Free Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino Page B

area in which I feel competent to give an opinion), it opens up countless possibilities which are unknown to the West.
    For instance, one of the most common motifs in Western folktales — the hero sees a portrait of a beautiful woman and instantly falls in love with her — is found also in the Orient, but multiplied. In a twelfth-century Persian poem, King Bahram sees seven portraits of seven princesses and falls in love with all seven at one and the same time. Each princess is a daughter of a ruler of one of the seven continents; Bahram asks the hand of each of them in turn and marries them. He then orders seven pavilions to be built, each a different colour and ‘built to reflect the nature of the seven planets’. Each one of the seven princesses has a corresponding pavilion, colour, planet and day of the week; the king will make a weekly visit to each of his brides and will hear her tell a tale. The king’s clothes will be the colour of the planet of that day and the stories told by the brides will match the colour, and the specific power of the corresponding planet.
    These seven stories are folktales full of marvellous happenings like
The Arabian Nights
, but each one has a moral conclusion (even though it is not always recognisable as such beneath its symbolic cloak), such that the weekly cycle of the newly-wed king rehearses the moral virtues which are the human equivalent of the properties of the cosmos. (The single male king practises carnal and spiritual polygamy on his many handmaid-brides; in this tradition the roles of the sexes are irreversible, so it is pointless toexpect surprises here.) The seven tales in turn contain love stories which are presented in a multiplied form compared to Western models.
    For example, the typical structure of an initiation-tale demands that the hero undergo several trials to win both the hand of the girl he loves and a royal throne. In the West this structure requires the wedding to be kept for the end, or if it does take place earlier, it is the prelude to further vicissitudes, persecutions or magic spells, where the bride (or groom) is first lost then found again. Instead here we have a tale where the hero wins a new bride with each trial he overcomes, each bride more royal than the previous one; and these successive brides do not cancel each other out, but are cumulative, like the store of wisdom and experience gathered in a lifetime.
    The book I am discussing is a classic of medieval Persian literature, now available in a slim volume in Rizzoli’s Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli series, and presented with commendable expertise: Nezami,
Le sette principesse (The Seven Princesses)
, introduction and translation by Alessandro Bausani and Giovanna Calasso. Tackling masterpieces of Oriental literature is usually an unsatisfactory experience for those of us who are uninitiated, because it is so difficult to obtain even a distant glimmer of the original through the translations and adaptations; and it is always an arduous task situating a work in a context which we are not familiar with. This poem in particular is certainly an extremely complex text both as regards its stylistic make-up and its spiritual implications. But Bausani’s translation — which seems to stick scrupulously close to the densely metaphorical text and does not hold back even when it comes to puns (the Persian words are given in parenthesis)—with its copious notes and introduction (along with its essential accompaniment of illustrations) gives us something more, I believe, than the illusion of understanding what this book is about and of savouring its poetic charm, at least as far as a prose translation can do so.
    So then, we now have the rare good fortune to be able to add to our library of masterpieces of world literature a work that is both of some substance and highly enjoyable. I say rare good fortune because this privilege has been granted only to Italians amongst all other Western readers, if the