Let's talk about Italians

He means the meme trilogy.

It's possibly one of the best Italian novels ever written. It deals with decadence and death on a historical (decadence of Italy and its artisocracy), cultural (decadence of southern Italy as representative of Italian culture), philosophical (general decadence of everything) and existential (decadence of the main character/human being). It is everything you could ask from a good novel - masterful prose, beautiful characters, delicate, funny at bits, deeply melancholic. A 10/10.

t. italianon

There are far better Italo Calvino books than that one.

How's the translation? Might pick it up

I'll never understand why everyone here loves Invisible Cities so much, but never talks about Baron in the Trees. I think On a Winters Night a Traveler is probably his best work, but Baron in the Trees was by far my favorite. Invisible Cities was intellectually interesting but sterile.

I've read a lot of Primo Levi, and I'm even currently reading The Wrench. What do my italianons think about him?

Also any particular thoughts on The castle of crossed destinies? Bought it on a whim and looked interesting.

Best prosimetrum of all time.
PDF in the first or second result on google.

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tell me fellow Yea Forumsalians, is it true that 'La Storia' is your own 20th century War and Peace?

anyone here ever read pictured? is it good?

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Kind of. But it's far from being the best work of Elsa Morante. It's written in the most plain neorealistic style, which gets a bit boring after a while. Read Aracoeli instead. It's a masterpiece about an insecure and ugly homosexual who still loves his mother even though she hated him and became a prostitute and then died. One of the most depressing and extreme stories I've ever read.

Based Comisso. Pretty much a forgotten author. I prefer Piovene though. He wrote a 1000 pages Italian Journey that legitimately rivals the one by Goethe.

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will save that.
Thing is, I'm south american and in my public library the works in italian are very few, giorni di guerra is one of them along with il pendolo di foucault and others.
Is it good, then? I'll probably pick it up today.
Fucking unfair though, the section of works in german and the section of works in french are 3 times bigger than the one of works in italian

Yea Forumsalianon here, sincerely i like Eco as an intellectual as much as i dislike him as a writer.
Pirandello is my favourite, take a look at "novelle per un anno" (novels for a year), imho his best work.

In general i feel a lot of Italian literature is very difficult to explain to a foreigner (in particular if northamerican).
Partly because post war culture of the U.S.A. tends to be very centered on the individual while our is always talking, in a way or another, of society in a larger scale and politics (most of our intellectuals of that period, including Calvino, were communists or at least very close to it).
Above all because very often the language plays a lot with dialects and features different people from differents parts of Italy carachterized also by their speech and their birthplace, and all of this is lost in the translation. This is true for much of European literature, but for the Italian imho a little bit more.

no lol, i like Elsa Morante (i even went to the same high school institute of her), but La Storia isn't comparable to such a masterpiece like War and Peace

>Is it good, then?
I haven't read it. In Italy Comisso is completely forgotten now, but he had much success in his life. So I can't tell what you could expect. Maybe it's shit, maybe not.

>Fucking unfair though, the section of works in german and the section of works in french are 3 times bigger than the one of works in italian
Heh, what can we do? After the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution the world decreed that Italy was irrelevant: end of the story. Three hundred years of Italian history and art thrown in the toilet. The Risorgimento? Irrelevant. The Fascist era? Irrelevant. The tragedy of the World War II? Irrelevant. The economical miracle? Irrelevant. The Years of Lead? Irrelevant.

Facts are different, though. So if you want books you'll have to ask here. Your library fell behind.

Does anyone have the read/expected/got image for this?

>In general i feel a lot of Italian literature is very difficult to explain to a foreigner (in particular if northamerican)
Like literally every other national literature.
>Above all because very often the language plays a lot with dialects and features different people from differents parts of Italy carachterized also by their speech and their birthplace, and all of this is lost in the translation. This is true for much of European literature, but for the Italian imho a little bit more
And I suppose you know at least two or three European languages and understand this from actual experience?

Do you think speaking two or three European languages is somehow exceptional? What kind of shithole are you from?
Everyone speaks English nowadays, add to that a native tongue and the fact almost any decent European high school will force you to take a third language course and it's basically standard.

No one should be too confident in their knowledge of contemporary Western literature unless they can at least scrape by in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

user is probably from USA, literally the only civilized(?) country where it is normal for people to only speak one language.

A German, a Britain, and an Italian are in a hospital waiting room, all of their wives are giving birth.

A nurse appears and announces, "all of the births were a success and your wives are resting peacefully, but we've had a small mixup... We don't know who's baby is who's.. Any of you men want to come back and help up out?"

The German father stands up and agrees to assist.

He appears 10 minutes later with an obviously brown baby and the man from the UK shouts,"hey buddy what do you think it is that you are doing?"

And the German hisses in retort, "LOOK one of those babies back there is Italian and I'm not taking any chances!"

English is the langua franca of many lands. Oh, also, literally the sky. You can't be a pilot that crosses international boundaries if you don't speak English. Genuine fact.

Anyone got the Italo Calvino flowchart?

i don't get it

Yeah, and everyone in europe speaks english. The difference is that we also speak a second langauge

German man would rather take a paki child over his own just to be certain he didn't end up with an Italian

I'm glad you realize you must bow to us to even use the very air above your head. Whereas good God fearing anglos can travel the world without effort

Yes it is, I never implied in any way English was not the most important language in the world. But if you genuinely think that speaking a single language in modern society is normal, you are bloody delusional. Like 3/4 of the most important literary work is written in languages other than English and some of those languages are still relevant for uses other than literature.
google image it, but the chart I see used is wrong. Italo Calvino should be read in the order that clicks for you, though if you are very serious about reading him, probably do it chronologically, all the while reading "Why Read Classics" by him in parallel, to see what works influenced him at those times.

you are not arguing against what that user said with this genuine fact.
Yes, in any country that does not have english as native language being fluent in english is as basic as knowing how to use a computer, that does not change the fact that yes, it is pretty safe to assume america is the (at least western) country that has the smallest portion of people fluent in a 2nd language.
Some of this does have to do with english being the "world's language" (as in there is no pressure to learn a second language so that you can get a job, as happens in other countries) but also with arrogance and laziness of burgers.

