کلکسیون شن

by Italo Calvino, هاله ناظمی (Translator)

این کتاب مجموعه‌ای از مقالات و نوشته‌های جذاب ایتالو کالوینو است که آن‌ها را از پاریس برای روزنامه‌های ایتالیایی می‌فرستاد. «کلکسیون شن» معرف برداشت کالوینو از موزه‌های پاریس و نظراتش درباره‌ٔ پدیده‌های مختلف از جمله ادبیات است. علاوه بر آن، شامل مشاهدات نویسنده در سفر به سه کشور مکزیک و ژاپن و ایران است که فصل پایانی کتاب را تشکیل می‌دهد.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Italian Literature, Italy, Travel, Literature, Classics

297 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).

His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

Reviews

[Argos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calvino’nun ansiklopedik bilgilere olan ilgisi bilinmektedir. Bu denemelerinde ilk bölümde ilginç sergiler (kum koleksiyonu, balmumu ucubeler müzesi, ejderhalarla ilgili kitaplar, sıradışı cinayet haberleri vb) ile Delacroix’in ünlü “Halka Yol Gösteren Özgürlük” tablosunun öyküsünü anlatmış.

İkinci bölümde Roland Barthes’e bir saygı duruşundan sonra görme ve gözün erşebildikleri üzerine denemeler yeralıyor, Roma’daki Traianus Sütunu için kaleme aldığı deneme ile Roma dönemi ve Ortaçağ şehirlerindeki duvarlar ve üzerindekiler (örneğin yazılar) hakkında çok ilginç bir denemesini okuyoruz.

Üçüncü bölüm pek ısınamadığım fantastiğe ilişkin denemelerin bulunduğu bir bölüm. Dördüncü ve son bölümde ise zamanın biçimini ülkeler üzerinden yazmış. Japonya, Meksika ve İran’ı işlemiş. Kültürlerine, günlük yaşamlarına, militarist geleneklerine kendimi hep uzak hissettiğim Japonya’yı okuyunca pek de haksız olmadığımı anladım.

Calvino ve deneme okumak isteyenlere öneririm.

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dünyaya Calvino’nun gözünden baktım, kendisiyle sergiler, şehirler, ülkeler gezdim – ne güzel oldu. Kendisinin kurgu eserlerini her zaman daha çok sevsem de, denemeleriyle de arada haşır neşir olmak iyi geliyor, zira bu kadar büyük bir entelektüel (ve hatta zaman zaman ansiklopedik) birikimden faydalanmak lazım bence. Olmayan ülkeler için hayali pullar yapan bir adamla, mor kimonolu bir Japon kadınla, perilerle filan tanıştım. (Zaman zaman Borges’i andıran bölümler de okudum diyebiliriz aslında.) Bana kalan, ağaçların “kaotik savurganlığına” bakıp sorduğu şu soru oldu: “Bir anlamın aktarımı, kendini sergilemedeki ölçüsüzlükle, kendini dile getirmedeki bollukla, ne olursa olsun kendini dışarı atmayla mı sağlanır?” Calvino cevabı söylemiyor. Ben de bilmiyorum, ama her ne kadar bizler ağaç olmasak da hepimizle ilgili bu sıra sorduğum sorulara çok benzediği için bu soruyu alıp kucaklıyorum. İşte böyle. ❤️

[Davide · Rating 3 out of 5]

"come ogni collezione anche questa è un diario: diario di viaggi, certo, ma pure diario di sentimenti, di stati d’animo, di umori; anche se non possiamo essere sicuri che davvero esista una corrispondenza tra la fredda sabbia color terra di Leningrado, o la finissima sabbia color sabbia di Copacabana, e i sentimenti che esse evocano a vederle qui imbottigliate ed etichettate"

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of Sand brings together many short pieces of nonfiction writing by Italo Calvino, who I previously knew only as a fiction writer. I was unsurprised to find that his writing skill and insight are equally evident in nonfiction. However, the forms of nonfiction he wrote are brief which gives this collection a fragmentary feeling. The first section collects exhibition reviews and the last travelogues, while the middle is composed of book reviews, art critique, and related reflections. I enjoyed the pieces while wishing they were longer and also that there were more of them. This isn’t a substantial enough collection to allow tracing of the author’s evolving philosophies, like Borges' The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Nonetheless, it showcases Calvino’s thoughtful opinions on art, language, and culture. All are beautifully expressed, for example:

