The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso

His father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty. His mother Melisenda – who gave up a promising academic career to raise her three children – was a scholar of German literature, and had worked on Hölderlin’s translations of the Greek poet Pindar. His uncle Tristano Codignola, partigiano during the Resistenza, after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education.

Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, just like his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza. His maternal grandfather Giovanni Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University. He was born into a family of the local upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time. Roberto Calasso (1941-2021) was an Italian publisher and writer. Thousands of years later, when Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked and arrives on that very same island, the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation and sacrifice.įollowing Calasso's masterful retelling of ancient Greek myths in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Indic myths in Ka, this richly imaginative work delves into the crucible of our collective consciousness to reimagine the origin stories of one of the earliest human civilizations. Rather than punish Utnapishtim for his disobedience, Enlil, King of the gods, granted the mortal eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. He advised one of his devotees, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals, and saved these living creatures from the Flood. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree. I remember days of desperation.'Ī long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans and decided to send a flood to destroy them. Men just went on multiplying and the noise they made was ever more irksome. It came at the end of a long, tormented story. 'The Flood didn't come suddenly as a big surprise.

The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso