Organised by the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in the School of Languages Literature and Cultural Studies in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, a conference taking place across three-days in the Trinity Long Room Hub brought together leading scholars and translators of Calvino’s work. What followed was a fascinating multi-and cross-disciplinary discussion on the author’s impact across different cultures and media.
The headline of a recent article in Italy’s La Repubblica reads “ChatGPT, Italo Calvino aveva previsto tutto”, or “ChatGPT: Italo Calvino predicted everything.” Journalist Roberto Di Caro recounts how in 1967 Calvino wondered whether, one day, we will “have a machine capable of substituting the poet and the writer, to create and compose poems and novels?” (Avremo la macchina capace di sostituire il poeta e lo scrittore, di ideare e comporre poesie e romanzi?) This was the subject of Dr Federico Federici’s talk on techniques and technologies as he reflected on what Calvino, who experimented extensively with style, would have done with ChatGPT?
Computer simulation and literary invention were also discussed in a contribution by Dr Eleonora Lima, a Research Fellow in the Discipline of Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. Working through both Calvino and Japanese architect Arata Isozaki’s conceptions of the city, Dr Lima explored the nature of the ‘’ever-changing cities’’ that both were concerned with, and the forces that shape a city, including growth and disruption.
Professor Michael Cronin, Chair of French 1776, French, at Trinity College Dublin, and also speaking to ‘Calvino’s Landscapes’, probed the links between Invisible Cities and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, known for its idiosyncratic language use. Outlining the references to the “more-than-human" worlds in both, Professor Cronin argued that a “crisis of translatability” can leave us blind to connections held in indigenous languages as he spoke about Joyce’s preoccupation with water.
Conference organizers Dr James Hadley, Dr. Claudia Dellacasa, Dr Enrica Maria Ferrara and Andrea Bergantino
The conference focused extensively on the translation of Calvino’s works globally, as detailed by Dr Francesca Rubini of Rome’s La Sapienza University, who cited Calvino as the Italian intellectual “who has had the most significant impact on an international scale.” Dr Rubini outlined how the writer’s work had been translated into 56 languages, in 67 countries and in 12 alphabets, and argued that translation, for such writers, means “raising the stakes.” This point was picked up further by Dr Federico Federici (University College London) when he said “translation offers the opportunity of becoming a modern classic.”
Among the highlights of the conference were Professor Domenico Scarpa’s book launch (Calvino Makes the Shell: A Process, a Proposal, a Promise), an interview-performance with Italian author Silvio Perrella impersonating Italo Calvino himself, and an interview with Ann Goldstein, noted translator of the so-called Napolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante’s four-part series originally published in Italian. Turning her attention to Calvino’s essays in her most recent translation The Written World and the Unwritten World, Goldstein outlined some of the challenges she encountered with dealing with certain Italian terms, and the assumptions that must be addressed in what readers will know about the original translated culture. Goldstein has also translated works including Alessandro Baricco, Primo Levi, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Further outreach events that were also part of the conference but took place at the Italian Insitute of Culture in Dublin included the screening of Ricordi?, inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees and followed by a Q&A with Italian director Valerio Mieli, and the premiere of a theatrical performance curated by actress Cloris Brosca on the theme of Calvino’s life and work. Both events were fully booked.
Marco Giochini, Director of the Italian Institute of Culture
Other panel discussions at the Hub focused on Calvino and ‘Human Sciences,’ ‘Calvino across Worlds’ ‘Calvino across Media’ and the popular Six Memos for the next Millenium, and ‘Performance and Performativity in Calvino’. Speaking on Calvino’s youthful passion for the theatre, Dr Enrica Maria Ferrara (TCD), who recently acted as an advisor on Goldstein’s latest translation of Calvino, spoke about material from the writer’s theatre days being recycled and re-used in later works, and also picked up themes of the ‘more-than-human’ and eco-translation raised by Professor Michael Cronin in his work on the topic.
Dr Ferrara commented on some of the highlights of the conference as bringing to the fore “Calvino’s understanding of culture as a porous and translatable entity, inhabited by hybrid human-non-human presences, anticipating important environmental issues.”
She said, “a vibrant debate emerged around themes and keywords such as translation, eco-translation, and translators, identities in transformation, human-nonhuman entanglements, performance and performativity in Calvino’s narrative, global reception and interdisciplinary approaches to Calvino’s work.”
Dr Ferrara also noted that the conference was dedicated to the memory of Calvino scholar Roberto Bertoni (1952-2019), Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin. Professor Bertoni was Dr. Ferrara’s mentor during her IRC project (2008-2011) which resulted in two Calvino publications: Calvino e il teatro (Peter Lang, 2011) and Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Calvino, Pasolini (Firenze University Press, 2014).
Ann Goldstein’s interview with James Hadley and Enrica Maria Ferrara is available to watch on Youtube, click here:#
The conference was sponsored by the generous grants of the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin, the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, and the Society for Italian Studies and organised by scholars of the Italian department and of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation (Andrea Bergantino, Dr. Enrica Maria Ferrara, Dr. James Hadley) along with UCD scholar Dr. Claudia Dellacasa.