![]() Fortunately, in this case, the problem was no more than a minor anomaly in the book’s analytical index, something the copy editor and I sorted out in a rapid exchange of e-mails, taking easy possession of the dead man’s text. When I would write to let him know of one, he didn’t reply, as if the very idea of a mistake were unthinkable, a bad smell in polite company, or a hairline crack that might bring down an entire edifice but I always noticed that the correction would be made in the next edition. ![]() Having translated almost two thousand pages of his writing over the years, I had come across only a handful of small mistakes. He prided himself on his meticulous editing, most of all when editing his own books. Calasso was a publisher as well as a writer, head of the prestigious Italian house Adelphi Edizioni. More serious than issues of style, the copy edit eventually turned up one tiny instance of what looked like a mistake in Calasso’s original. “And you don’t ask a story to show its papers.” “In the end, they’re just stories,” observes Utnapishtim. Now I couldn’t even savor his resistance to my curiosity. In the past, translating The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, or Ka, or The Book of All Books, I had occasionally pressed Calasso, who reveled in reticence, on the meaning of this or that aspect of his work. “Here is a question I have never really fathomed,” muses Utnapishtim: “whether the Anunnaki forgot about me, here in Dilmun, sometime before being forgotten themselves or whether they left me here with a precise role in mind, the role I have in relation to you and will very likely never have again: as one who passes on their stories.” At the moment of bowing out-apparently he had been ill for some time-Calasso was using this figure, as Shakespeare used Prospero, to suggest his position in relation to his material and his readers. “I’m telling these stories of the Anunnaki ,” confesses Utnapishtim, “as if Ea had instructed me: ‘You will live and tell our stories.’” Reviewing the copy edit, it was suddenly obvious that Utnapishtim was a kind of alter ego. I had sensed, but vaguely, that it was more personal, wry, and melancholy than the other nine installments of the grand mythological cycle he had been writing since the early 1980s. Only after Calasso died did I realize that La tavoletta dei destini had a powerful autobiographical element. On the very rare occasions that he receives a guest-Gilgamesh, Sindbad-this lonely man begins, compulsively, to tell those stories, one after another, all interconnected, outside time. After building an ark and surviving the Flood with his freight of men and animals, Utnapishtim had been granted immortality, but only if he went to live in remote, uninhabited Dilmun, a place Sindbad “never came across on any nautical chart.” Here, after several thousand years, he is the only repository of his culture’s ancient stories. “This is the home of Utnapishtim,” he is told, “in Dilmun.” Utnapishtim, it turns out, is Mesopotamian mythology’s version of Noah. ![]() That was his last exact observation.” Sinbad-or, with respect, Sindbad-wakes up in a tent beside another man. ![]() “This storm was like no other he had known.… Not only had he lost his course, the compass points themselves had disappeared. La tavoletta dei destini opens with a shipwreck. A ship had slipped its anchor and was adrift on the high seas, unmanned. The text was what it was, independent of its author, at the mercy of its readers. In the past, since Calasso had excellent English, I could appeal to him to support this or that stylistic choice, if it seemed important. There were suggestions, occasionally objections. The copy editor knew Italian and had checked my work against the original. Immediately I sensed I was in new territory. And in November I received the copy edit from the publisher for my comments. I’m writing other things.” It was then I guessed that something was up. On the first of July, I wrote reminding him that my delivery deadline was just a week away. I told him this was the name that English and American readers were familiar with. “You have changed Sindbad to Sinbad,” he immediately objected. This was the arrangement with all the translations I had done of his work: he liked to stay in control and I liked the reassurance that he would pick up misunderstandings and missed nuances. He was to check through it before I sent it to the publisher. Kunsthistorisches Museum/Wikimedia CommonsĪ page from the diary of Albrecht Dürer in which he describes his nightmare of a deluge: “I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven,” June, 1525ĭoes an author’s work change when he dies? On May 6, 2021, I sent Roberto Calasso my translation of his unusually slim book, La tavoletta dei destini.
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