‘The Argentine Ant’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

Having very little money at the time, in the early 90s, I remember having a book fund, a sort of piggy bank for loose change which I would spend on books, and I remember I used this to buy a copy of Alberto Manguel’s anthology of fantastic literature Black Water, a big volume published by Picador of 72 short stories. An influential book, I think, bringing together classics like ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ with lesser known works like the Calvino story I’ve chosen here. ‘The Argentine Ant’ is built on a very simple premise – a family, and a community, is driven mad by the relentless presence of ants. It inspired the title poem of my third poetry collection, Island to Island.

First published as ‘La formica argentina’, 1952, and in translation in 1957. Now available in Difficult Loves and Other Stories, Vintage, 2018

‘The Distance of The Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

Sometimes there is a story that takes my breath away at the sheer delight of the writer’s imagination. This Calvino story is such a one. It is story about the Moon, with a love triangle providing the narrative. Calvino takes an old scientific theory that there was a time when the Moon was very close to the Earth and suggests it was so close you could row out to the celestial body and climb up to it on a ladder. Calvino is wonderfully exact about the mechanics of clambering onto the Moon’s surface, which the narrator says is scaly and smells faintly of fish.

“The only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.”

Great use of ‘only’ there. This story is like a Chagall painting, charming, strange, surreal, particularly when Captain Vhd’s wife, with her long silvery arms, is stranded on the moon playing slow arpeggios on her harp. Joyous.

First published in Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. It is now available as a Penguin Modern Classic

‘The story of the married couple’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

Some time ago now, before I’d realised how much this story means to me, I was at my cousin’s wedding reception, and the guest book was being handed round the tables and suddenly it was in front of me and I was at a loss as to what to write, and then I found myself just writing ‘Calvino’ and the title of this story.

I love love stories, but I feel they’re just about the hardest type of stories to do a good job of. If they indeed are, I think that one reason for that – and probably there are several – is that, as Jean Valjean and co sing, “to love another person is to see the face of God”, and capturing the face of God is no easy task – let alone two of the damn things. I think more elemental approaches get round that difficulty to some extent, and this story is a model in that respect.

So far as I can gather from cursory research: First published, in Italian, in 1958 in the third section of Calvino’s collection I racconti. That third section, titled ‘Gli amori difficili’, was then expanded into a collection of the same name, published in 1970. William Weaver’s English translation of the latter collection then came out in 1983, with a couple of other added stories – and this was the first of at least two translated collections of Calvino stories, somewhat different in content, with the English title Difficult Loves. I have the Vintage edition of that first translated collection

‘All At One Point’ by Italo Calvino

Most of this story takes place in the impossibly tiny cramped point that is pre-Big Bang existence, then suddenly bursts the desire to make pasta for everyone; and so, everything else must follow: the physics for the act of making must come into being; the chemicals and atoms of pasta have to pop into existence; there must be sunlight to ripen the wheat, so stars duly explode; even the concept of everyone has to become comprehensible, so matter must rush outwards to fill time and space. This life-affirming world-shaping desire to host and cook and gather is more gendered than I would prefer nowadays (it could easily be “friends, let’s have pasta!” rather than “boys, I’ll make you some pasta!”) but the humane philosophy at the core of this mind-expanding story is wonderful anyway and to read it is to be made happy.

First published in Italian in 1965 in Le cosmicomiche and in English in 1968 in Cosmicomics; reprinted in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin 2009

‘Big Fish, Little Fish’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

This story is in a battered parallel text edition which I get out every August. And what speaks more of summer than a child spending his days in the sea?

Zeffirino lives to fish. On this particular Sunday, while his father prises limpets off the rocks, he takes a secretly acquired harpoon (“he was a careful little boy”) and revels in the underwater hunt. As with the best stories about children, the telling is as effortless as the child’s movements, and the delight is fully the child’s.

“He had found the sea-bream again; in fact two! Just as he was aiming he saw a whole squadron of them navigating calmly to the left, and another shoal gleaming to his right. The place was swarming with fish, almost an enclosed lake, and wherever Zeffirino looked he met a frisking of narrow fins and a gleaming of scales.”

This is the story of an encounter between two very different humans, who for an afternoon find a new way to get along. The pivotal moment happens when Zeffirino emerges by a rock to see “a fat woman in a bathing-dress” crying into the sea. No longer carefree, he must assess this adult’s sadness. How to cheer her up. With the wonders of the sea of course: “if she did not stop at sight of a bass or a sea-perch, what on earth could ever console her?”

She accepts his offer to try on his mask but can’t see through her tears, and so she sits on the rocks putting his catch into a pool. The signorina becomes ever bolder in touching the fish, tracing their wounds, till the prize catch of an octopus attaches itself to her arm, then her throat. Things do not end well for the octopus, but Zeffirino is pleased to see there are no more tears.

