Belki çeviri kaynaklı bir sorun var bu kitapta. Cümleler fazla ağdalı hale getirilmis, sürekli devrik. Fazla beğenmedim o yapıyı. Italo Calvino okudum daha önce, böyle bir zorluk yoktu ama.pek emin değilim.
Eser ise oldukça bilgi içerikli. Ama tavsiyem şudur ki, asla içerisindeki eserler ve yazarlar taninmadan okunmasin, sıkıcı oluyor. Ben de okumadığım eserlerin bölümlerini şimdilik atladım.

Keyifli okumalar.

I was prescribed this book for an MA I am about to start this September, though this was actually very convient for me as I have been meaning to read this for a while.
Essentially, this collection of essays are calvino espousing what he loves about some of his favourite authors and works of fiction. It's organised in a general chronological order of when an author was active (Homer before Hemingway).
The real joy that comes from reading this collection is the the unbridled enthusiasm Calvino has for the works he is reviewing. In one essay he goes back to a poet he had been taught in school and compares the poet's works to the misremembered lines that calvino has had floating in his brain since adolescence and endeavours to understand *why* exactly his brain changed the phrasing or the metre.
This collection has really opened me up to authors I never had a interest in reading, or even knew existed. So far I've bought a copy of Pliny the Elder's Natural History and have decided to try and get my hands on some of the works of Balzac, Ariosto, Montale, Francis Ponge, and Jorge Luis Borges.
One shortcoming is that the collection is entirely filled with male authors (unless I seriously missed something), however I'd most likely put that down to history being unkind to female writers, also this collection was not organised by him as its publication was posthumous.

I did not read every page of this collection of essays, but only for the best of reasons. Calvino gives each classic in such enticing life, and I so often had to put aside his commentary because it too successfully made me want to read the book itself. My "ideal library" has expanded substantially through this reading, and that is a gift indeed.

Additionally, the opening essay, from which the collection takes its name, is one of the finest and most enjoyable bits of theory I've encountered. I'll conclude with an except which could well be applied to this collection:

"4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much a sense of discovery as the first reading.

"5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the irst time gives the sense of something we have red before."

Per me Perché leggere i classici di Italo Calvino è un libro a metà.
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Da un lato c’è il testo che dà il titolo al libro e che ho amato alla follia.
Dall’altro ci sono tutta una serie di articoli su vari autori e testi che non sono riuscita ad apprezzare più di tanto (a parte qualche eccezione).
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Da un lato c’è Calvino che ha una scrittura che ti trascina, dove ogni parola sa di passione e amore. E la sua conoscenza, mamma mia, cosa non è il suo sapere!
Dall’altro ci sono io, che a parlare così di libri manco nelle prossime duecento vite.
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E a questo punto a chi vuoi dare la colpa? Alla conoscenza di Calvino? O alla mia ignoranza? Eh.
Quindi sì, diciamo che è uno di quei libri a cui posso dire: “Sono io, non sei tu”.
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Ci sono autori e/o titoli che non conoscevo, o che magari conosco di nome, per fama, importanza, ma che non ho mai letto e affrontato e questo penso abbia influito sulla mia capacità di apprezzare la raccolta di saggi scritti dall’autore.
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Penso che il saggio iniziale possa raggiungere un numero più vasto di lettori, di sicuro rimane ancora attuale, e forse lo rimarrà sempre.
I rimanenti articoli forse sono più apprezzabili da un gruppo più ristretto di lettori, ma prendete questa frase con le pinze e soprattutto non vedeteci un senso diverso da quello che intendo (perché no, non sto dicendo che esistono lettori di serie A e lettori di serie B).
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A prescindere, io un uomo come Italo Calvino lo avrei voluto incontrare, conoscere, parlarci assieme, anzi no, avrei fatto parlare solo lui, io sarei rimasta - commossa - in un angolo della stanza ad ascoltarlo per ore.
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[…] non si leggono i classici per dovere o rispetto, ma solo per amore.

Calvino is not only a brilliant author but also an enigmatic bookworm. He weaves his multi-layered logic with the specific authors and books he’s referencing (one author per essay; 36 essays). If one have read the author/book he’s referencing, it’ll add deeper insights/logic of thought. If not read yet, one’ll be encouraged to read that author/book ASAP.

Highlights:
Ovid and Universal Contiguity
Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity
The City as Novel in Balzac
Jorge Luis Borges
The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau

Notes:
P83: The Book of Nature in Galileo
Philosophy is written in this enormous book which is continuously open before our eyes (I mean the universe), but it cannot be understood unless one first understands the language and recognises the characters with which it is written. It is written in a mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Without knowledge of his medium it is impossible to understand a single word of it; without this knowledge it is like wandering hopelessly through a dark labyrinth. (Il Saggiatore - Galileo)

P124: Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal
Stendhal claims, ‘there is no originality in truth except in the details’.

