s own preface to his first novel in which the author recalls the profound effect of Italian translations of Russian works on his literary development. In any case, Archibald Colquhoun’s rendering of Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947), is so natural that I would hope this is sufficient for at least some appreciation of the original writer’s merits. The Path to the Spiders’ Nests is engrossing in its gritty detail, and has been linked to the Neo-realist cinema movement emerging contemporaneously. It tells a warts-and-all story of World-War-Two Resistance at a time when Resistance narratives were about to become controlled by the Italian State, played down and effectively buried by the Christian Democrats to the frustration of the Italian Communist Party of which Calvino was then a member. The story centr...