Italo Calvino on the Written and the Unwritten Word

About this episode

This episode revisits Italo Calvino's James Lecture on the relationship between the written and unwritten word.

In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983. Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy, he began his literary career as a journalist and fiction writer after World War II, publishing his debut novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, in 1947. He went on to write some of the most formally original works in postwar literature, including Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a winter's night a traveler. His work moved fluidly between realism, fantasy, and structural experimentation, earning him a reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of what would come to be called postmodern fiction. He died in 1985, in Siena, Italy. In this lecture, later published as “The Written and the Unwritten Word” in the New York Review of Books, Calvino reflects on writing, reading and what it means to live between the written world and the material world. He is introduced by NYIH fellow Susan Sontag. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Topics covered

• Italo Calvino
• literature
• postmodern fiction
• writing
• reading
• Italian authors

Keywords

• Italo Calvino
• literature
• postmodern
• writing
• reading
• New York Institute for the Humanities

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: New York Institute for the Humanities, New York Review of Books

Books & works: The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveler, The Written and the Unwritten Word

Places: Cuba, San Remo, Italy, Siena, Italy

More episodes of New Books in Language and Translation

• Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, "Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India" (Oxford UP, 2026) · June 11, 2026 · 39 min
• Islam in English · June 10, 2026 · 37 min
• Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025) · June 4, 2026 · 55 min
• Romani Grassroots Language Learning · June 3, 2026 · 30 min
• Terao Tetsuya and translated by Kevin Wang, "Spent Bullets" (HarperVia, 2025) · June 3, 2026 · 59 min
• Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, "Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me" (37 Ink, 2026) · June 2, 2026