P197: The World is an Artichoke
The world’s reality presents itself to our eyes as multiple, prickly, and as densely superimposed layers. Like an artichoke. What counts for us in a work of literature is the possibility of being able to continue to unpeel it like a never-ending artichoke, discovering more and more new dimensions in reading.

P223: Francis Ponge
Re: read FP’s The Voices of Things
Instructions for use are: a few pages every evening will provide a reading which is at one with Ponge’s method of sending out words like tentacles over the porous and variegated substance of the world.

P240: Jorge Luis Borges
The osmosis between what happens in literature and in real life: the ideal source is not some mythical event that took place before the verbal expression, but a text which is a tissue of words and images and meanings, a harmonisation of motifs which find echoes in each other, a musical space in which a theme develops its own variations.
P241: The power of the written word is, then linked to lived experience both as the source and the end of that experience. As a source, because it becomes equivalent of an event which otherwise would not have taken place, as it were; as an end, because for Borges the written word that counts is the one that makes a strong impact on the collective imagination, as an emblematic or conceptual figure, made to be remembered and recognised whenever it appears, whether in the past or in the future.
..maximum concentration of meanings in the brevity of his texts.
Re: Borges ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’.
The hypothesis about time are put forward in TGOFP are each contained (and almost hidden) in just a few lines. First there is an idea of constant time, a kind of subjective, absolute present (‘I reflected that everything happens to a man in this very moment of now. Centuries and centuries, but events happen only in the present; countless men in the air, on land and sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me..’). Then an idea of time determined by will, the time of an action decided on once and for all, in which the future would present itself as irrevocable as the past. Lastly, the story’s central idea: a multiple, ramified time in which every present instant splits into two futures, so as to form ‘an expanding, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times’. This idea of an infinity of contemporary universes, in which all possibilities are realized in all possible combinations, is not a digression from the story, but the very condition which is required so that the..

"Un clásico es un libro que nunca termina de decir lo que tiene que decir."

Parece mentira y a la vez me da vergüenza reconocer que yo, un lector especializado en reseñar clásicos, recién hoy haya terminado de leer este libro clave del gran autor italiano Italo Calvino.
“Por qué leer los clásicos” es un maravilloso recorrido del Calvino lector por todos aquellos libros que de alguna u otra manera lo marcaron en su vida literaria.
De la misma manera que Jorge Luis Borges en “Otras inquisiciones”, otro libro de un gran autor, precisamente al que Calvino le dedica todo un capítulo, vamos encontrándonos con todos esos autores clásicos que siguen asombrándonos con sus libros extraordinarios.
La lista de autores y libros que desfilan por este volumen es impresionante.
Calvino nos detalla a la perfección las características más sobresalientes de la “Odisea” de Homero, Jenofonte y su “Anábasis”, ”Las metamorfosis” de Ovidio, el “Tirant lo Blanc”, uno de los libros preferidos del Quijote, la estructura del “Orlando Furioso” de Ariosto, Cyrano de Bergerac, el “Robinson Crusoe” de Daniel Defoe, un acercamiento al “Cándido”, de Voltaire, la estructura de la gran novela de Denis Diderot en “Jacques el fatalista”, la literatura de Stendhal y su novela “La cartuja de Parma” destinada a los nuevos lectores, un profundo análisis de la ciudad en las novelas de Balzac, una radiografía a la anteúltima novela de Charles Dickens llamado “Nuestro amigo en común” y la impecable reseña de los “Tres cuentos” de Gustave Flaubert, los “Dos húsares” de Lev Tolstói, “El hombre que corrompió a Hadleyburg” de Mark Twain, “Daisy Miller” de Henry James, ”El pabellón en las dunas Robert Louis Stevenson, “Doctor Zhivago” de Boris Pasternak, y sendos ensayos biográficos de Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Queneau, Césare Pavese y como había comentado antes, un profundo detalle de la obra de nuestro querido Jorge Luis Borges.
Hay más, porque este libro parece inagotable.
En fin, si lo que uno como lector desea es aproximarse a los grandes clásicos de la literatura, este es el libro indicado para hacerlo, y también como comentara previamente es indispensable seguir con “Inquisiciones” y especialmente “Otras inquisiciones” de Borges y de esta manera y gracias a estos maestros, tendremos un entendimiento cabal en lo que a literatura se refiere.

