Isbn: 9788833635279 - intelligible cities (1 Ergebnisse)

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. 154 pages. Exactly fifty years after the conversations recorded by Italo Calvino in Le c ittà invisibili, Marco Polo and the Emperor Kublai Khan meet once again, this t ime to discuss the weird and wacky ways in which the inhabitants of 26 cities co mmunicate with strangers who arrive at their gates speaking an unknown language. With a few sad exceptions, each city has devised an almost perfect method for l anguage sharing, using translation buckets or hypnosis, game theory or computati on, sexual intercourse or divine inspiration, magic rivers or reflections, drawi ng on the arts of music, dance and painting, and on the wisdom of plants, birds and fish. It is for the reader to decide if this is a fabulous travelogue up and down the Silk Road from Xanadu to Venice, a treatise on translation in the form of a comic novel, an allegory of friendship between people and peoples, or a se ries of bedtime stories in which the cities themselves are like female character s out of The Arabian Nights. In any case, Intelligible Cities is a distant tribu te to Italo Calvino from a writer resident in Aotearoa New Zealand, a linguist a nd a traveller, deeply versed in things Italian.…