So I decided to choose only a single lane of Diomira which he entered and saw, complete with the silver domes, bronze idols, multicolour lights and the woman on the terrace. Here I wanted to have the visitor, mentioned in the second half of the excerpt, in the centre similar to a protagonist in a movie poster with the other activities happening around him. This is my interpretation of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible city” of Diomira. I have chosen the work of an artist called Lucia Ghirardi, which I describe in the latter part. Our task thereupon was to interpret this paragraph and illustrate it, and also to compare it with an illustration of any other artist. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.” All these beauties will already be familiar to a visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. “Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. One such city was the city of Diomira which he describes in the following fashion. But all of them turn out to be a description of the city Venice. Marco Polo describes 55 imaginary cities through prose poems to glorify the extent of Kublai Khan’s empire. It is framed like a conversation between the emperor Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. The book is a collection of descriptions of cities given by Marco Polo and it ignites ones imagination as we read through it. We were given an excerpt from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”. To amend this, listen to Polo’s observation, “it is not the voice that commands the story it is the ear.Through this blog, I try to bring about my interpretations of a story that I read, as an assignment for Communication class in my college. Within the cohesive empire, the utopian ideal of the cities remains unachieved - whether aimed through the ontological set-up of Plato’s Ideal City in The Republic, or down the centuries, when Calvino sat to write about the cities, which could not be validated. Khan’s aspiration to systematically bracket Polo’s accounts echoes the political realities. At every step, Polo defeats the purpose of the frames and questions its boundaries that refrain him from putting the blocks together. To have a better understanding of Polo’s narration, Khan deploys - chessboard and atlas - as the predetermined tools to lend a structure to Polo’s commentary. Inevitably, it barred me from reading the book under the lens of political empire and sovereign logics. Under the current context, while rereading the text, I was taken by surprise that in the past, I had been caught within the poetic-philosophy framework of the cities. Largely, the text’s liminal position between modern and postmodern forms catches the attention of the readers and critic alike. Even the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has dedicated a long poem Kubla Khan to the ‘slight disposition’ of the emperor of the Tartars who ruled as far as the regions of current day EuroAsia.Įarly sailing ship for voyages of discovery Image Credit: Courtesy of Creative Commons Even if the cities documented in the book are as fantastical as the Be'er Sheva, the travel accounts of the real-time Italian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan’s court were made popular in the 13th century Italian Renaissance with a travelogue The Travels of Marco Polo written down by Rustichello da Pisa and Polo. The second part holds true for this book - with less than 150 pages it would force you to take long pauses before turning a page and often even moving to the next paragraph to understand the meaning of the unsaid ‘between the lines’. If the cover of the book does not affirm the quality of the book, then the number of pages is nowhere the yardstick to measure the intensity of the read. My first encounter of the bond between these two countries came with the two protagonists - Venetian traveller Marco Polo and the Tartars emperor Kublai Khan - of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in 1972. Book cover of Invisible Cities Image Credit: Courtesy of the author
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