Blog / Colloquies

How War Begins

February 24, 2022 - By Izet Sarajlić and Jim Hicks

Tonight, driving home from the Mass Review office, I listened to a report on All Things Considered. An expert from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies opined on the distinctions between “invasion” and “incursion” and how best to describe what’s happening today in Ukraine. It’s difficult, of course, to keep one’s blood from boiling, or to keep one’s brain from thinking of arguments about angels dancing on pins and needles. Yet in my case, as is today no doubt true of many outside the world’s comfort zones, I also couldn’t help thinking, haven’t we been here before...

In Memoriam, Gianni Celati (1937-2022)

February 19, 2022 - By Patrick Barron

I came to know Gianni Celati through his writings (if knowing a person in this way is possible), beginning in the late 1990s when I found his book Narratori delle pianure (“Storytellers of the Plains,” translated as Voices from the Plains) in a shop in Ferrara, a town in northern Emilia Romagna not far from the Po River, where I was living at the time and working as an English teacher. On the cover is a photograph of Celati by Luigi Ghirri, a lone figure facing away from the camera and standing on a muddy road that curves to the left across a vague expanse of snowy land, slightly crooked and bent over something immediately at hand. I imagine that Celati is taking notes, trying to describe his surroundings—the seemingly nondescript expanse of wintry...

The Writer as Meditative Thinker

February 19, 2022 - By Jim Hicks

(Photo from Mondonuovo, directed by Davide Ferrario, produced by Movie Movie, Bologna, 2003)

This year, during the second night of January, one of our favorite writers passed away. Gianni Celati was a brilliant thinker, an innovative, experimental stylist, and an influential translator—and most of all, he cared about people, about communities, and about history. In short, our kind of guy. We were honored, a few years back, to publish Celati’s remembrance of attending the funeral of his friend and mentor, Italo Calvino, as translated by Patrick Barron.

To commemorate Celati's work, and to introduce it to those of you not fortunate enough to know him already, we offer here a three-part colloquy. First,...

Wind Taking Flight Among the Ruins

February 19, 2022 - By Anna Botta

In the “Foreword” to his Conversations with the Wind Taking Flight, Gianni Celati states that:

Writing is a conversation with whoever will read us, and conversations carry us like the wind—we never really know what the direction will be. Here the “wind taking flight” is our name for that atmospheric force that words take on, scattering them across all sorts of subjects, from cinema to autobiography.

The way that Celati’s writing moves forward—that disorienting “sense of vast horizons” (Nunzia Palmieri), that aimless wandering with an eye driven by his anxious and eternally insatiable mind, that fluid pace of face-to-face conversations—is also found in the way that Celati makes...

The Climate Change in Me (1)

December 17, 2021 - By Giacomo Sartori

Inside me exists a self that years ago decided to study agronomy—where that idea came from exactly, who knows? Many aspects of our selves remain a mystery. For forty years this self did work in soil science, and, even at a time when few were talking about climate change, he always felt that the best thing he could do for the environment would be to do his work well, putting all his effort into it, so that he would obtain persuasive data, making it clear that our lands are fragile and essential, that they must be protected and stewarded. This indefatigable self has imposed itself, domineering my life, in part because he brought home the bacon—all the other selves lived off the sweat from his brow. During a long period he analyzed mountain soils. They’re lovely,...