Calvino, Queneau, and the Sciences

My memories of Italo Calvino go back a long way. To be precise, they go back to our common baptism as writers, when, in 1947, Arrigo Cajumi simultaneously reviewed his first book, The Path to the Spiders’ Nest, and my first book, If This Is a Man, in La Stampa, wishing us youths, the youths of that time, a long career. There were long gaps in my association with Calvino, owing to his absence from Italy and to the fact that I was living basically in Turin while he was traveling a lot. His happiest hour, however, was the publication of the translation of Raymond Queneau’s Petite cosmogenie portative (A Pocket Cosmogony). The translation was done by Sergio Solmi, and Calvino wasn’t entirely satisfied with it; he had revised it himself, but was dissatisfied with his revision, too, as this fantastic poem by Queneau, which begins with the creation of the universe and ends with computers, has a part about chemistry that contains—like the rest of the book—myriad tangles: there isn’t a line that doesn’t conceal a trap. Queneau was a fabulous master of manipulating words, squeezing a word, extracting from it, beyond its meaning, its sound as well: he was an acrobat. And Calvino was a friend, a disciple, and a devotee of Queneau in this dimension, too.

After sifting the Italian translation of A Pocket Cosmogony, we found a good number of knots left in the sieve, some of which Queneau himself was no longer able to untangle. When, some decades after writing the book, he was consulted, he said: “Forgive me, I can’t remember what I intended to say.” With joy, and, I must say, fun, Calvino and I worked on this in the mountains, at Rhêmes Notre Dame (in fact, there were three of us—a kitten sat on the table, on Solmi’s manuscript, doing its best to help, every now and then trying to turn the pages with its little paw). So this was a game, but it was a grand and wonderful game—the very game in which Calvino was a master, squeezing everything possible out of a word, turning it into an instrument of penetration.

In Calvino, this love of words went hand in hand with an equally deep love of nature that wasn’t at all idyllic, sentimental, or romantic. It was a naturalist’s love, which he had inherited from his parents, which he nurtured to the end, and which, to the careful reader, had already been apparent in his first book. Indeed, in the very title of his first book: that path, the only one in the world where spiders make a nest instead of weaving a web, is a discovery made by Calvino/Pin.

I would say that in the literary fabric of all Calvino’s books the meticulous precision of a scientist appears; although he never took academic classes, he was in fact a scientist. Anyone who has read Cosmicomics realizes that it isn’t just entertainment: it’s an extremely profound book, a book to meditate on, page by page. And this is a truly distinctive feature of Calvino, at least in his early writings: the capacity to make you laugh and to make you think at the same time. In Cosmicomics, in T Zero, in, to a lesser extent, the more famous triad—but again to a high degree in Mr. Palomar—the great wonder of the layman emerges: before the order of creation, before this clock whose maker is not known for sure, before the passing of time. The subject of time is almost an obsession for Calvino, as it is for anyone who has even the vaguest idea of what cosmogony is today. The theme of the labyrinth remains in suspense: whether or not there is a way out is debatable. In my view, however, Calvino’s labyrinth does have an exit, or at least it’s conceivable, we hope that it has: it is our labyrinth, the labyrinth where we live. This is a multifaceted symbol. To me, as a hybrid, half chemist and half writer, a concise definition of Calvino’s writing consists in its rejection of conventions along with a prodigious capacity to create new ones. For this reason I truly believe that if there is one writer—and not just an Italian writer—who will never be imitated, because he is inimitable, that writer is Italo Calvino.

Statement made on the occasion of the presentation of Raymond Queneau’s
La Canzone del Polistirene (The Song of Styrene), translated by Italo
Calvino; Milan, January 29, 1986, sponsored by the Progetto Cultura
of Montedison. The text was published in Montedison Progetto Cultura, no. 5,
April 1987, and later appeared in a longer version, in G. Poli and
G. Calcagno, Echi di una voce perduta (Milan: Mursia, 1992).