Calvino's Cosmicomics

PREVIOUSLY untranslated (so far as I know) Calvino—Two Cosmicomics: As long as the sun lasts and The meteorites—can be found in the May issue of Harper's.

From As long as the sun lasts:

It was precisely for that reason, to have a bit of a quieter life, that my grandfather came and settled here—Qfwfq said—after the last "Supernova" explosion had flung them once more into space: grandfather, grandmother, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The Sun was just at that stage condensing, a roundish, yellowish shape, along one arm of the Galaxy, and it made a good impression on him, amidst all the other stars that were going around. "Let’s try a yellow one this time," he said to his wife. "If I've understood it right, the yellow ones are those that stay up longest without changing. And maybe in a short time from now a planetary system will form around it too."

And from The meteorites:

At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean—old Qfwfq said—since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact, you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different: there's atmosphere; you look at the sky and say, "Oh, how clear it is, how pure!" But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder as white as mothballs that deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.

Note that it's Martin McLaughlin (who also did Calvino's Why Read the Classics? and Hermit in Paris) translating these, not William Weaver. Penguin Classics UK is publishing The Complete Cosmicomics next month.