Translation: Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

Guy Debord, Psyschogeographic Guide to Paris, 1957

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of one of the brief one- to two-page descriptions of the many imaginary cities with female names of Italo Calvino from his collection Le città invisibili or Invisible Cities in English. This particular city description reminded me of Venice and of Guy Debord's concept of psychogeography, or a geography based on the concept of dérive or detour. Smeraldina is a city that encourages this very practice, and its potential map theoretically manages to trace each and every desire for an unpredictable route to one's destination, fueled by an architecture and an urban plan that structurally encourage novelty in making one's way around the city. After reading this extract, you might also find similar ideas in my translations of Michel de Certeau and Patrick Beaulieu's Art of Drift.   

"5. The City and Trade" by Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities, Le città invisibili, translated from Italian to English by Bora Mici

Smeraldina, an aquatic city, is made up of a network of canals and roads that are superimposed and intersect. In order to go from one place to another, you can always choose between the trip on land and the one by boat; and since the shortest distance between two points in Smeraldina is not a straight line but a zigzag that branches out into tortuous alternatives, the pathways available to every pedestrian are not just two but many, and they are multiplied even further for whomever alternates between ferrying by boat and transfers to dry land.

In such a way, the inhabitants of Smeraldina are spared the boredom of having to take the same routes everyday. And that’s not all: the network of passageways is not organized according to a sole layer, but follows small stairways, railed landings, humpback bridges and hanging walkways up and down. Combining segments of the different elevated or ground-level footpaths, every single inhabitant accords himself the daily distraction of a new itinerary for getting to the same places. The most habitual and calm lives of Smeraldina carry on without repetition.

Here like elsewhere, adventurous and secret lives are exposed to greater limitations. Smeraldina’s cats, thieves, and clandestine lovers get around on higher and discontinuous paths, jumping from one rooftop to the next, descending from a belvedere onto a balcony, avoiding the gutters with the careful step of tightrope walkers. Further down, the mice run around in the darkness of the sewers, one behind another’s tail, together with the conspirators and the contrabandists: they pop up from manhole covers and sewer tunnels, slide through interstitial walls and small alleyways, carrying cheese from one hiding place to the next, illegal merchandise, barrels of gunpowder, and cross the city’s dense fabric, permeated by the rays of underground passageways.

Marked in inks of different colors, a map of Smeraldina ought to contain all these trajectories, solid and liquid, hidden and in clear sight. What is more difficult is tracing onto the map the pathways taken by the swallows, which cut through the air above the rooftops, swoop to form invisible parabolas with their wings closed, take a detour in order to swallow a mosquito, spiral upward a pinnacle at razor-thin distance, and look over all of the points of the city from every point on their aerial trails.