Arkasözde yazan çekici paragrafın uyandırdığı beklentinin aksine kitap bilindik eserleri değil, yine tanıdık yazarların tabir-i caizse biraz kıyıda köşede kalmış olanlarını, bir başka deyişle Calvino'nun kendi seçmecelerini içeriyor. Bir eserin hangi şartlar altında klasik statüsünü kazanalabileceğinin birçok tanımı verilen şahane ilk bölüm haricinde, kitabın geri kalanı yazarın anlaşılması aşırı dikkat gerektiren, ağdalı cümleleriyle bu kişisel 'klasik'ler üzerine denemelerinden oluşuyor. Calvino'nun bu şiirsel-soyut üslubu ve klasik olarak karar kıldığı bu eserlerdeki sürekli İtalya kültürü ve lokasyonları vurgusu gibi etmenler anlatılanı takibi zorlaştırsa da, incelemelerin duygusal ve bilgisel zenginliği hemen farkediliyor.

Ayrıca, -benim yaptığımın tersine- sözkonusu eseri okuduktan hemen sonra Calvino'nun ilgili denemesi sindirerek okunacak olursa bu kitabın daha besleyici ve aydınlatıcı olacağını düşünüyorum.

"Bir klasik, söyleyecekleri asla tükenmeyen bir kitaptır."

"Bir klasik, sürekli olarak kendisi hakkında bir eleştirel söylemler bütününü tahrik eden, ama hep onları silkeleyip üzerinden atan bir yapıttır."

"Klasikler, haklarında duyduklarımızla ne kadar bildiğimize inanıyorsak, gerçekten okuduğumuzda o kadar yeni, beklenmedik, benzersiz bulduğumuz kitaplardır."

First of all, let's start with the irony of that title: in order to understand the essays in this volume, you need to have read the classics (or some of them at least). Only the first essay tries to find an answer to that question, the rest of the book is full of Calvino's thoughts on some of his favourite works of literature.

Now, I am not familiar with Calvino's work as a writer of fiction, but as an essayist, he didn't exactly blow my mind. He is clearly passionate about the "classics" he covers and it shows, but I feel that this book doesn't offer much that is new or revolutionary for reasonably well-read literature students (like myself, she said modestly). There is a lot of summarising and Calvino pointing at things and going: "Isn't this neat?" I know it's neat, Calvino. I've read the book. I can deduce most of this myself and the majority of your information is listed on Wikipedia, so I was hoping that you would dig a little deeper than that. The first essay on what makes a work a classic is cute, but again, nothing we haven't heard many times before.

Overall, it's not bad, just a tad disappointing. For such a well-known writer, these essays are average. Fine. Okay. But I expected more from you, Calvino.

From Homer, Ovid, Xenophon, Stendhal, and Balzac, to Defoe, Dickens, Conrad, Pasternak, and Hemingway, Calvino, with fascinating insight gives, his take on these writers, among others, as to why their 'classics' are precisely just that: classics.
Calvino resounds with a deep sense of wonder, and writes wholeheartedly in a chirpy unpretentious manner, of which, it's clear to see just what his favourite classics meant to him. He lays out his reasoning in fourteen key points at the start of the book before we actually get to writers.

Three for example are -

'We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them,

'The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through'

'A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree'


Some of the essays on offer are only a few pages long, while others are more expansive, and while is it was great reading of the writers mentioned above, my particular interest was with fellow Italians - Cesare Pavese, Eugenio Montale, and Carlo Emilio Gadda.
Calvino wrote some superb stuff on Montale & Gadda, but to my disappointment, no sooner had I started reading his thoughts on Pavese (one of fave writers), it was all over in a flash, which for me, was a shame. It maybe didn't help that I hadn't read some of the famous classics he was referring to. The likes of - The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe, Our Mutual Friend, and The Charterhouse of Parma still have yet to sit comfortably in my lap. There is a good chance they won't ever end up there either. As who in their right mind can say they've read every single classic on the planet!

These literary essays were thought-provoking, invigorating, and a real pleasure to read, but I'm going for four stars over five because some of them were simply just too short.

i just had the chance to read one chapter. i loved it. i have plans for reading the whole of it...

"Só nos resta inventar para cada um de nós uma biblioteca ideal de nossos clássicos; e diria que ela deveria incluir uma metade de livros que já lemos e que contaram para nós, e outra de livros que pretendemos ler e pressupomos possam vir a contar. Separando uma seção a ser preenchida pelas surpresas, as descobertas ocasionais."

Little bit uneven! Loved his essay on Homer, but the Borges one was surprisingly ineffective for me.