And this is another constant highlighted by these [Japanese] gardens: in Japan antiquity does not have its ideal material as stone as in the West, where an object or building is considered ancient only if it is conserved in its substance. Here we are in the universe of wood: what is ancient here is that which perpetuates its design through the continual destruction and renovation of its perishable elements. This holds for gardens as it does for temples, palaces, villas, and pavilions, all of which are in wood, all destroyed many times by the flames of fire, many times covered in mould and rotten or reduced to dust by woodworm, but refashioned piece by piece every time. […]

During the visit to Kyoto’s centuries-old buildings the guide points out how often they take care to replace this or that piece of the construction: the fragility of its parts emphasises all the more the antiquity of the whole. Dynasties, human lives, the fibres of tree-trunks rise and fall, but what lasts is the ideal shape of the building, and it does not matter if every piece of its structural support has been removed and replaced countless times, and the most recent replacements smell of newly-planed wood. In the same way the garden remains the garden designed 500 years ago by a poet-architect, even though every plant follows the course of the seasons, rains, frosts, wind; similarly the lines of a poem are handed down over time while the paper of the pages on which the lines are systematically written disappears into dust.

I confess, the first section of Collection of Sand gave me a real case of Exhibition Envy. The reviews make these exhibits sound so fascinating! I was especially taken with ‘Writers Who Draw’, the Paris exhibition of drawings by nineteenth century French novelists. I did not know that Victor Hugo was a talented amateur painter, that Alfred de Musset drew prototype comic strips, or that Baudelaire and Verlaine sketched caricatures and portraits. (Zola apparently did not draw – when would he have had time?) I have a great love for nineteenth century French literature and therefore particularly appreciate Calvino recording this exhibition which took place before I was born.

Another piece that stood out was ‘In Memory of Ronald Barthes’, written shortly after his death. Calvino reflects upon Barthes’ books and his philosophical legacy:

The fact is that his entire oeuvre, I now realise, consists in forcing the impersonality of our linguistic and cognitive mechanisms to take account of the physicality of the living and mortal subject. Critical discussion of Barthes – which has begun already – will be polarised between the supporters of one Barthes or the other: the one who subordinated everything to a rigorous methodology and the one who had just one sure criterion, namely pleasure (the pleasure of intelligence and the intelligence of pleasure). The truth is that those two Barthes are just one: and in the constant and variously balanced co-presence of these two aspects in Barthes lies the secret behind the fascination his mind exercised on many of us.

I cannot mention Barthes without recommending The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet, a magnificently farcical novel that treats his death as murder. I also recommend Collection of Sand, although it whetted my appetite for more nonfiction by Calvino rather than sating it. His nonfiction style in translation is appealingly similar to that of Borges and Alberto Manguel.

[Mana Ravanbod · Rating 3 out of 5]

اینقدر بعضی جستارهای کتاب درخشان است که آدم ترجمه‌ی متوسط و ویرایش بد کتاب را می‌بخشد. سه جستار به‌هم‌پیوسته‌ی انتهای کتاب درباره‌ی چیزهایی‌ست از ایران، از جمله‌ی چند پارگراف از گچبری محرابی نوشته که بی‌نظیر است. جستار در باب «جهان نو» و «نقشه‌های جغرافیایی» هیمنطور. ولی ناویراسته بودن کتاب اجر آن را ضایع کرده بود. یکی لازم بود از روی جملات بخواند و تصحیح کند، و اینقدر بداند که «آلکساندریا» نداریم بلکه «اسکندریه» است و در همین حد اعلام هم اگر درست می‌شد و معنی بعضی جملات کلیدی، مثلاً جستار مربوط به مرگ رولان بارت چیزی میشد ماندگار و مثال‌زدنی.
تجربه‌ی خواندن کتاب برای همین قدری زجرآور بود و روزی یکی بیشتر نمی‌شد بخوانم. با خودم مذاکره می‌کردم که اشکال ندارد، مداد دست می‌گیری هرجایی بد بود خط می‌کشی، هر جایی بهترش را می‌شد می‌نویسی و الی آخر. بعد یک جستار می‌خواندم چند بار کلافه می‌شدم. می رفت تا فردا. نمی‌دانم چه سری‌ست که حاضر نیستم روی کیندل انگلیسی بعضی کتابها را بخوانم و در فهمیدنش همانقدر به زحمت بیفتم که در ترجمه‌ی فارسی. لابد جادوی کاغذ است.

