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Roberto Calasso
Roberto Calasso in 2019. His nine-book series ends with The Book of All Books, due to be published this year. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
Roberto Calasso in 2019. His nine-book series ends with The Book of All Books, due to be published this year. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Roberto Calasso obituary

This article is more than 2 years old
Writer who invited the gods back into literature in an ambitious series retelling the great ancient myths

Roberto Calasso, who has died aged 80, wrote: “A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.” The Italian writer did not lead a quiet life: he invited the gods back into literature and retold the great Greek, Vedic, Egyptian and other myths in one of the most extraordinarily ambitious literary projects of modern times, a series of nine books that began with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and ended with The Book of All Books, due to be published this year.

His magnum opus made him a man out of time, one who, like Billie Holiday and Walter Benjamin, realised that there was blood at the roots of our civilisation. “There is no society which doesn’t start with dealing with violence,” he said. “And that has much to do with one of the themes I’ve been writing about since the beginning, which is sacrifice. If you look at how it all began you see it’s connected very closely with hunting, and hunting is what makes a big part of human history. Hunting starts when men, who had been for some million years simply prey of predators, become themselves predators.”

Rape, abduction, murder, and above all blood sacrifice figured again and again in the stories he told. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988) begins with Zeus transforming himself into a bull to abduct Europa from a beach. In Ka (1996), Prajapati gives birth to Agni, by opening his mouth, and then suddenly Agni’s open mouth is coming towards Prajapati, trying to eat him, because at that stage in the evolution of the universe there was nothing else to supply sustenance. In The Celestial Hunter (2016), Minos ejaculated scorpions, serpents and centipedes, until kindly Procris treated his ailment with a root that grew from the black blood of a dead giant.

Calasso insisted that these were not just curious fairy stories but essential allegories of what we were and are. “We live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their moulds,” he wrote in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. His literary expedition, in one sense, was a voyage to find those moulds and explain the casts that lie all around us.

He worried that modernity involved the erasure of the brutality that made it possible. “What I’m trying to say,” he told me in an interview for the Guardian in 1999, “is that there is a compulsion to sacrifice now as much as in Vedic India, which after all was six centuries before Christ, but in a way which isn’t seen any more. When you read about world war one, for example, it’s all in terms of sacrifice. There are monuments to the sacrifice involved in war all around us, but we do not know that we are living in a sacrificial society.”

The critic and novelist John Banville suggested Calasso had “an almost feral alertness to the violence of modern society and how we try to erase the crime”. Calasso’s point in many of his books was that killing, particularly ritual killing, is a natural feature of human life that thrived in ancient times but which we in the modern era have come to disguise or otherwise suppress.

He was born in Florence. “I come from a family that is full of academics, scholars and publishers,” he said. His maternal grandfather, Ernesto Codignola, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Florence. His mother, Melisenda, was a literary scholar who worked on Friedrich Hölderlin’s translations of the Greek poet Pindar. His father, Francesco, was a professor of the history of law. “He used to work on texts mainly from the 16th to 18th century, so the house was full of marvellous folios,” recalled his son. “I grew up surrounded by old books. I was always in the midst of books.”

But that makes Roberto’s early life sound serene. It was not, certainly not during the second world war. “I had a rather dramatic childhood,” he said. “My father, who was known as an antifascist, was arrested and condemned to death and we had to hide. My father was freed but had to disappear and so did we. I was three years old in 1944 when I was told: ‘If someone asks you, you are Roberto Fachini.’”

The boy was precocious. Aged 12, he was already writing and formed a friendship with Enzo Turolla, a translator and professor at Padua University. In 1954 his family moved to Rome, where he studied English literature and did his doctoral dissertation on Sir Thomas Browne’s theory of hieroglyphs.

In 1962, he became an editor at Adelphi Edizioni, the publishing house established that year to publish an Italian edition of Nietzsche. Adelphi quickly won a reputation for intellectual iconoclasm. After Calasso became editorial director in 1968, the authors that Adelphi published more closely reflected his personal tastes, among them Georges Simenon, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin and Milan Kundera, as well as neglected Austrian writers including Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachman, Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth.

It pleased Calasso he could elevate public literary taste with often abstruse books. His own translation of the aphorisms of Karl Kraus, for instance, was expected to sell 20 copies. Instead, it went on to its 20th printing. He also published Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which sold 300,000 copies. “That is astonishing not only in Italy, but anywhere,” he reflected. “It’s a book by an author who is unknown to the general public, on physics, which is not the easiest subject, and it obviously reached a huge public by only its pure force. So that is a very good sign.”

Calasso balanced publishing with his own writing. “I try not to go to the office in the mornings, so publishing is very concentrated in the afternoon. When I wake up I start writing. I always write with a fountain pen.” His ink was turquoise and his expensive blue paper wafer-thin.

In 1974, he published his first novel, L’Impuro Folle, about Sigmund Freud’s paranoid patient Daniel Paul Schreber. In 1978, he began the series of books that was to dominate his life, with The Ruin of Kasch. Calasso’s magnum opus was big enough to include virtuosic studies of Baudelaire, Tiepolo and Kafka, as well as The Unnamable Present (2017), a book that suggests that we in the 21st century live in a world of unfixed meanings and constant dread, while the final volume is an epic reimagining of the Old Testament.

He did not plan such a big oeuvre: “I had in my mind to write three books about the world as it was, using concepts and images almost like characters. But I ended up making a long detour.” Its encyclopedic nature led Sunil Khilnani to write in the New York Review of Books in 1998: “Calasso shares Proust’s ambition to create a work that surpasses literature: like Wagner’s Ring or Mallarmé’s notion of literature as simply the ‘Book’, which was emblematic of the creativity of the entire universe – in a word, a work that enfolds within itself all there is.”

Among his admirers were Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal and Simon Schama. But even Calasso’s longtime translator Tim Parks worried about Calasso’s motives. “Clearly there’s mania here, and preciousness, and vanity,” Parks wrote in the London Review of Books. And his critics could be savage: the Daily Telegraph reviewer of Ka for instance, yearned to put all 444 pages of its “joss stick mysticism” and “twaddle” through the garden shredder.

Calasso also published essays including Literature and the Gods (2001) based on the Weidenfeld lectures he delivered at Oxford in 2000, on the decline and return of pagan imagery in the art of the west. This was his enduring theme. As Banville put it in the Irish Times: “ In a mealy-mouthed time, Calasso speaks out strongly from an unfashionably high-intellectual position. What he is urging on us is nothing less than our duty to recall the gods from banishment through the medium of literature.”

In 1968, Calasso married the writer and translator Fleur Jaeggy. She and his children, Tancredi and Josephine, from his relationship with Anna Katharina Fröhlich, survive him.

Roberto Calasso, writer and publisher, born 30 May 1941; died 28 July 2021

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