"Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch."

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About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian novelist and short-story writer whose experimental and imaginative fiction made him one of the most influential postwar European authors. Born in 1923, he wrote major works including Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler. He died in Siena on 1985-09-19.

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