First published as ‘Pesci Grossi, Pesci Piccoli’; published in English translation in Italian Short Stories, Penguin, 1965. Picked by Caroline Clark. Caroline’s books are: Saying Yes in Russian (Agenda Editions), Sovetica (CB editions) and Own Sweet Time (CB editions).

‘The Adventure of a Bather’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

* Picked by CD Rose

Several years ago, having just returned to England after a long time living in Italy, a group of newish acquaintances invited me to spend a day at the beach with them. I happily accepted the offer, though on arriving was disappointed to find that all the men, despite being mostly in their mid-to late 30s and early 40s, were wearing these absolutely fucking hideous ‘board shorts’ things, looking like they were all off to see Carter USM or some such horror at the Camden Underworld in 1991. I’d turned up wearing a pair of proper swimming trunks, which caused these overgrown man-children much hilarity, the ladhood (and I use the phrase carefully: it is a universal truth that irrespective of age, ethnic background, sexual orientation, level of education, income, or political affiliation, any group of more than three men immediately become the lads) attempting to mock my choice of (stylish, practical) costume.

Later, out in the water (freezing, gusty), a larger than anticipated wave sunk us all, and on finding our feet again in the shallows several of my companions were horrified to find that the force of the water had filled their ghastly baggy apparel completely, like sails, and swiftly removed them. Their shock rapidly turned to hilarity (they were, after all, the lads) but few were spared the sight of pallid, eggy buttocks, shrivelled scrotums and tiny wriggly penises (in all fairness, it was the North Sea, whose cold spares no one.) My snug trunks, however, remained firmly in place.

I tell this story not out of mere schadenfreude, nor because it is one of my few personal anecdotes that does not end up with me being the rube, but because it is – indirectly – the premise of Italo Calvino’s story ‘The Adventure of a Bather.’ Signora Isotta Barbarino loses her cozzy while out swimming at the beach (though her misfortune is attributed to poor quality of manufacture rather than poor sense of style), and treads water, then hangs onto a convenient buoy for most of the day. It’s a tiny thing, but with Calvino’s characteristic leggerezza it becomes a story about bodies, shame, men and women, small acts of kindness, reflections on a life, and even – that dread phrase – what it might mean to be alive, in not much more space than it has taken me to tell you this story.

First published as L’avventura di una bagnante, from Gli amori difficili, 1957. Translation first published in Difficult Loves, 1983

* C.D. Rose’s The Blind Accordionist is out now in paperback from Melville House Publishing. You can read his own Personal Anthology here.

‘The Daughters of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin

In ‘The Daughters of the Moon’ the space race and American consumerism collide with the concept of an ageing and decrepit moon, leaving its orbit and crashing to Earth – New York’s East River, to be precise, witnessed by the goddess Diana and her acolytes. Calvino, who began writing as a neorealist, is better known for his later fabulist and metafictional works. These emerged when, instead of producing the novels he felt were expected of him, he began writing the kind of book he loved to read, one that felt as if it was ‘by an unknown writer, from another age and country, discovered in an attic.’

First published in the New Yorker in 2009, and available for subscribers to read here, then collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

It’s hard to pick a favourite from Cosmicomics. In this one, the narrator Qfwfq explores the scientific fact that the moon was once close to the earth. It bobbed just above the sea so that men rowing beneath it feared they might bang their heads if they stood up, and regularly visited it to collect the creamy, curdy milk that collected on its surface, which needed to be filtered due to the pollution of “fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fishhooks, at times even a comb.” A mad, vivacious tale that fills me with joy every time I read it.

First published in Italian in 1965. First published in English by Jonathan Cape, 1968. Now available from Penguin Classics, 2010

‘The Aquatic Uncle’ by Italo Calvino

This is my favourite of the Cosmicomic stories, each of which begins with the expression of a scientific hypothesis – true, subsequently disproved or apocryphal – which is then inhabited fictionally, with absurd consequences. This particular story hinges on the fact of our evolution from the oceans, with the recalcitrant uncle of the title refusing to make the transition to dry land.

Originally published in Italian between 1964 and 1965 in the periodicals Il Caffè and Il Giorno; first published in English translation in Cosmicomics, Harcourt Brace, 1968; translated by William Weaver, collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2010

‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

To indulge completely in fantasy, and to risk. By risk I mean to avoid resting in comfort for long, always trying to expand the reaches of what you’re doing, never shying away from the new and untested. In the Cosmicomics Calvino uses scientific hypotheses of the day as jumping-off points, creating a new genre described as “a subspecies of science fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

First published in Italian in 1965. First published in English translation in Cosmicomics, Harcourt Brace, 1968. Collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2010. Available as an animation, in Hebrew with subtitles here

‘The Adventure of a Clerk’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver and Ann Goldstein

Chosen by Jane Roberts

(Dedicated to those of us who have loved for one night only, and equally to those of us who have never loved for one night only.)

