Salvatore Marano teaches American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Catania (Italy). Along with his academic interests (the interrelations among arts, spatial form in literature, the technologies of writing), he has long been cultivating a passion for ludolinguistics and translation.

At the beginning of his career he translated Gertrude Stein’s portraits and poems (“Avanguardia e traduzione. Poesie e ritratti di Gertrude Stein,” Ritmica, 4, giugno 1990, pp. 20-33) and Anthony Burgess’s worplays in prose and verse (ABBA ABBA; Roma, Biblioteca del Vascello, 1995). He then studied E. E. Cummings’s unreadable poempictures (“Il carme figurato e l’haiku. Silent Songs di E. E. Cummings,” Siculorum Gymnasium, 48, 1-2, 1995: 229-241) and perfected his knowledge of play-translation by investigating the Canadian avant-garde of the 1960s-80s (“Rational Geomancy: The Toronto Research Game of Literature”, Siculorum Gymnasium LI, 1-2, 1998, Tome I: 583-60; “Poetry as Pun. Concrete, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and the Academy,” in The Canadian Vision/La vision canadienne, ed. A. Anastasi, G. Bonanno, R. Rizzo, vol. 6., Reggio Calabria, Edizioni Officina Grafica, 1999: 125-151).

Among his oulipo-oriented publications there are: a collection of essays on literature as play and game (American Games, Catania, emme, 2001, with a chapter on Harry Mathew’s The Journalist), a reading of Walter Abish’s tautogrammatic novel Alphabetical Africa (“Imperialismo e identità: Alphabetical Africa di Walter Abish,” Letterature d’America, XXX, 129, 2010: 75-93), and an interdisciplinary essay on George Perec and the representation of the city (Lo spazio obliquo. Georges Perec fra segno e disegno, with S. Nucifora and D. Colistra; Roma: Aracne, 2015).