وقتی این کتاب نشر هرمس را کنار کتابهایی که قدیمتر از آنجا در می‌آمد بگذاریم به این نتیجه می‌رسید که گرافیک و قطع و بازاریابی و فروش و معرفی نشر هرمس چندبرابر بهتر شده ولی ویرایش و نسخه‌پردازی وصفحه‌آرایی چند برابر نزول کرده است. اگر فکری برای تحریریه‌ی ویراستاری‌اش نکند تا چند سال از انبان شهرتش ارتزاق خواهد کرد و بعد می‌شود آنچه می‌شود.

[anchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

卡爾維諾的文筆一向很魔幻，《收藏沙子的旅人》是本散文集，記錄他去看展、讀書、旅遊時的所見所聞與感想，我個人覺得很好看，尤其是他寫關於日本和伊朗的遊記。讀書這件事情也是很有趣，只有在讀了他的閱讀筆記後才能稍稍了解到，原來他故事裡的那些想像是來自何方。

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my free time I almost exclusively read fiction, but, when I like an author enough, I sometimes give that author’s non-fiction writing a try. Calvino is one of my favorite authors, so he makes the cut easily, but Collection of Sand nevertheless ended up being a disappointment.

My favorite work in Calvino’s The Road to San Giovanni was an essay (with Calvino transforming the topic of garbage into a brilliant meditation on modern living), and my favorite story in Under the Jaguar Sun was the titular story of a trip to Mexico. Thus, I went into Collection of Sand expecting great things, as it is comprised of essays and stories of Calvino’s travels. While the stories of Calvino’s travels were indeed strong, my great expectations were not met overall because the essays tend to be formulaic, and (though I hate to say this about anything Calvino wrote) sometimes even boring.

Calvino’s strengths as a writer are numerous, but chief among them is his imagination. For instance, what made his essay on garbage (“La Poubelle Agreee”) so excellent is the way in which he started discussing something that seems mundane, but he brings you along with the flow of his thoughts to new, beautiful perspectives you would never have considered on your own. He does not abandon his original topic, indeed he focuses on it throughout, but he uses the everyday as a springboard for his imagination and shows you something wonderful. The essays in Collection of Sand are not like La Poubelle Agreee, in that Calvino does not use them as a jumping off point for anything greater. Instead they are Calvino’s accounts of museum exhibits, or academic essays, or chapters of books, with most of each essay spent describing or summarizing the subject, giving some of Calvino’s interpretation (inevitable in any description), but doing nothing more until the final paragraph, where, for a brief moment, Calvino reaches outside of the immediate topic and gives you something more thought provoking.

So, essentially, Calvino’s essay ends just when it’s getting good (the one exception being the essay that gives the collection its name, where Calvino goes outside the boundary of his subject and delves into introspection a bit earlier). The structure of these essays are so similar that they feel repetitive, and even begin to feel uninspired. The best pieces of these works are the throwaway line referring to Calvino’s personal opinion, like the sentence where Calvino states that he has “never felt any strong urge to explore psychological depths” that made me realize that not a single one of Calvino’s books have any characters of psychological complexity. They may contain characters of symbolic complexity, but that’s not at all the same thing. I appreciated little tidbits like this, but chiefly because of my love of Calvino’s other works and not for the sake of the work at hand.

The pieces on foreign countries are much better than the essays, with Calvino’s musings on Japan and Iran being particularly strong (his Mexico material is overshadowed by Under the Jaguar Sun, no pun intended). Calvino could have been a great travel writer, in part because of a realization he expresses in one of his pieces on Japan that travel does not lead to understanding, but does enhance observation. Here, that heightened observation gives Calvino a path to the more abstract discussion of ideas that I wished his essays would reach but never did. The exploration of foreign lands lent themselves to introspective exploration, and Calvino delivers on both fronts.

The ultimate problem, therefore, is that Collection of Sand is three-quarters essays and one-quarter travelogues. If the ratio were reversed, this collection would be a very good one overall, but, as it stands, the mediocre overpowers the noteworthy. I can’t recommend a collection based on its final fourth alone. Perhaps someday someone will compile the gems scattered about Calvino’s lesser works into a single great volume. If this does come to pass, the travelogues herein will be represented, though not the rest.

