Polo’s descriptions of his travels are not chronological but thematic, as he classifies them under headings such as “Cities and Memory” or “Cities and Death.” At a 1983 Columbia University conference, Calvino said that Invisible Cities was “made as a polyhedron, and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges” (Elpis). Publicada en italiano en 1972, 'Las ciudades invisibles' de Italo Calvino consiste en una secuencia de diálogos imaginarios entre el viajero veneciano Marco Polo y el emperador tártaro Kublai Khan. While the journeys are all told in the present tense, they encompass time-travel that incorporates classical Greek and Roman deities in addition to the construction of modern metropolises like Los Angeles and New York. Polo describes the waste that accompanies consumerism, travelers’ fatigue, and the homogenization of the landscape. As the account of cities progresses, dystopian motifs emerge. 21 cm 'A Helen and Kurt Wolff book. These features include duality-for example, one city for the living and another for the dead-and paradox, in the sense that the cities’ greatest virtues are also the origin of their decline. Although each city has a different female name, as his narrative progresses the reader comes to realize that they share features in common. Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border between two deserts.The second narrative strand is Polo’s descriptions of the 55 cities he has visited. In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the city form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed. When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red windsocks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel and he thinks of all the ports the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the 1 docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. As Gore Vidal wrote Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities. They know the net will last only so long.ĭespina, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972ĭespina can be reached in two ways, by ship or by camel. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. There are two ways to escape suffering it. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. 541 likes Like The inferno of the living is not something that will be if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. Octavia, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972
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