Domestic book fans have finally ushered in the long-lost "Calvino Classics" series of new books. Recently, on the occasion of the 98th anniversary of the birth of the most influential Italian contemporary writer in the world, Italo Calvino's short story "The Last to Come is the Crow", which was first launched by Yilin Publishing House Chinese Simplified edition and included in this classic series in the form of an illustrated rare collection.
"The Last To Come is the Crow" includes thirty short stories written by Calvino from 1945 to 1948, and has played an important role in guiding and inspiring the creation of later works such as "Short Story Collection", "Marco Waldo", and "Difficult Love". The Chinese Simplified edition of "The Last To Come is the Crow", literally translated from Italian by the well-known Italian literary translator Ma Xiaomo, contains Calvino's own preface, accompanied by a version description and an afterword written by literary critic Gianno Pombaloni. Renowned Italian artist Riccardo Verde immerses himself in illustrating each story. The binding design continues the "Calvino Classic" series of hardcover double covers, the spine is gilded, and it is suitable for both hiding and reading.
Calvino
The publication of the new book is exactly twenty years after the introduction and publication of his debut novel, The Path to the Spider's Nest.
The Last to Come is the Crow was first published in 1949, just two years before Calvino published his first novella, The Path to the Spider's Nest, which won the Riccione Prize for Literature. In 2001, edited by Lü Tongliu and Zhang Jie, the "Calvino Anthology" first published by Yilin Publishing House translated Calvino's debut literary masterpiece "The Path to the Spider's Nest".
However, from "The Path to the Spider's Nest" to "The Last To Come is the Crow", Calvino spent two years Chinese the reader to burn the two original works, a gap of twenty years. In twenty years, we have read Calvino's novels, fairy tales, literary treatises, lecture notes, travelogues... Today, back to the original point of reading, finally waited for this "crow".
The Chinese Simplified edition of The Last to come is the preface written by Calvino for the 1969 edition, detailing the background, main line of creation, and evolution of the book. According to Calvino, "The Last to Come is the Crow" is divided into three parts, corresponding to the three main lines of creation in those years: the first is the main line of the "Resistance Movement", which reads like a suspense adventure or horror adventure novel; the second is the theme of the adventure of the tramp after World War II; and in the third main line, the scenery of the Ligurian coast dominates, where young people, teenagers and animals are full of young people, teenagers and animals, like a kind of "memory literature" with obvious personal overtones.
It can be said that without "The Last to Come is the Crow", there would be no "Short Story Collection", "Marco Waldo", "Difficult Love"... A writer's second book is probably the biggest test for him. The Last To Come is the Crow is Calvino's first exploration of the literary form of the short story, and as a result, these thirty stories have been hailed as "the clearest path to the world of Calvino's novels."
The Last to Come is the Raven, inspired by Calvino's experiences in the final stages of World War II, and also includes a keen observation of the panorama of post-war Italy. Although written primarily in the neorealist style, many of the scenes incorporate visionary fantasy elements from Calvino's later work that were the first prototypes of later short stories such as The Short Story Collection, Marco Waldo, and Difficult Love. It can be said that without "The Last to Come is the Crow", there would be no Calvino's many later rich, diverse, flexible and vivid short stories.
Heroes who play happily by the sea, beggars wrapped in fragrant leather coats, thieves and policemen who forget each other because they focus on licking cream pastries, children with rifles on their backs and German soldiers who have witnessed his hundred shots in horror, cunning little Moors who earn fifty lira for every half hour of renting mattresses, big black market women traders with insect mouths and poor and fallen aristocratic old gentlemen... These are just a few of the countless heart-wrenching and surprising images on the carousel of "The Last to Come". Calvino can tell the story of the adventures of the homecoming infantryman and the widow in the black veil, or depict the chaos wrapped up in prostitutes, Americans, and the dollar, but at the same time ensure that nothing muddys his work will lose the calm cunning of his work. The Last To Come is the Crow clarifies and defines Calvino's poetic world: it's not polluted by anger and boredom, it's not exacerbated by conflict, and you can breathe the purest air.