[Moss Weichert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This shit fucking slaps 🔥🔥🔥

[Andrew]

A collection of essays that shows the same attention to detail and love of fabulist and yarn-spinning as his finest stories. Journalistic pieces, witty observations, travel diaries, these are the sorts of things that you and I might write, but because it's Calvino writing them, it's orders of magnitude better. While it wouldn't be the best introduction to his work, it succeeds magnificently as fan service. After you've made your way through his better novels, go out and pick up Collection of Sand.

[Elis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Piccola di collezione di approfondimenti e curiosità che animavano la mente di Calvino.
Rimango sempre più stupita da quest’uomo che fa di piccole cose, materiale per conoscere di più e far conoscere.

[R.D. "Bob" Mathison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every now and again I start making a list of the latest books I have read and of those I intend to read (my life functions on the basis of lists: accounts of things I have not completed, plans that are never realized).

Bro, same.

[eleonora reggiori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non c’è sulla faccia della terra una persona che io reputi tanto geniale e semplice e acuta da avvicinarla a Calvino

[Julio Palomino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pues ahora se reduce la pila de libros de mi mesilla, con un libro que es una enciclopedia. Una enciclopedia de la mirada tenaz, fabulosa y concisa de Calvino, que se vierte sobre un mundo que ama, visto el entusiasmo con el que lo narra. Esta recopilación de artículos y pequeños textos realizados a lo largo de su carrera nos hacen viajar por los confines del mundo, visitar exposiciones, conocer artistas y quizás, el amor.

Tiene tantas citas este libro que no puedo elegir una.
Sin lugar a duda, el primer texto, que da título a la obra, es de los más interesantes, pero en todos ellos Italo consigue enseñarnos algo nuevo. Sus relatos sobre sus viajes a Irán, México y Japón ponen a nuestra disposición su atenta mirada, de la misma manera que expone su manera de entender de manera literaria las artes plásticas, escultóricas o cualquier cosa que se encuentre por el camino.

Italo Calvino es realmente un orfebre de la palabra, tan experimentado que juega con ella como un anciano que sin mirar enebra los bucles cerrados de las letras a través de los cuales va tejiendo un hilo de significado. Su observación es minuciosa y directa, tensa por el hilo que ha pasado por sus letras.

Es un libro disperso y sin un hilo conductor,[dada la diferencia temporal y temática] pero como dice sobre el Árbol del Tule, cuestiona su forma de entender el mundo en tanto que las ramas son troncos, que las raíces emanan de ellas buscando el suelo, que el tronco pervierte en una especie de masa informe que es rama-tronco-raíz. Esto es, que pese a que la naturaleza trata de enterrar y pervertir el significado con el caos, seguimos reconociendo el árbol en un esplendor magnífico, tan magnífico como casi cualquier cosa que escriba Calvino.

[Olalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Y de repente Calvino hablaba mi idioma

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an odd collection, but it is by no means a bad collection. Calvino faces the sort of problem that humanity in general has to deal with, and that is the desire to be remembered and to leave something lasting. Had Calvino been a person of faith who believed in some sort of eternal judgment, it might have been possible for him to place his deeds in the hands of a merciful God and ask for forgiveness for his various follies (including his politics), but alas, he was a secularist of a particularly leftist cause, and one whose writings were enjoyed and appreciated by a particular set of people but by no means the sort of writings that had obvious popularity that would last forever. And the author, as he neared the end of his life, seemed to reflect over and over again on the ravages of time on historical memory, and on the way that people sought to ensure that their deeds would be remembered. This poignant theme is not dealt with in a heavy-handed way, but it is repeated often enough to make it a very thoughtful set of material. If you appreciate the writings of Calvino in general, this is certainly something I recommend.

This book is about 200 pages long but it is filled with dozens of essays divided into four parts and a complex set of contents. The book begins with the translator's introduction, the author's presentation of the volume, and a note on the text. After that comes a look at exhibitions and explorations, as the author looks at the titular collection of sand, a look at the wax monsters, the way the New World was viewed by Europe, and the wonders of the popular press (I). After this comes a look at the eye's ray and things like pigs and archaeologists, the narrative of Trajan's column, the measure of spaces in the city, and the meaning and struggle of graffiti (II). The third part of the book is the shortest of the set and it looks at various accounts of the fantastic, including the adventures of automata, fairy geography, the archipelago of imaginary places, and an encyclopedia of a visionary (III). The fourth and final part of the book looks at various places through travel essays that discuss matters of history, culture, and contemporary thinking and behavior in Japan, Mexico, and Iran. Here the author looks at everything from a massive tree in Mexico to more reflections on sand and the struggle for permanence.