The whole point of this post is that Italy is an extremely unsteady and fragmented reality, even 150 years after the Unity. This is not just its most apparent peculiarity (on a social, political and cultural level), but a whole way of being. The American, the French, the Russian are used to an all-embracing vision, to a solid universe of possibilities. They are watching a whole world from the peak of a mountain. It is not – and it can't be – the same for Italians. To understand this condition, and from there all Italian literature, you need to think to L'Infinito by Giacomo Leopardi. The poet is sitting on a hill and he can't see ahead of him, because a hedge is in front of him, too close to him. The landscape is hidden. From this very situation, Giacomo imagines that which is hidden, and finds access to the Infinite. This concept is at the root of all Italian literature and art, and the reason why Leopardi is one of greatest geniuses ever lived. In a similar way, Petrarch wrote 366 poems to Laura without ever having met her, and Dante saw the entire afterlife culminating in the light of God despite being a poor exiled man. This is not just a matter of experience. It's a condition of existence, because Italy is small, blind, full. The amount of history, signs, values has covered the window, and there's no way to see through it. You must do with the little you have. That's the reason why our literature is not just a handful of long great novels, and why poetry continues to be more important than elsewhere. Italians love the American novel, as they love the Russian epics like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Grossman, but it's really hard for an Italian to conceive something that big and unitary all at once. The greatest Italian writers of the 20th century were similar to Pessoa, in that they did the best in short pieces of text: Landolfi, Calvino, Buzzati, Pirandello. The others were poets, and it's not a coincidence that Hermeticism was born in Italy, with Giuseppe Ungaretti. (And, incidentally, Hermeticism was also at the basis of our neoplatonic Renaissance philosophy). Yes, we also had Horcynus Orca (1300 pages novel), Brothers of Italy (1400 pages), The Name of the Rose (700 pages), etc, but the substance doesn't change: the limit is always our local horizon, into which there can be everything. Certain books, still untranslated, are small but contain worlds. Language is extremely important – this old, beautiful, melodious and yet cumbersome language that we borrowed from Latin and that we still haven't settled. A well written line in Italian can be worth an entire novel.

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>Foucault’s Pendulum sucked dick.
No, it did not.

>No one should be too confident in their knowledge of contemporary Western literature unless they can at least scrape by in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.
I'd add Russian to that list.

It is common to make a distinction between slavic and western.

lmao you guys are delusional.
Learning as much languages as possible is obviously desirable but dismissing totally a reader unless he reads the original is retarded. That is, unless you've read the greeks in ancient greek, the romans in latin, the bible in aramaic and hebrew, kant and hegel in german, pessoa in portuguese, ariosto in italian...
not to mention if you actually spend the time needed to become ACTUALLY fluent in several languages it is likely you won't be that well read since it takes a lot of fucking time learning it and becoming actually able to read high brow literature/philosophy in another language (because between reading foreign philosophy/good literature while being mediocre in that foreign language and reading a well-made translation by a guy dedicated to learning that country's culture, the life of the author, etc, I'd rather read the translation)
>inb4 monolingual anglo
no

Anything written in a romance language can be read in another romance language without big loss of value. My suggestion is that a romance language speaker learn German and/or Russian, and vice versa.

Learning a lot of romance languages (and to a lesser extent European languages in general) is not as hard as it seems. It gets progressively easier to learn a new one, the more you already know.
And the benefit, while exaggerated at times, is undeniable.

>but also with arrogance and laziness of burgers (to not try and self-teach a bastardized version of a language they'll never use)
Eurostarves are so pathetic. What's your news saying about our president today?

yes, that is reasonable, knowing at least 1 language very distant and unconnected to the native language is great and will also open a lot of doors.
A romance language speaker will be able to read very close translations in languages that are very close to german, just like a german/russian person would be able to read great translations of romance languages by learning 1 of them

>in a literature board
>this much close-minded towards learning something that would improve one of his (assumed) passions
>having as argument for his arrogance and laziness "not having any actual use"
pathetic.
And I'm not european, nor do I care about your president although I agree with a good portion of his politics

Western Europe exceeds USA politically in every way. If you think otherwise, you are a brainwashed nationalistic retard. What that user said is backed up by extensive statistics (for example as compared to UK or Australia). You're pathetic for having this knee-jerk reaction of defending your shithole country. You are on Yea Forums, so perhaps at least try to form your own, educated, opinions?

Stop ruining the thread with silly discussions about language learning. Here is an incentive to move to an interesting topic: Italo Svevo.

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No, I don't think it is exceptional, the exceptionality is completely beside the point. My point was that you're an Italian who exaggerates the uniqueness of your culture, somehow the "untranslatable" factor in your books is magically greater than in any other European national literature.

I'm from continental Europe and speak 3 languages.

Where to start with Leopardi? Zibaldone or Canti?

Canti

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>somehow the "untranslatable" factor in your books is magically greater than in any other European national literature.
Then why certain masterpieces of our literature are totally absent from your bookstores shelves?

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It's not like every developed literature and language has untranslatable masterpieces that foreigners don't care about. Big fucking whoop

Does anyone know if there is a German translation of Landino's philosophical works?

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Very based

Is this ironyposting? As a huezillian (non-italian), I read Gomorra and The Tartar Steppe with no major difficulties (although the former was certainly easier)