(Presenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus and Ar...)
Presenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus and Ariadne, the birth of Athens and the fall of Troy, in all their variants, Calasso also uncovers the distant origins of secrets and tragedy, virginity, and rape.
(Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ...)
Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name--"Ka," or Who? What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse.
(In books lauded as brilliant, exhilarating, and profound,...)
In books lauded as brilliant, exhilarating, and profound, Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient and modern through topics ranging from Greek and Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution.
(Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature a...)
Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso’s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and enchantment of great literature.
(The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiep...)
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art.
(In a meditation on the wisdom of the Vedas, Roberto Calas...)
In a meditation on the wisdom of the Vedas, Roberto Calasso brings ritual and sacrifice to bear on the modern world. In this revelatory volume he explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people, who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: They left behind almost no objects, images, or ruins. They created no empires. Even the soma, the likely hallucinogenic plant that appears at the center of some of their rituals, has not been identified with any certainty.
(A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence...)
A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects―“the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else,” wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983.
(A decisive key to help grasp some of the essential points...)
A decisive key to help grasp some of the essential points of what is happening around us. The ninth part of Roberto Calasso’s work in progress, The Unnamable Present, is closely connected with themes of the first book, The Ruin of Kasch. But while Kasch is an enlightened exploration of modernity, The Unnamable Present propels us into the twenty first century. Tourists, terrorists, secularists, fundamentalists, hackers, transhumanists, algorithmicians: these are all tribes that inhabit the unnamable present and act on its nervous system.
Roberto Calasso is an Italian writer, translator, and publisher. He has directed Adelphi, Italy’s most prestigious publishing house, for forty years.
Background
Calasso was born on March 30, 1941, in Florence, Italy, into a family of the Tuscan upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time. His mother Melisenda – who gave up an academic career to raise her three children – was a scholar of German literature, working on Hölderlin’s translations of the Greek poet Pindar. Calasso's father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty. He was arrested by the fascist militia after the assassination of Giovanni Gentile and sentenced to be killed in reprisal, but was saved by the intervention of both friends of Gentile, with whom the family had connections on the maternal side, and by the German consul Gerhard Wolf.
Education
Roberto received a Doctor of Letters from the University of Rome in 1966.
Roberto Calasso has worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since its founding in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. His books have been translated into most European languages.
Besides publishing, Calasso is also the author of works reflecting on the culture of modernity. His first novel, The Impure Madman (1974), is an emotive presentation of madness, written in lyrical styles from comic to epic and from arcane to popular. Calasso started what he considered a work in progress with the publication of his second novel, The Ruins of Kasch (1983). It is a chaotic text built on an ancient African legend of the kingdom of Kasch and its decline after it abandons its traditional ritual sacrifice of the king. The second volume, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, retells classic Greek myths in an attempt to evoke the primal meanings they once conveyed - the absolute and arbitrary power of nature and existence as embodied in the gods. In 1996 he published Ka, in which he treated Indian mythology. In his work, Ardore (2010), the author returns to India for an exhaustive analysis of the theory and practice of Vedic sacrifice and its significance for post-modern epistemology. Calasso's most recent book, The Unnamable Present, is the ninth part of a series exploring myth and modernity.
His more narrowly focused essays relating to European modernity are collected in The Forty-nine Steps, addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife; Literature and the gods (2002), based on his Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford, on the decline and return of pagan imagery in the art of the west, and The Madness that Comes from the Nymphs, a collection of related essays ranging from Plato's Phaedrus to Nabokov's Lolita.