One of the most notable aspects of this book is the way that the author explores the results of his travels, and proves to be an observant tourist, whether that tourism involved the speculative worlds of other writers, other fields besides his own literature which he deals with humbly in order to avoid triggering the anger of gatekeepers, and also as a tourist of literal foreign places that the author finds to be deeply worthy of thinking and reflection. The result is that the author finds himself dealing with the imagination and the fantastic but also with the way that people deal with the ravages of time and with the terrain of life and the imagination. The content of this book is a bit scattered, but there is also the unity of the book's themes and of the author's own perspective and approach that make this a coherent work even though it is a collection of essays that would likely be unfamiliar to most American readers. I happen to be a big fan of essayism as an essay writer, but it is a genre that not everyone is into. Again, though, if you like essays and the author's thinking is appealing, this is an easy work to appreciate.

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calvino is everywhere filled with interesting observations and the ideas that flow from what he sees, but he is at his best as a traveler.

"Traveling does not help us much in understanding...but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world."

The section called "The Shape of Time" about Japan, Mexico, and Iran was definitely the highlight of this collection for me. In juxtaposing different cultural approaches to time and space with those he holds from being raised in the West, Calvino grasps threads of universal truth that leave ethereal impressions on the lenses we usually use. Neither crystallizing nor disappearing, they will keep providing new dimensions to how I process what I see.

The first part of the book contains essays on exhibits, history, writing, and communication. I especially enjoyed "Before the Alphabet", a history of and meditation on written language, "Say it with Knots", about using knots to communicate, "Light in our Eyes", about a book called "The Eye and the Idea" by Ruggero Pierantoni, and "Encyclopedia of a Visionary" bout the Codex Seraphinianus of Luigi Serafini.

A book to savor for its language, information, and ideas, I read and reread it over a period of weeks; and I'll definitely return to it again.

[Tyrone_Slothrop (ex-MB) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frammenti di Palomar

Una serie di articoli ed elzeviri scritti da Calvino negli anni '70 - '80: troppo frammentaria e eterogenea questa raccolta per essere convincente. Se ci sono delle vere perle che valgono la lettura (su tutte il pezzo sul Codex Seraphanius, ma anche le intelligente e profonde riflessioni su varie mostre), dall'altra parte rimane una sensazione di incompletezza perchè, non appena la mente di Calvino elabora pensieri originali e di livello superiore ad un pezzo da quotidiano, ecco che il brano termina - indubbiamente il Calvino intellettuale, osservatore della realtà storica in cui si trovava rifulge meglio senza limiti di battute...

[Gizem · Rating 4 out of 5]

“İnsanın dokunamadığı şey midir saf olan? Kendinden yaşamı dışlayan şey midir? Her bedenden, mahfazadan ya da dayanaktan arınarak yaşayan şey midir? Ve saflık ateşin içindeyse, ateşi nasıl arındırabiliriz? Yakarak mı?

[rachel z · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first section 'exhibitions' made me nostalgic for museums and special exhibits deep diving into ancient, historical or niche subjects. I really liked the essay on the cartography exhibit- maps being a whole journey contained in one image. Calvino had some interesting observations and ruminations here and there, but overall the collection wasn't terribly exciting.

[Anna Rossi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gli articoli di Calvino sono un miracolo di equilibrio e bellezza.
Delle mini storie dove gli oggetti o i luoghi vengono descritti con la caratteristica minuzia dell'autore che coglie ogni dettaglio e ci spinge a scoprire l'essenza delle cose e a non soffermarci esclusivamente alla nuda apparenza.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of flâneur I want to be when I grow up

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Italo Calvino single-handedly sparked my interest in reading about random topics just for the sake of pure unadulterated whimsy and merriment. This book offers a mixed bag of brief travel / cultural / miscellaneous essays. Calvino obviously had an enormous fascination for a staggeringly diverse range of cultures. He manages to turn the absolute minute details of theology, mythology, geometry and architecture into whimsical treasures to discover. This book shows what separated his fantasy writing from the rest: Calvino knew that the real world has far more bizarre and compelling stories to tell than any fiction could possibly ever dream of.
Definitely some gems in here for a cult readership; of little interest to anyone else I would say. Some of it seems like filler, which makes sense given this is just a posthumous compilation. I found myself skipping a bunch of essays trying to find the really great ones.

