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First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1998
Published in Penguin Classics 2009
Originally published in Italy as Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno copyright © 1947 by Giulio Einaudi,
Editore, Torino.
Original translation copyright © 1956 by William Collins & Sons Co. Ltd., London.
Translation of Preface and revised translation of text copyright © 1998 by Martin McLaughlin
Copyright © The Estate of Italo Calvino, 2002
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-88959-7
Note to the 1998 Translation
Preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Italu Calvino, one of Italy’s foremost writers, Was burn in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. when the Germans occupied northern Italy during the Second world War, he joined the partisans. The novel that resulted from this experience, published in English under the title The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, won wide acclaim. Best known for his experimental masterpieces Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in such works as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, The Complete Cosmicomics, and the trilogy, Our Ancestors, comprising The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non Existent Knight. An essayist, journalist and the author of many stories, Calvino won the prestigious Italian literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli, in 1973. Eighteen of his books have been published in English.
The New Statesman said, ‘Calvino cannot be defined within our existing terms … his is a voice which cries out the need to rehabilitate ourselves to our books, our lives, our world’ and Time called him ‘Quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, one of those storytellers who hold a mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror.’
Italo Calvino died in September 1985, aged sixty-two.
Italo Calvino (1923–85) wrote his first novel at the age of twenty-three, in a few weeks in December 1946. Published in October 1947, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests won the Premio Riccione that year, and sold 6,000 copies, an unusually high level of sales for the time. But the author soon turned his back on his first book, as he modified his early neo-realist poetics, and refused to authorize a re-edition until 1954. Only a decade later, in 1964, as he prepared to abandon realism altogether and embark on the fictions that were to make him internationally famous, did Calvino go back to his first book and authorize a third, definitive edition; and this time, to accompany the novel, he composed a preface which remains his most substantial and revealing self-commentary, as well as an indispensable, objective analysis of Italian neo-realism.
Despite its length, however, the preface makes no explicit mention of the substantial changes that Calvino made in the text of both the 1954 and 1964 editions. In both cases he excised or toned down certain passages depicting Cousin’s and Pin’s anti-feminism, Mancino’s political extremism, as well as some violent details. However, reading between the lines, we can see that sections two and three of the preface do at least hint at the changes, when he criticizes the youthful extremism of the novel in its exaggerated emphasis on sex, violence, political ideology, and expressionist characters, and then adds: ‘The unease which this book caused me for so long has to a certain extent subsided, but to a certain extent still remains.’ Only late in life and nearly twenty years after writing the preface did Calvino explicitly acknowledge the changes and their motivation. In an interview with students in 1983 he admitted:
I had written things that seemed to me too brutal or exaggerated [in The Path to the Spiders’ Nests]. So I tried to attenuate some of those overstated and certainly brutal passages, even although they were attributed to the thoughts of other characters, not to me. Perhaps it was also to do with the fact that, when I wrote the book, I imagined that it would be read by just a few hundred people, as happened at that time for works of Italian literature. Instead when I realized that its readership was so much more numerous, the novel’s status changed in my own eyes. I reread it and thought ‘How on earth could I have written such things?’ So I made some corrections. Of course there are still exaggerated elements in the novel: these are due to the almost adolescent phase I was still undergoing when I wrote the book, a phase which young people go through. It is the book of a very young man.
The implications of this publishing background for the book’s English translation are important. Since the first English version has a copyright of 1956, it is likely that the translator, Archibald Colquhoun, used the 1954 edition, but comparison of the passages omitted and added by the author at various stages suggests either that the 1954 copy used by the translator had somehow retained one or two passages from the first edition (such as the very different opening paragraphs), or that Colquhoun was given the 1947 text with cancellations and additions marked by the author. It is worth adding that Colquhoun himself or his publisher also censored certain passages deemed unsuitable for the sexual and political climate of the 1950s (such as the description of Mancino’s obscene tattoos or the mention of the serenity of the Soviet Union).
The task of issuing an English version of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests suitable for the 1990s meant that Colquhoun’s translation had to be updated in at least three ways: first by cutting out passages which Calvino himself omitted for the definitive edition, especially as the preface alludes, however implicitly, to these excisions; secondly by inserting the sections that Calvino had added to produce the 1964 edition as well as those that had been silently censored in the English version; and thirdly to eliminate a number of errors that had crept into Colquhoun’s otherwise fine translation. It was also necessary to update numerous words and turns of phrase which are now misleading or meaningless. These are the four main areas in which I have revised the 1956 translation. I have also altered Colquhoun’s translation of the title from The Path to the Nest of Spiders to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, partly to be more faithful to the plural nidi in Italian, partly to avoid the inadvertent echo of ‘a nest of vipers’ in Colquhoun’s title (which produces quite the wrong associations in English), but particularly because we know that Calvino was delighted that the novel’s title in English could both be more concise and could avoid the awkward double genitive in Italian (‘Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno’). Similarly, the important preface which had been translated in 1976 by William Weaver in a slightly abridged form now appears in English in full for the first time, though in this case rather than simply revising Weaver’s translation I have translated it from scratch.
Readers often find prefaces off-putting, and either postpone reading them until after finishing the novel, or simply choose not to read them. However, the inclusion of Calvino’s preface in this volume not only respects the definitive will of the author, it also provides the reader with a typical sample of Calvino’s elegant essay-writing as well as a good novel. In fact, even allowing for the difference of genre between a literary preface and a novel, these two pieces of prose allow us a glimpse of how Calvino had matured as a writer in the two decades between the 1940s and the 1960s. The preface displays some typically Calvinian symmetries and dialectics. For a start, it has, in all, twelve sections like the twelve chapters of the novel. The first section deals with external elements of the context in which the book emerged (the anonymous oral tradition of narrative in post-war Italy as people were allowed to speak freely again and recount their adventures); the second with the book’s Italian literary ancestry (Verga, Vittorini, Pavese). This dialectic between external and literary elements informs the whole preface: the next three sections return to non-literary factors (the question of commitment), while the two central ones establish international literary influences (Hemingway, Russian writers, Stevenson). Finally Calvino returns to other external factors (the discussions with ‘Kim’, his own meditations on violence, his identification with Pin), before concluding with further literary discussion (of Fenoglio and of the cost of writing one’s first novel).
Salman Rushdie pointed out that The Path to the Spiders’ Nests had one of the best titles in post-war literature, but felt that the ending had ‘dipped its feet in slush’. But if the close of the novel is rather anodyne, the more mature preface ends with one of those elegant Calvinian paradoxes that are typical of the writer at the peak of his powers: ‘A completed book will never compensate me for what I destroyed in writing it: namely that experience which if preserved throughout the years of my life might have helped to compose my last book, and which in fact was sufficient only to write the first.’ Reviewing Calvino’s last work, Mr Palomar, the poet Seamus Heaney talked of the author’s fondness for ‘binary blarney’ and noted that ‘symmetries and arithmetic have always tempted Italo Calvino’s imagination to grow flirtatious and to begin its fantastic display’. The reader can enjoy something of that love of binary systems and symmetries here, and can appreciate that even in this early novel and its 1964 preface Calvino is, in Heaney’s words, ‘on the high wire, on lines of thought strung out above the big international circus’.
Martin McLaughlin
Christ Church, Oxford