书名：Why Read the Classics卡尔维诺：为什么读经典
作者：Italo Calvino
出版社名称：Penguin Classics
出版时间：2009
语种：英文
ISBN：9780141189703
商品尺寸：12.9 x 1.7 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：288
我爱简·奥斯汀，因为我从未读过她，却只因为她存在而满足。我爱果戈理，因为他用洗练、恶意和适度来歪曲。我爱陀思妥耶夫斯基，因为他用一贯性、愤怒和毫无分寸来歪曲。我爱巴尔扎克，因为他是空想者。我爱卡夫卡，因为他是现实主义者。我爱莫泊桑，因为他肤浅。我爱曼斯菲尔德，因为她聪明。我爱菲茨杰拉德，因为他不满足。我爱拉迪盖，因为青春再也回不来。我爱斯维沃，因为他需要变得更老。我爱……

经典是每次重读都像初读那样带来发现的书，经典是即使我们初读也好像是在重温的书。

Why Read the Classics《为什么读经典》共36篇文章，论及31位经典作家及其作品，是进入经典世界非常好的入门书。在这里，卡尔维诺向我们开放他不拘一格、兼容并蓄的秘密书架，娓娓道来他的理想藏书。凭着热枕和智慧，卡尔维诺让文学作品在读者面前呈现千姿百态的魅力。没有学院术语和新闻报道的油嘴滑舌，博学而非炫学，充满了对文学真正的热情。正因为此，《为什么读经典》打动了世界上成千上万的读者，无论他们是初读，还是以一种新的方式重读。

Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are 'rereading', not 'reading'), this is an absorbing collection of Italo Calvino's witty and passionate criticism.

Review
'Enthusiasm and intelligence: these are the essential qualities of the critic. Calvino, himself a novelist of rare quality, possessed both generously. This is a book to read for itself, and also because it will send you back to other books to read, either again in a new way, or for the first time... Superb' --Daily Telegraph

'This volume itself is a classic book at bedtime, a seductive invitation to forgotten opportunities or rereading' --The Times
伊塔洛·卡尔维诺(Italo Calvino,1923-1985)是意大利当代具有世界影响的作家。于1985年获得诺贝尔文学提名，却因于当年猝然去世而与该奖失之交臂。但其人其作早已在意大利文学界乃至世界文学界产生巨大影响。
卡尔维诺从事文学创作40年，一直尝试着用各种手法表现当代人的生活和心灵。他的作品融现实主义、超现实主义与后现代主义于一身，以丰富的手法、奇特的角度构造超乎想像的、富有浓厚童话意味的故事，深为当代作家推崇，并给他们带来深刻影响。《我们的祖先》三部曲、《命运交叉的城堡》、《帕洛马尔》等达到惊人的艺术高度和思想深度。《意大利童话》很大限度地保持了意大利民间口头故事的原貌，艺术价值和学术价值兼具，是再现意大利“民族记忆”之深厚积淀的不可多得的作品。《美国讲稿》是卡尔维诺对自己近40年小说创作实践的丰富经验进行的系统回顾和理论上的总结与阐发。他的作品以特有的方式反映了时代，更超越了时代。
关于生平，卡尔维诺写道：“我仍然属于和克罗齐一样的人，认为一个作者，只有作品有价值。因此我不提供传记资料。我会告诉你你想知道的东西。但我从来不会告诉你真实。”
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. He died in Siena in 1985, of a brain hemorrhage.
Why Read the Classics?
Let us begin by putting forward some definitions.
1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading…’
At least this is the case with those people whom one presumes are ‘well read’; it does not apply to the young, since they are at an age when their contact with the world, and with the classics which are part of that world, is important precisely because it is their first such contact.
The iterative prefix ‘re-’ in front of the verb ‘read’ can represent a small act of hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, all one need do is to point out that however wide-ranging any person’s formative reading may be, there will always be an enormous number of fundamental works that one has not read.
Put up your hand anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and Thucydides. And what about Saint-Simon? and Cardinal Retz? Even the great cycles of nineteenth-century novels are more often mentioned than read. In France they start to read Balzac at school, and judging by the number of editions in circulation people apparently continue to read him long after the end of their schooldays. But if there were an official survey on Balzac’s popularity in Italy, I am afraid he would figure very low down the list. Fans of Dickens in Italy are a small elite who whenever they meet start to reminisce about characters and episodes as though talking of people they actually knew. When Michel Butor was teaching in the United States a number of years ago, he became so tired of people asking him about Emile Zola, whom he had never read, that he made up his mind to read the whole cycle of Rougon-Macquart novels. He discovered that it was entirely different from how he had imagined it: it turned out to be a fabulous, mythological genealogy and cosmogony, which he then described in a brilliant article.
What this shows is that reading a great work for the first rime when one is fully adult is an extraordinary pleasure, one which is very different (though it is impossible to say whether more or less pleasurable) from reading it in one’s youth. Youth endows every reading, as it does every experience, with a unique flavour and significance, whereas at a mature age one appreciates (or should appreciate) many more details, levels and meanings.