+ The title essay
+ The one about visiting a Japanese pinball arcade in the midst of Japan’s rapid modernisation in the 80’s
+ The one about the incredible details of Trajan’s column in Rome
+ The one about Calvino visiting a temple for pre-Islamic Zoroastrians in Iran and explaining the religion’s survival for millennia from conquest symbolized by the little flame sustained in secret for atleast 1300 years straight
+ The one about the true story of a WW2 soldier with a lifelong secret obsession for making meticulously crafted fake stamps/letters from fake places

“Throughout his life Donald Evans made stamps. Imaginary stamps of imaginary countries, drawn with pencils or coloured inks and painted in watercolours , but scrupulously faithful to everything one would expect from a stamp, to the point of where they seemed, at first sight, genuine. He would invent the name of the country, the name of a currency, a range of imaginary sights, and would start to insert minute details into tiny quadrangles or squares (sometimes triangles), all of them framed with a white, perforated border. … [He’d have] the address written in mock handwriting, and names of people and places also invented but always just about credible”

[Elekouv · Rating 2 out of 5]

Έχοντας αγαπήσει τη γραφή του Ίταλο Καλβίνο στις Αόρατες Πόλεις, το βιβλίο αυτό δεν ανταποκρίθηκε ιδιαίτερα στις προσδοκίες μου.
Υπήρχαν αρκετές φορές που με ταξίδευε με την περιγραφική και, ταυτόχρονα, αφηρημένη αφήγησή του. Ωστόσο, χανόταν πολλές φορές η ουσία, θεωρώ, λόγω ενός καταιγισμού πληροφοριών που δε μπορούσαν πάντα να κρατηθούν.
Αγαπημένα κεφάλαια του βιβλίου ήταν, χωρίς αμφιβολία: Η συλλογή της άμμου, Πέστε το με κόμπους, Η στήλη του Τραϊανού αφηγείται, Η πόλη και η γραφή: επιγραφές και γκράφιτι, Η γριά κυρία με το βιολετί κιμονό

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't thought this much since my masters! Who knew an English lit grad loves to read about language, signs, and culture? 😂

Some essays were more thought provoking than others. A lot of them made my mind go in multiple directions. Even if I didn't agree with him, I loved thinking through the concepts.

The further I got along though the more western touristy it became - his thoughts often stem from observation rather than engaging with people from that culture. Although can you really blame an essayist for being self involved and in their head?

[Kelly]

DNF

Has some qualities but contains traces of ill-considered misogyny (and I’m usually rather open to criticisms against my kind)

[Mathieu Dionne · Rating 5 out of 5]

J’ai appris pleins de choses incroyables.

[Emily]

The rewards of reading Calvino sometimes come slowly and with effort. I always wonder if the flow of his words are affected by translation.

All of these essays are of a modest and regular length, so the collection is easily read as an essay or two a day.

Notes

Or perhaps it is only a record of that obscure mania which urges us a much to put together a collection as to keep a diary, in other words the need to transform the flow of one’s own existence into a series of objects saved from dispersal, or into a series of written lines abstracted and crystalized from the continuous flux of thought.

The fascination of a collection lie just as much in what it reveals as in what it conceals of the secret urge that led to its creation. (pg. 7)


At this point there is nothing left to do except to give up, walk away from the case, from this cemetery of landscapes reduced to a desert, this cemetery of deserts on which the wind no longer blows. And yet, the person who has had the persistence to continue this collection for years knew what she was doing, knew where she was trying to get to: perhaps this was her precise aim, to remove from herself the distorting, aggressive sensations, the confused wind of being, and to have at last for herself the sandy substance of all things, to touch the flinty structure of existence. That is why she does not take her eyes off those sands, her gaze penetrates one of the phials, she burrows into it, identifies with it, extracts the myriads of pieces of information that are packed into a little pile of sand. Each bit of grey, once it has been deconstructed into its light and dark, shiny and opaque, spherical, polyhedral and flat granules, is no longer seen as a grey or only at that point begins to let you understand the meaning of grey.

