From an interview in the Paris Review: Roberto Calasso [72] is a literary institution of one. He has directed Adelphi, Italy’s most prestigious publishing house, for forty years, while publishing twelve books of his own, including an international best seller on Greek myth titled The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. In a country where intellectuals like to complain, perhaps more than elsewhere, that literary culture has fallen by the wayside, Calasso has come to stand for a lost ideal: a writer on esoteric topics, a book collector, a translator of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, and an editor who oversees the publication of some ninety books a year, in every domain from the scientific to the poetic, with a fiction list that ranges from Nabokov and Borges to Kundera and Bolaño.
Read an additional interview from 2012 here in the New Yorker.