We meet our protagonist in the early hours of post-coital bliss: “It so happened that Enrico Gnei, a clerk, spent a night with a beautiful lady.” Bedroom antics are hinted at, allowing the reader to wander off the pages of the present and join Enrico in his imaginings of the sensual and tender “inheritance of that night”, whilst embedded in the converse mundanity of the morning’s necessities. The basic human urge to broadcast his nocturnal exploits, seems here something more than the braggadocio of a lad about town. This is the middle class, middle man, middle of the road, clerk who has undergone an abrupt metamorphosis from the constrains of his bourgeois humdrum. The moment merits marking; as we bask in revelation and comedy, Calvino, the descriptive master of both microcosm and macrocosm, ensures the world breathes into life with an intense – almost pixelated – ecstasy of “boundless Edens”.

From the exquisite idealisation of those early hours of the morning when he leaves the house at the top of the hill, Enrico the Adventurer descends back down to earth – or the office – “mad with love among the accountants” – with a bathetic crash. The unexpected illicit beauty and joy of the day is stripped away by thwarted communication of various kinds; and his fate is to wonder the “what if” of a one night stand. Often love can be realised when the moment passes – the orgasmic glory, a fleeting moment of tenderness never to be reclaimed, maybe never to be spoken of again once passed: all eventually fades into a “ secret pang of grief” and a closed account book of passion.

First published in Difficult Loves and Other Stories, 1953. Available in Vintage Classics, 2018

Jane Roberts is a freelance writer living in South Shropshire. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in anthologies and journals including: Litro, Bare Fiction Magazine, The Lonely Crowd, Wales Arts Review.

‘The Distance Of The Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

This is a gloriously sensual story, narrated by a man who wants another’s wife – but the true star of the show is the moon. Calvino imagines it so close it risks dipping its scales in the sea. Fishermen gather lunar milk as the protagonist writhes in unrequited love. I still remember discovering magic realism and fantasy – adult literature that gave me permission to work seriously with playfulness, allegory and the “precious muck” of detail. This is a great example of the form – full of texture and motion and mischief and longing. I suggest you read it while eating a very good crème brûlée.

First published in Cosmicomics, Giulio Einaudi (Italy) and Harcourt Brace (US), 1965. Currently available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2010, and as a £1 Penguin Modern, 2018. Read the story online here

‘La Luna e Gnac’ (‘Moon and Gnac’) by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

Marcovaldo is a popular character who shaped our childhood and imagination. Created by the genius of Italo Calvino during the Italian economic boom, Marcovaldo’s stories tell about the character’s life and family, whose mediocre everyday existence is punctuated by sudden discoveries and epiphanies. Despite living in a cold grey city, Marcovaldo is always able to spot a touch of poetry, the hidden beauty of daily life; yet in the background we can see the dawn of consumerist society with all its ambiguities. In these stories, Calvino’s style combines melancholy and fun, farce and fantasy.

In ‘Moon and Gnac’, the view of the night sky from Marcovaldo’s family home is thwarted by the commercial sign of Spaak Cognac, a neon sign that turns itself on and off every twenty seconds. After his son Michelino destroys the sign with his sling, one of the competitors of Spaak, Cognac Tomawak, offers to hire Marcovaldo’s family in order to make Spaak go bankrupt. But once they succeed, the original neon sign is replaced by a similar, even more annoying one from Tomawak. Calvino captures a moment of transformation in 1960s Italian life, when Italian society is irremediably losing its innocence.

First published in Marcovaldo, Einaudi, 1963. Published in English in Marcovaldo: or The Seasons in the City, Vintage, 2001

‘Il visconte dimezzato’ (‘The Cloven Viscount’) by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

Did we mention that we love Italo Calvino? We couldn’t resist including in this anthology another of his stories. ‘The Cloven Viscount’ tells of Viscount Medardo, who is bisected by a Turkish cannonball during the Crusades; when his two halves come back to his homeland, walking around independently from each other, one reveals to be the kind half of the viscount, while the other terrifies everyone.

When this longish short story appeared at the start of the 1950s, Calvino was criticised for abandoning the realism of his early writing. Later he revealed that the story had developed from a visual image that he saw in his mind – the image of a man split in two halves. But more than with a moral good/evil division, this splitting had to do with a feeling of being incomplete and the impossibility of feeling whole, of being everything that one would like to be. This novella includes one of our favourite literary quotes: “Alle volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.” (“Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”)

First published by Einaudi, 1952 / collected in Our Ancestors, Vintage, 1992