This article**: The people**.
Xu Tong. People** December 03, 2023 Edition 07).
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italian writer Italo Calvino. He once said, "The world and me, experiences and fantasies are contained in line after line." "Calvino's writings are full of lightness, warmth, and bright fantasies, opening up a literary adventure for generations of readers.
Realism in allegorical colors.
Calvino was born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de Las Vegas, a small town near Havana, Cuba, and returned to San Remo in northwestern Italy with his parents when he was less than two years old. The town is located next to the Ligurian Sea, and in the garden of the house is a pubescent frankincense, the "false pepper tree", which later became the prototype for the tree in The Baron in the Tree.
At the end of World War II, Calvino joined the partisans with his younger brother. The experience of guerrilla warfare was of great significance to the formation of Calvino's outlook on life. He once said that everything he wrote and thought was based on the experience of this period, and "all the feelings, observations and hearings in life are literary inducements."
After the end of World War II, Calvino began his literary career at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Turin. In 1946 he began working for the publishing house Aeginaoudi. At the end of the year, he completed his 20-plus full-length novel, The Path to the Spider's Nest, which not only sold well, but also won literary awards, making him famous in the Italian literary scene.
In the 50s of the 20th century, Calvino gradually turned to the creation of "allegorical style". The Trilogy of Our Ancestors has been hailed by critics as a "philosophical fairy tale", and they all "take place in distant times and imaginary realms": Viscount Medardo in "The Viscount Divided in Half" is split in half vertically by artillery fire during the war, half evil, half benevolent;Cosimo in "Baron in the Tree" (see picture 1, courtesy of Xu Tong) climbed the tree at the age of 12 because he rebelled against his father's **, and did not return to the earth in his life, and jumped into the hot air balloon that rose into the sky when he was dying;The protagonist of "The Knight That Doesn't Exist", Adi Lulfo, is a horseback armored body without a physical body, and survives by will. Through them, Calvino hopes to rediscover the tension between the individual and the collective, between survival and reason, between autobiography and history, between lyricism and epic, and to make it flow vividly in reality.
This trilogy also responds to a fundamental question that many writers in the 50s of the last century concerned about: how to revive popular literature?Drawing inspiration from fairy tales, Calvino writes metaphors about human existence in "allegories of stylistic realism": "We go from the struggle for existence (The Knight of Non-Existence) to existence in its entirety (The Viscount in Half) and finally to the struggle for existence – striving for self-fulfillment in the collective, while remaining loyal to individual freedom (The Baron in the Tree). Critics have called Our Ancestors the "allegorical realism" of contemporary Italian literature. Fables have also become Calvino's preferred genre, and he uses fables to overcome the gap between "reproducing reality" and "reaching the truth", finding a style of "lightness" that is intended beyond words, and finding a way for his words to break through the constraints of the appearance of things. In this way, Calvino found the connection between literature and the times, with history, and with his home and country for his works, which became an allegory of literature itself.
In 1972, The Invisible City was published, which became Calvino's late masterpiece and a masterpiece of postmodernism, which was loved by readers from all over the world and won him world fame.
Encounter with the East in the book.
In April 1956, Shanghai New Literature and Art Publishing House launched a collection of modern Italian short stories "The Soldier Who Brought the Cannon Home", with the author writing "Italo Calvino and others" in the author's column, and the title of the book was taken from Calvino's short story of the same name**, and selected his other work "The Seven Brothers of the Severic Family". Calvino was introduced as "one of the most talented writers" in post-World War II Italian literature. At that time, both stories were translated from French, not the original Italian to Chinese, but Chinese readers could also feel the unique style of this Italian ** family. On August 9, 1956, a few months after the first edition was published, the first reader's borrowing record was left on the library card of the Peking University Library.
Unlike Calvino, which we are familiar with, these two stories have the simplicity and purity of resistance literature and witness literature. They are based on Calvino's own experience of guerrilla warfare, and the young writer uses plain language to tell the common people's hatred of the fascist war, their desire for peace, and their cherishing of truth, goodness and beauty. At this time, Calvino's pen already had Boccaccio-like transparency and humor and "The Good Soldier"-style absurd irony, and he explored a unique literary expression in the future through the honing of words.
In literature, Calvino meets again with the East and China. "Invisible City" (see picture 2, courtesy of Xu Tong) is a rewrite of "Marco Polo's Travels". Calvino uses a dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo throughout. It's just that the reader can't be sure whether he is reading Marco Polo's fictional memories or Kublai Khan's own imagination. In Calvino's deconstruction and reconstruction of Marco Polo's memories of China, he once again encounters China, Italian culture and Chinese culture.
The Invisible City is a quintessentially Calvino-esque "light" little book. The writer himself describes it as "written as poetry", with concise, light, and concise language, full of philosophical and highly unfamiliar imagery and a crystal-like delicate structure. The book consists of short chapters, divided into 9 parts, with a total of 55 chapters, each of which deals with a fictional city. They do not correspond to any city that exists, but lead the reader to the author's reflections on the city, on the relationship between "man and the city": Zola is the city that makes visitors unforgettable at first sight, but in order to be remembered, it is forced to stand still, and finally goes to depression, forgotten by the earth;The inhabitants of Leonia create countless amounts of garbage every day, and as the city expands, it piles up higher and higher until it engulfs the entire worldTekla is like a huge construction site, the builders of the city work day and night, and in addition to the wooden fence and canvas barrier, the traveler can see the scaffolding, the steel skeleton, ......
In the summer of 1985, Calvino began preparing a lecture for the Norton Lecture on Poetry at Harvard University, entitled "Memorandums on Literature in the New Millennium." He plans to discuss the value, nature, and characteristics of learning, including Shakespeare, Balzac, Hemingway, and Thomas Mann, as well as Boccaccio, Dante, and the great Italian writers of the ages. In the six lectures planned by Calvino, he wanted to ** "lightness", "speed", "precision", "vivid image", "variety of content" and "coherence", which were the literary issues that he was most concerned about. He is full of confidence in the future of literature, and firmly believes that even in the next millennium, there are still some things that literature can bring us.
On September 19, 1985, Calvino's life came to an abrupt end at the age of 62. And his literary life continues to stretch into the future. He has left many clues in his works, allowing generations of readers to imagine his literary world through words, and touch his infinite exploration of literature itself buried under the light words: where is the boundary of literature?The boundaries of literary genre are inWhat are the limits of verbal expression?To this day, readers are still searching for his words.
Author Affilications:School of Foreign Chinese, Peking University).