In order to recreate the "various marginal characters" in Calvino's story, each story in the book is accompanied by a funny illustration, painted by the famous Italian painter Ricardo Wilde. "During the reading of 'The Last here comes the Crow,' very specific images kept flashing through my mind. So after each reading, I had to quickly pick up paper and pencil and quickly record them. ...... I love the tone of Calvino's novels that 'hangs on to you,' the feeling of 'waiting for something to happen and it never happens,' as if the whole world stands still in a time and space with no beginning and no end. Wilder said.
Calvino's "Journey to China"
Since 2001, Yilin Publishing House has systematically translated and continuously cultivated Calvino's works, and this calvino's journey to China has witnessed the joint efforts of scholars, writers, translators and publishers of all generations.
Calvino, the master of imaginary literature and the pioneer of exploring the boundaries of novels, has been engaged in literary creation for nearly forty years, and has been trying to express the life and soul of contemporary people in various ways. With his unique exquisite conception and profound and timeless way of thinking, his works have had a great impact on the art of modern novels and the avant-garde ideology of literature. He defined the literary picture of the new millennium with "light, fast, precise, figurative, and complex", and the semiotic master Echo commented: "Calvino's imagination is like a delicate equilibrium of the universe, placed between Voltaire and Leibniz. He rubbed shoulders with the Nobel Prize for his sudden death, and then Italian President Corsiga personally mourned and deeply remembered: "Our country has lost a spiritual symbol of creativity and inspiration." ”
Calvino's works are highly regarded by contemporary Chinese and foreign writers, and he is known as "the writers of writers". He influenced a large number of Chinese writers represented by Wang Xiaobo and Acheng in his thinking and creation, and the writer Li Jingze called him a "bird-like writer", and the Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan believed that "Calvino's book is worth reading repeatedly." John Updike, a master of contemporary American literature, compared Calvino to Borges and Márquez, arguing that "Calvino was the warmest and brightest" of the three. Calvino is a recognized literary master in the minds of readers, and even becomes a kind of symbol and symbol, containing infinite charm.
Calvino's works can be described as often read and often new. Since the 1950s and 1960s, Calvino's literary works have been translated and introduced by many scholars and researchers, but they are relatively scattered, and many works are translated by other languages, which have failed to form a synergy; after entering the copyright protection period in the 1990s, the publishing cost has increased greatly, and Yilin Publishing House has firmly tracked and explored foreign pure literature and cutting-edge works, bid for the exclusive copyright of Calvino, systematically translated and introduced, and continued to cultivate.
In 2001, the "Calvino Anthology" edited by Lü Tongliu and Zhang Jie contained important representative works of Calvino in different periods, and for the first time systematically and comprehensively introduced this great writer of the twentieth century in the Chinese world; in the five years after 2006, the Translation Forest Agency continued to improve and successively launched the "Calvino Collection" (a total of 15 kinds of 17 volumes), which not only supplemented non-fiction works such as "Paris Hermit" and "Why Read the Classics", but also revised and supplemented important contents such as the preface, chronology, and afterword. Dedicated to all readers who love Calvino; in 2012, a new "Calvino Classic" hardcover collector's edition was launched, and many classic works such as "The Invisible City" and "The Baron on the Tree" received tens of thousands of 9.0+ evaluations on Douban, and this series of books has always been updated in sync with calvino research and collation around the world, and the bibliography is still being supplemented and improved. In 2019, the Translation Society selected some of these works to form a more modern "Calvino Works" set, which continues to convey Calvino's unimaginable story with rich techniques and strange angles.
From 2021 to 2022, in addition to "The Last to Come is the Crow", the Translation Forest Agency will also successively launch new books such as "The Observer" and "I Was Born in the Americas". Created in 1963, the new work "Ten Years of Grinding a Sword" "The Observer" is a novel that marks the end of Calvino's neorealist writing style, which for the first time touches on the themes of congenital misfortune and pain, the responsibility of childbirth, etc. Calvino once admitted that "the themes I touched on in The Observer are the ones I never dared to touch before." Calvino's interview "I was born in the Americas" includes 101 interviews spanning 4 10 years, covering many aspects such as film, literature, and the future of the city. It is also one of the most precious collections of essays on Calvino's self-evaluation, through which calvino's artistic and aesthetic ideas can be understood from another perspective.