So, deciphering the diary of the melancholic (or happy?) collector, I have finally come round to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that now seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and deserts of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model. (pg. 9)

Nevertheless, the point I wanted to stress is a different one: Praz realized the Cecchi’s objection was not so much about his taste as about his possession of such furniture. ‘Expensive beauty was repugnant to Cecchi… as decoration for his own house he loved objects in which a minimum of intrinsic value was combined with a maximum of expressivity… Modest things, things that aided devotion and nothing else, yet devotion’—and he would emphasize this point—‘has to be totally spiritual, disinterested, uncontaminated by the crude love of possession.’ (pg. 110)

The human is the trace that man leaves in things, it is the work, whether it is a famous masterpiece or the anonymous product of one particular epoch. It is the continuous dissemination of works and objects and signs that makes a civilization the habitat of our species, its second nature. If we deny this sphere of signs that surrounds us with its thick dust-cloud, man cannot survive. And again: every man is man-plus-things, he is a man inasmuch as he recognizes himself in a number of things, he recognizes the human that has been in things, the self that has taken shape in things. (pg. 112)

The extraordinary thing is how centuries later a conception that has been rejected as mythical can reappear as fertile at a different stage of knowledge, taking on a new meaning in a new context. Would it not be right to conclude that the human mind — in science as in poetry, in philosophy as in politics and law — only functions on the basis of myths, and our only choice lies in adopting one mythical code or another? A knowledge that is outside any code does not exist: we just have to be careful to identify myths that are wearing out and becoming obstacles to knowledge, or worse still dangers to human co-existence. (pg. 119)

Eisenhart sees the origin of this philatelic obsession in Evans’s introverted character. I would say that what inspired him was the urge to keep a diary of states of mind, feelings, positive experiences, values that were summed up in emblematic objects; but the nostalgic vision of the stamp album allowed him to cultivate an interiority that had at the same time become objectivized and dominated by his consciousness…

All in all, this supposed introvert was a man who was not at all turned in on himself but projected outwards, towards the things of the world, chosen and recognized and named one by one with great delicacy and loving precision. Perhaps what interested him most in stamps was precisely their celebratory function: he wanted to oppose the carefully programmed, bureaucratic, official celebrations of all the postal ministries in the world with a ritual of private celebrations, commemorations of minimal encounters, consecrations of things that are unique and irreplaceable… (pg. 140-141)

New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don't know what value to give it… When everything finds an order and a place in my mind then I will start not to find anything worthy of note, not to see any more what I am seeing. Because seeing means perceiving differences, and as soon as differences all become uniforms in what is predictable and everyday, our gaze simply runs over a smooth surface devoid of anything to catch hold of. Traveling does not help us much in understanding (I've known this for a while; I did not need to come to the Far East to convince myself that this was true) but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world. (pg.154)

There is one thing I seem to be starting to understand here in Kyoto: something I've learned through the gardens more than through the temples and palaces. The construction of a nature that can be mastered by the mind so that the mind can in turn receive a sense of rhythm and proportion from nature: that is how one could define the intention that has led to the layout of these gardens. Everything here has to seem spontaneous and for that reason everything is calculated… (pg. 161)

All trace of life seems to have been removed from this model house; there is none of the heavy weight of existences that materializes in our furnishings and impregnates all our Western rooms. Visiting the Court palaces in Kyoto or those of the great feudal landowners, one finds oneself wondering whether this aesthetic and moral ideal of the bare and unadorned was achievable only at the peak of authority and wealth, and whether it presupposed other houses chock-full of people and tools and junk and rubbish…

I try to imagine myself as one of the former Emperors of an empire that was at the mercy of the whims and devastation carried out by the lawless landowners, perhaps cheerfully resigned to concentrating on the one operation that is still possible for him: contemplating and guarding the image of how the world should be. (pg. 164)

One’s daze ranges over a horizon of cement and tarmac. But the taxi has turned down a little road amidst courtyards full of crates. Suddenly there's a tree, an enormous green tree of great height, of an unfamiliar species, but with myriads of tiny leaves. An old signpost states that this is the last surviving specimen from the Wood of the Ninety-Nine Trees, perhaps actually the ninety-ninth, thus proving that yesterday’s geography of the sublime, so dear to Mr. Fuji, really does have a link with today's geography of the prosaic, and that even today the roots planted in a terrain of risky investments with no capital guarantee still nourish the branches that face a world of balance sheets that must all be showing a profit, a world of operations that can never close at a loss. (pg. 182)

