Reading|Time spent with Calvino

Living in a Tree: A Biography of Calvino

Luca Baranelli/

by Ernesto Ferrillo

Translated by Bi Yanhong

Yilin Publishing House

October 2023

■ Shen Xiayan

The best way to remember a writer is to quietly open his book under the window and let his words flow and reverberate in your heart. It is not enough to think of Life in the Trees – A Biography of Calvino as an illustrated biography, but the compilers, translators, and publishers have taken great care to make every line and note, every frame and description, the color of the font, and even the font size, all of which are tempting and immersive for professional readers like me.

In fact, the biography itself is not what Calvino wants, he says, "Biography or personal information is extremely private. Making this information public is like psychoanalysis. (At least, I don't think I've ever done psychoanalysis.) He believes that "an author, only the work is valuable", and added: "I will tell you what you want to know." But I'll never tell you the truth. "Isn't it the same as the familiar metaphor of Mr. Qian Zhongshu about eggs and hens?

In 1972, he wrote the work "Invisible City", which brought him world fame, and contained the prophecy of the age of consumption in his truthful and realistic depiction, urbanization is the product of human desire, and it also constantly inspires human beings to pursue new and different. My doctoral dissertation began with a reference to Calvino's detailed depiction of Sex and the City. In fact, Calvino lived, roamed, and wrote in many large cities throughout his life. After I became a teacher, I often quoted his "Why Read the Classics" and "Memorandum of Literature for the Next Millennium" in class.

Living in a Tree: A Biography of Calvino portrays a three-dimensional contemporary Calvino, who is willing to act, lives in different cities, lives in different languages, works as an editor, writes novels, writes thousands of letters, and has his own unique style of criticism. Calvino's uniqueness was almost innate, his entire family members were scientists (agronomy, chemistry, botany, etc.), highly intelligent, advocating creativity, and his family wrote many popular science pamphlets that accompanied Calvino's growth. We, the post-70s generation, have always felt that we should "learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well", and it is difficult not to look at such writers differently.

The admiration of science inevitably imprints the writer's writing, that is, the pursuit of linguistic precision. Even when he writes about a piece of soap that he doesn't have to do every day, Calvino writes about it with great skill—"a constant influx of rainbow-colored embrace, like a persuasive roundabout, like a pompous euphemism...... It convinces the water to dance with our hands by boasting of its own veils, skirts, ball dresses". In the case of portraiture, he says that it is "the contour of a person plus the relationship between the contour of the person and himself", and that a face "is made up of a physiological face that is always decisive and a cultural face that in some way satisfies the need to manage the biological face." Calvino wrote many golden sentences that the world sang, and his dozen definitions of the classics were widely circulated. His pursuit of precision, his call for lightness, his reflection on translation, and his conscious ...... language It's all intriguing.

I spent a great deal of time carefully discerning the photographs that corroborated Calvino's life, and how it fell on people's faces, hearts, eyes, and the shadows around him. Each photograph is a part of his self, some deep, some naïve, some brooding. It's more about group photos, photos of him with his family, his travels, friends, lectures, work in publishing, photos of him with his colleagues and many artists...... I have long been immersed in the photograph of Calvino and Borges, and how I wish I could fill the teacup in front of them and pay homage to the pinnacle of twentieth-century literature.

Calvino leaned forward slightly, smiling, Borges was no longer visible, but his eyes were still shining, his cane parallel to Calvino's tilt, his head slightly tilted towards Calvino. Between them, some lights illuminate the "path to the spider's nest" and some light shines into the "garden where the path diverges". In 1984, Calvino participated in a reminiscence of fantasy literature in Argentina, to which Borges was invited. When Esther told the elderly writer, who was blind, that Calvino was also present, Borges said: "I recognized him from the silence. "When you meet in a high place, you don't have to borrow foreign objects. These two writers, who did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature, have enriched and updated world literature with their writing, which is not in English, and has also changed our imagination of the world and our attitude towards literature.

Calvino lived in Paris for a long time and had close relationships with celebrities such as Roland Barthes. Barthes once said of Calvino on a French television show: "He is emotionally revealing and creating...... There is a kind of sensitivity, which can also be described as human nature, and I would even say that it is benevolent...... In his observations, there is always a kind of irony that is neither hurtful nor aggressive, in which there is detachment, there is smile, and there is sympathy. "Calvino's insight into the human world and his grasp of degree contain scientific rationality. This scientific rationality is also one of the emotional ties that bind him and Roland Barthes, and reading their thoughts on photography—the writer's sensual expression and the critic's theoretical brushstroke—will gain a deeper understanding.

Calvino "is a modern, skeptical and satirical man, Don Quixote who knows very well what is fantasy and what is reality, who shuttles between reality and fantasy, and who always has a bright heart".

In 1981, Calvino left a video in an interview, and once put forward "three key words, three magic weapons" for the year 2000, how similar to the motto he left us: 1. Recite poems, many poems, whether you are a child, a teenager, or an old man. If a person keeps repeating these poems spiritually, then they will stay with him for the rest of his life. Second, focus on the things that are difficult, that need to be taken to the extreme, that need to be worked on, and be wary of things that are simple, superficial, and that are done for the sake of doing...... Not only in the language but also in what is done, focus on precision. 3. Understand that what we have now can disappear at any time. This does not mean that we have to give up everything, on the contrary, we have to enjoy it more than ever.

Calvino's allure is immortal in his works, in his living characters, and in his immersive, reverie-inspiring biography.

(The author is a literary critic and a professor at Jinan University)

【Author】

[Source] Southern Press Media Group Southern + client