William Fense Weaver dedicated over fifty years to translating Italian literature, becoming a significant bridge between cultures. His extensive work encompassed not only prose but also poetry and opera libretti, showcasing a profound understanding of the nuances of Italian expression. Beyond translation, he contributed as a critic and commentator, demonstrating a deep engagement with the literary and operatic worlds.
The definitive edition of the cosmicomics, Italo Calvino's short stories exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe. The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all of these enchanting stories -- including some never before translated -- in one volume for the first time.
Eco returns to the Middle Ages with a wondrous, provocative tale of history, myth, and invention. In April 1204, as Constantinople is being sacked by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian from certain death and begins to recount his fantastical story. Born a peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino possesses a talent for languages and a knack for deception. His life changes when he meets a foreign commander in the woods, who turns out to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Adopted by the emperor, Baudolino is sent to the university in Paris, where he forms a fearless group of adventurous friends. Inspired by myths, they embark on a quest for Prester John, a legendary priest-king believed to rule a fantastical Eastern kingdom filled with bizarre creatures, eunuchs, unicorns, and beautiful maidens. As with Eco's other works, this novel features dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, and profound reflections on our postmodern age. Baudolino is an utterly marvelous tale by the inimitable author of The Name of the Rose.
This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life.A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination ZENO'S CONSCIENCE has provoked enormous affection in its readers both in Italian and English since its first publication in the 1920s.
A soldier wandering through the streets of Rome resolves, rather drunkenly, that he must find himself a woman. It is Ida Mancuso's fate, at precisely that moment, to turn the corner of the street, laden with shopping. The soldier sees easy prey - but Ida confronts her nightmare vision. The year is 1941, the soldier is German and she is half-Jewish. Elsa Morante's brave novel evokes the real terrors, fears and hopes of a mother living through one of the most horrifying events in recent times. In marked contrast to the posturing fascists on the political stage, this is the history of the Second World War as the ordinary people of Italy experienced it.
After a violent storm in the South Pacific in the year 1643, Roberto della Griva finds himself shipwrecked-on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he remembers chapters from his youth: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy. In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and of a most amazing old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood.
This witty and irreverent collection of essays presents Eco's playful but unfailingly accurate takes on everything from militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, librarians and bureaucrats to meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, express mail, fax machines and pornography. "An uncanny combination of the profound and the profane".--San Francisco Chronicle.
A student of philosophy in 1970s Milan, Casaubon is completing a thesis on the Templars, a monastic knighthood disbanded in the 1300s for questionable practices. At Pilades Bar, he meets up with Jacopo Belbo, an editor of obscure texts at Garamond Press. Together, with Belbo's colleague Distallevi, they scrutinize the fantastic theories of a prospective author, Colonel Ardenti, who claims that for seven centuries the Templars have been carrying out a complex scheme of revenge. When Ardenti disappears mysteriously, the three begin using their detailed knowledge of the occult sciences to construct a Plan for the Templars - only to discover too late that the Plan they have invented is in fact real. As brilliant and quirky as his Name of the rose, this book (not a novel in the strict sense of the word) is full of puns, allusions and literary references and "information" playfully and masterly manipulated by Eco
If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If not this way, how? If not now, when?' So runs the Song of the Partisan. This enthralling novel pays tribute to the Jews who fought back during the holocaust. Based on a true story, it chronicles the adventures, crises and moral struggles of a group of Russian and Polish refugees as, stranded in occupied territory, they offer what resistance they can to the German army.
Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh.