THE BOOK
This volume offers a detailed analysis of selected cases in the reception, translation and artistic reinterpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) around the world.
The book traces the many different ways in which Calvino's modern classic has been read, translated and adapted in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Flanders, Mexico, Romania, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, Poland, Japan and Australia. It also offers analyses of the relation between Calvino's book and, respectively, the East and Africa, as well as reflections on the book's inspiration for, and resonance in, dance, architecture and art. The volume thus traces the diversity in the reception and circulation of Invisible Cities in different countries and continents, offering a much wider framework for the discussion of Calvino’s masterpiece than before, and a more detailed picture of its cultural and linguistic ramifications.
Through the tale of 55 cities, Calvino attempts to describe a single city, Venice. Emerging from the lagoon on countless small islands, Venice could be seen as an archipelago in itself: the changes, the relationships, the stories pass from one island to another thanks to the lagoon which leads to the sea that here becomes a “pòntos “ that repels and bring together at the same time.
The metaphor of the archipelago is the metaphor of the relationship between spaces, cultures, peoples, languages, ideas, imaginaries. The archipelago represents the time of crossing, of transience, of inbetweenness. We are all always in a transitory state "between" the past and the future, "between" the here and the elsewhere, "between" what we know and what we do not know, between the before and the after.
The Invisible Cities are fluid, metamorphic, continuous and contiguous, merging in the wandering-reader's imagination, they belong together and cannot exist individually, since they are part of a whole, all possible variations of the same city, malleable, changeable, expandable and only able to reach an ideal centrality by remaining peripheral to large maps.
THE BOOK
This volume offers a detailed analysis of selected cases in the reception, translation and artistic reinterpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) around the world.
The book traces the many different ways in which Calvino's modern classic has been read, translated and adapted in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Flanders, Mexico, Romania, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, Poland, Japan and Australia. It also offers analyses of the relation between Calvino's book and, respectively, the East and Africa, as well as reflections on the book's inspiration for, and resonance in, dance, architecture and art. The volume thus traces the diversity in the reception and circulation of Invisible Cities in different countries and continents, offering a much wider framework for the discussion of Calvino’s masterpiece than before, and a more detailed picture of its cultural and linguistic ramifications.
Through the tale of 55 cities, Calvino attempts to describe a single city, Venice. Emerging from the lagoon on countless small islands, Venice could be seen as an archipelago in itself: the changes, the relationships, the stories pass from one island to another thanks to the lagoon which leads to the sea that here becomes a “pòntos “ that repels and bring together at the same time.
The metaphor of the archipelago is the metaphor of the relationship between spaces, cultures, peoples, languages, ideas, imaginaries. The archipelago represents the time of crossing, of transience, of inbetweenness. We are all always in a transitory state "between" the past and the future, "between" the here and the elsewhere, "between" what we know and what we do not know, between the before and the after.
The Invisible Cities are fluid, metamorphic, continuous and contiguous, merging in the wandering-reader's imagination, they belong together and cannot exist individually, since they are part of a whole, all possible variations of the same city, malleable, changeable, expandable and only able to reach an ideal centrality by remaining peripheral to large maps.
VALENTINA ACAVA’S PAPER
“Acava approaches Invisible Cities from a (nomadic) African perspective, suggesting cities that have remained truly invisible in account of the circulation of Calvino’s book, places such as Gaoui, Gedi, Pate, Abomey, Cité du Fleuve, Koumbi Salhe, Lalibela, Soweto, Kigali, Kibera, Ajegunle, Cazenga, Agbogboloshie and Shiro Meda. Although the book has not been officially published in any African language, this is not to say that it does not resonate with African readers or cultures. Acava’s acrostic reflection on Calvino’s book conveys, among other things, the importance of imagination, translation and hybridity in the text.”
FROM THE PAPER: “A rhizomatic acrostic in Africa through Calvino’s Invisible Cities”
“The idea of reading Invisible Cities as a kaleidoscopic book, in which such a vast and ungraspable continent as Africa can find itself represented, is justified here by the almost complete absence of translation into the principal African languages... It would be desirable to read Calvino in Amharic, Kiswahili, Shona, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba; yet this is a proposal for the future. When thinking about a continent that has its gaze fixed on the horizon of Utopia – which is indeed a direction rather than a goal – the most urgent question seems to reappropriating a narrative voice that was stolen by colonial history, while identifying ways of approaching the future with a different attitude.”
VALENTINA ACAVA’S PAPER
“Acava approaches Invisible Cities from a (nomadic) African perspective, suggesting cities that have remained truly invisible in account of the circulation of Calvino’s book, places such as Gaoui, Gedi, Pate, Abomey, Cité du Fleuve, Koumbi Salhe, Lalibela, Soweto, Kigali, Kibera, Ajegunle, Cazenga, Agbogboloshie and Shiro Meda. Although the book has not been officially published in any African language, this is not to say that it does not resonate with African readers or cultures. Acava’s acrostic reflection on Calvino’s book conveys, among other things, the importance of imagination, translation and hybridity in the text.”
FROM THE PAPER: “A rhizomatic acrostic in Africa through Calvino’s Invisible Cities”
“The idea of reading Invisible Cities as a kaleidoscopic book, in which such a vast and ungraspable continent as Africa can find itself represented, is justified here by the almost complete absence of translation into the principal African languages... It would be desirable to read Calvino in Amharic, Kiswahili, Shona, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba; yet this is a proposal for the future. When thinking about a continent that has its gaze fixed on the horizon of Utopia – which is indeed a direction rather than a goal – the most urgent question seems to reappropriating a narrative voice that was stolen by colonial history, while identifying ways of approaching the future with a different attitude.”