I am seized by a sense of threat: as though that vegetal cloud or mountain that is now outlined in my field of vision is sending out a warning that here nature, with slow, silent steps, is intent on furthering a plan of her own that has nothing to do with human proportions and dimensions. (pg. 185)

Is it through a chaotic waste of matter and forms that the tree manages to give itself a shape and maintain it? That means that the transmission of meaning is guaranteed in excessive display, in the perfusion of self-expression, in throwing out matter by whatever means. Because of my temperament and upbringing I have always been convinced that the only thing that matters and survives is whatever Is focused on one single end. Now the Tule tree proves me wrong, wants to convince me of the opposite. (pg. 187)

But what sense does it make to say the word ‘forest’ when the actual forest is there, looming? If ‘forest’ is the word that is written in the sculpted figures of gods and monsters, then the temples in the forest are nothing but a giant tautology that nature rightly tries to cancel out as superfluous. So things rebel at the destiny of being signified by words, they reject that passive role that the system of signs would like to impose on them, and they recover the space that has been usurped; so they submerge the temples and bas-reliefs; once more they swallow up language, which had tried to assert its own autonomy and to establish its own foundations as though it were a second nature… Language’s dream of turning itself into a system and cosmos has been pointless: the last word belongs to silent nature. (pg. 193)

[Tuan Doan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very beautifully written. I don't absorb most of it though, with the rare exception of the last section "The Shape of Time" where the author writes about his observations through many trips to Japan, Mexico and Iran.

[Marco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le meraviglie del visibile - geografico, archeologico, naturale, collezionistico - a cui �� dedicata questa raccolta di scritti brevi hanno molto in comune con l'Invisibile delle pi�� note "Citt��" di Calvino. In entrambe troviamo la celebrazione di un mondo nascosto, la ricerca nella complessit�� del Creato di quell'essenziale che era per St. Exupery per sua natura "invisibile agli occhi". Se nel capolavoro di Calvino questo obiettivo �� perseguito immaginando mondi che non sono ma potrebbero essere, limpide utopie di geometria e leggerezza figlie di una mente che cerca di render concreto l'astratto, in "Collezione di sabbia" la stessa strada �� percorsa al contrario: sono luoghi, monumenti, mostre, folle, collezioni, viaggi a costituire il punto di partenza del cammino verso l'astrazione. Astrazione che per�� - e qua sta la grandezza dell'autore - non �� mai un gratuito partire per la tangente, ma sempre un'ostinata ricerca della struttura, della connessione intima, del disegno segreto. Cos��, nei rami di un albero in Messico come in un tempio giapponese, nella fiamma perpetua degli Zoroastriani come in una collezione di carte geografiche in mostra a Parigi, ci�� su cui Calvino guida il nostro sguardo di lettori �� l'imprendibile armonia delle cose terrene, la sovrumana logica che le lega e ne fa una il riflesso dell'altra. Un po' "foresta di simboli" di Baudlairiana memoria, un po' labirinto semiotico a un passo da Barthes, il mondo disegnato da Calvino in "Collezione di sabbia" somiglia a quello di ogni giorno come la mappa all'Isola del Tesoro: dimenticandone gli elementi pi�� evidenti, e soffermandosi su una rete accortamente selezionata di dettagli, riesce a mostrarne uno Scopo che altrimenti risulterebbe del tutto inaccessibile.

[Cem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calvino's "Sand Collection" brings together numerous essays which have previously appeared in Corriere della Serra, in the late 70s and early 80s. Calvino has a very interesting and at times, controversial outlook on things that when coupled with his genuine curiosity, displays a sharp mind at work. He dwells on appearances mostly, not out of superficiality but out of a an almost Buddhist/Sufi respect of the actual unrepresentable of the sacred "inside/nothingness" of anything, best illustrated in his essay on Iran, or his piece on graffiti. In doing so, Calvino is far from being a materialist in any sense; he is more content with his ability to read the world rather than squinting hard to try to see whatever lies behind. Considering his work with the Oulipo group or his experimental pieces based on a structural/engineering view of literature, this is perhaps not surprising. In any case, those who feel that Calvion is at best an engineer of literature I think will benefit greatly from these essays, in order to see the writer behind it in absolute curiosity toward the world, with a love of the strange, the estranged and the idiosyncratic.