Ricerc@Sapienza

Italo Calvino is reputed to be the most read Italian writer in the world. After the posthumous publication of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, his works – translated in innumerable languages – have met with sustained success and made him a reference point among intellectuals in the fields of literature and culture in numerous countries. This article presents an introductory survey of Calvino’s Arabic and Persian translations, together with reflections about some of the main features of Calvino’s reception in Arab countries and in Iran: a particular attention to Calvino’s fable-like narratives; a problematic process of semantic translation and acculturation for many aspects of Calvino’s writing and terminology; the emergence of a distinctly spiritual reading of several of Calvino’s works and ideas, which appears to find echoes in a number of spiritual themes and concepts circulating in the modern Muslim world. Through this analysis, the article seeks to lay some preliminary foundations for research into the question of Calvino and his reception in the Arab and Persian worlds.