The invisible cities

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The invisible cities (Italian original title: Le città invisibili ) is the title of a book by Italo Calvino published in 1972 . The first German translation by Heinz Riedt was published in 1977 by Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich, and at the same time by Verlag Volk und Welt , Berlin (GDR). In contrast to the original, it bore the generic name "Roman". A new translation by Burkhart Kroeber was published by Hanser in 2007.

content

There is no retellable "plot" in the usual sense in this book, and it is also - contrary to what is sometimes claimed - not a novel (at least its author never called it that, and the original was never called that), but a a singular piece of literature that blocks all generic names. It consists of 55 short texts, miniatures in the style of prose poems , of which the shortest only take up half a page, the longest not even three full pages, embedded in a kind of frame narrative, which, however, represents a description of the situation or a game arrangement rather than a narrative: Marco Polo , the great Venetian traveler to Asia in the late 13th century, tells the aging Mongol ruler Kublai Khan , founder of the Yuan dynasty and thus emperor of China, on cozy evenings in his palace in Kambaluk (= Beijing), in which cities he is visiting Inspection trips through the vast empire has come. Each of the 55 texts briefly sketches one of these (fictional) cities, each of which encapsulates a specific geographical, historical, social or general human situation in a poetic picture and each is named with a woman's name. What at first seems like a gallery of delicately put on, filigree pictures, which in linguistic form may be reminiscent of Paul Klee or Salvador Dalí , increasingly condenses into an oppressive panorama of a world threatened by decay and extinction that is becoming more and more similar to today's. In the end, Kublai Khan asks the question whether “everything is in vain”, “if the last berth can only be the hell city and the current pulls us down there in an ever tighter spiral”. What Marco Polo gives the now famous answer:

“Hell of the living is not something that is yet to come. If there is one, it is the one that is already there, the hell we live in every day, which we form through our being together. There are two ways not to suffer from it. The first is easy for many: to accept Hell and to become part of it so much that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and requires constant attention and willingness to learn: to seek and to learn to recognize who and what in the middle of hell is not hell, and to give it duration and space. "

shape

The book, which was written in Paris, belongs to Calvino's “combinatorial” phase, which was inspired by the experimental literature of the “Ouvroir de littérature potentialielle” ( Oulipo ), but which went far beyond mere formal experiments. The arrangement of the 55 city pictures follows a sophisticated pattern: In nine chapters, each beginning and ending with a piece of the "frame story", eleven rows of five cities each are presented, each numbered according to the pattern "The cities and ... 1" to “The cities and ... 5” and cyclically interlaced with one another, so that a structure emerges that from a distance is reminiscent of the classic stanza scheme of Italian poetry: that of the rhymed terzines in Dante's Divine Comedy , which also - certainly not by chance - the fact indicates that there are just nine chapters into which Calvino has divided the cycle, corresponding to the nine circles of hell in Dante, and that at the end of the last chapter he speaks explicitly of hell.

This book, which is certainly Calvino's most poetic, can best be defined as a modern, broken “world poem” with distant echoes of Dante. Calvino himself once said - deeply - in an interview with the New York Times : “I think I wrote something like a last love poem for the city at a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to experience it as a city . "

The table of contents, which Calvino deliberately placed at the beginning of the book, makes the “combinatorial” structure clear with the nine chapters of the city descriptions arranged in eleven interlaced rows of five - here supplemented by the names of the cities:

I.
The cities and memory 1: Diomira
The cities and memory 2: Isidora
The cities and the wish 1: Dorothea
The cities and memory 3: Zaira
The cities and the desire 2: Anastasia
The cities and the signs 1: Tamara
The cities and memory 4: Zora
The cities and the wish 3: Despina
The cities and the signs 2: Zirma
The Fragile Cities 1: Isaura
II
The cities and the memory 5: Maurilia
The Cities and the Desire 4: Fedora
The cities and the characters 3: Zoe
The Fragile Cities 2: Zenobia
The cities and the exchange 1: Euphemia
III
The cities and the wish 5: Zobeide
The cities and the signs 4: Hypatia
The Fragile Cities 3: Armilla
The Cities and the Exchange 2: Chloe
The cities and the eyes 1: Valdrada
IV
The cities and the characters 5: Olivia
The fragile cities 4: Sophronia
The Cities and Exchange 3: Eutropia
The cities and the eyes 2: Zemrude
The cities and the name 1: Aglaura
V
The Fragile Cities 5: Ottavia
The cities and the exchange 4: Ersilia
The cities and the eyes 3: Baucis
The cities and the name 2: Leandra
The cities and the dead 1: Melania
VI
The Cities and the Exchange 5: Esmeralda
The cities and the eyes 4: Phyllis
The cities and the name 3: Pyrrha
The Cities and the Dead 2: Adelma
The cities and the sky 1: Eudoxia
VII
The cities and the eyes 5: Moriana
The cities and the name 4: Clarice
The Cities and the Dead 3: Eusapia
The Cities and the Sky 2: Bathsheba
The Enduring Cities 1: Leonia
VIII
The cities and the name 5: Irene
The cities and the dead 4: Argia
The cities and the sky 3: Thekla
The Enduring Cities 2: Trude
The Hidden Cities 1: Olinda
IX
The Cities and the Dead 5: Laudomia
The cities and the sky 4: Perinthia
The Enduring Cities 3: Procopia
The Hidden Cities 2: Raissa
The cities and the sky 5: Andria
The Enduring Cities 4: Cecilia
The Hidden Cities 3: Marotia
The Enduring Cities 5: Penthesilea
The Hidden Cities 4: Theodora
The Hidden Cities 5: Berenike

effect

The name of the protagonist Irene in Herta Müller's narrative collage Travelers on One Leg (1989) is derived from the imagined city Irene near Calvino. Müller has the passage in Calvino quoted by the German man Franz, where "the city as a woman - whether as a whore or mother - and desire for her" reappears in a transformed perspective. Because Irene also symbolizes the transitory with Müller, but from the perspective of a German-speaking woman who lived as a stranger in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s before the fall of the Berlin Wall , according to Antje Harnisch in her analysis of Müller's work.

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Holger Voss: Myth and Utopia of the City. Italo Calvinos 'Le cittá invisibili' , Diss., Düsseldorf 1985 [1]
  • Felix Keller: Invisible Cities , in: Hermeneutische Blätter 1/2, 2007, pp. 261–272

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ p. 174 of the new translation.
  2. ↑ These are all mythological, ancient or biblical women's names.
  3. ↑ Antje Harnisch: "Foreigner Abroad". Herta Müller's travelers on one leg , in: Monthly books for German lessons, German language and literature , 89 (1997), 4, pp. 507-520.

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