Roberto Calasso, writer and publisher (1941-2021)

Roberto Calasso, writer and publisher, one of the great names in European literary publishing in the last fifty years, died in Milan on 28 July. In the last few days, various media outlets have reported the news in their pages and extensively commented on his intellectual work.

I would like to dedicate this text to evoke his work as a facilitator of intercultural contact, as an actor capable of assimilating a cultural tradition and making it available to interested readers, a mediation that I carry out both in his publishing activity (what else but a qualified mediator is a publisher) and in his purely literary activity.

As a publisher, Roberto Calasso's name is associated with the Adelphi publishing house, which he joined shortly after its creation and has directed since the early 1970s, making it one of the great European cultural publishing houses. A clear example of the cultural dissemination work to which I referred earlier was the publication, in the "Biblioteca Adelphi" collection, of a series of Central European writers in German (grouped around the "great Vienna" of the beginning of the last century), whose success meant the presentation of this Central European cultural constellation, in carefully edited texts, to the Italian reading public, who could thus have in their libraries authors such as Hofmannsthal, Kraus, Loos, Horváth, Roth, Schnitzler, Canetti and Wittgenstein. For Italian readers unfamiliar with German, this opened up a wide field of knowledge and reflection on a culturally and politically exciting period in modern Europe. The publisher Calasso was thus making it easier for the Italian public to receive thinkers who had had a decisive influence on the cultural shaping of the European continent. 

As a writer, Roberto Calasso has paid particular attention to mythology and the presence of the divine in our world today. The philosopher Juan Arnau recently evoked the Florentine writer's reflections on divinity ("Roberto Calasso: el hombre y lo divino", published in El País on 30 July).

In addition to Greek mythology (to which he dedicated 'The Marriage of Cadmus' and 'Harmony', one of his most praised books), his intellectual curiosity also led him to investigate Hindu myths, once again becoming a privileged mediator, capable of bringing the narrative fabric that makes up this mythology closer to the Western reader. Thus, if in 'Ka' we gain access to the constituent stories of Hindu mythology, in 'The Burning' we are presented with the texts that prescribe the execution of rites, in a reflection on the most complex of them (sacrifice), to lead us to rethink our current society and what the abandonment and forgetting of rites implies in it.

Like Calasso the editor, the writer and thinker opens the doors to new visions of the world, and contributes to the knowledge and rapprochement of different cultural traditions.

Roberto Calasso's reflections on the times in which we live are brought together in 'L'Innominabile attuale' ('The Unnamable Actuality', published in Italy in 2017 - and in Spain by Anagrama the following year). The first part of the book ('Tourists and Terrorists') describes, among other facts, the impact of sacrificial Islamic terrorism on our secular society. The second part ('The Viennese Gas Society') tries to explain our times by means of a selection of events that took place between 1933 and 1945, when "the world carried out a partially successful attempt at self-liquidation". 

From this intense and suggestive book, we are interested in his reflections on mediation, which connect with Calasso's work as editor and author described in the opening paragraphs. For Calasso, one of the constitutive features of this time is disintermediation, the need to get rid of intermediaries, which is as valid for a trip or a hotel reservation as it is for politics. According to Calasso, this "hatred of mediation" is fatal for thought and perception, which only exist thanks to mediation.

Interested Spanish readers can find the works of Roberto Calasso cited here published by Anagrama, whose founder, Jorge Herralde, showed great complicity with the Italian publisher over the years.

Luis Guerra, PhD in Philology, is one of the main researchers of the INMIGRA3-CM project, financed by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund.