The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered All of the stories in Cosmicomics, together with those from t zero and other sources, are now available in a single volume collection, The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin UK, 2009).

I read four stories on first day, and by the time I finished fourth, I did not have stamina to read a single word more. I was drained, I was puzzled. I sat wondering, what was that I just read!In 1956 Calvino published a seminal collection of Italian folktales. The following year he brought out The Baron in the Trees, and in 1959 The Nonexistent Knight. These two stories, with The Cloven Viscount, have been collected in the volume Our Ancestors. In 1965 he published Cosmicomics, and in 1979 his novel (or antinovel) If on a Winter’s Night a Travelerappeared. The last works published during his lifetime were Mr. Palomar(1983), a novel, and Difficult Loves(1984), a collection of stories.

Do you always have a set task, something specific you decide to work on? Or do you have various things going on at once? LL: Translating something so local to Hong Kong and so firmly rooted in language must be especially difficult. How did you get interested in Hong Kong literature in the first place? What was the first Hong Kong literary work you translated?

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Do you begin with a small group of unrelated ideas or a larger conception that you gradually fill in? The future writer studied in San Remo and then enrolled in the agriculture department of the University of Turin, lasting there only until the first examinations. When the Germans occupied Liguria and the rest of northern Italy during World War II, Calvino and his sixteen-year-old brother evaded the Fascist draft and joined the partisans. JF: 700! And some people question whether Hong Kong literature even exists! What kinds of work can readers expect to find in Fleurs des lettres? In “A Sign in Space,” Qfwfq seeks to make a sign in space where the sun was so that he can know, 200 million years later, that the sun has made a full revolution around its galaxy and returned to the original point. A sign as such is impossible, for there are no implements, bodies, or modes of representation, but somehow, one is brought into existence. He can think of nothing but the sign, meditating on its unique properties. He forgets its exact reality but retains a sense of its importance. He discovers that the same point is returned to only every three galactic years, so 600 million years instead of 200 million. He waits. Upon arriving at the spot, though, Qfwfq finds his sign has been excised by a being from another planetary system named Kgwgk. He resolves to make a new sign, but the very concept has changed irreparably. Countless other signs have come into existence. He finds that this multiplication makes the reality of space untenable. Or maybe with the fact that, there are no humans in this book. Yes, you got it right ‘no humans’ (and please, no aliens either).

JF: The majority of Chinese-language literature that’s been translated into English is from mainland China and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan. In her short story “An Addendum to Cosmicomics,” Xi Xi references “a writer who lamented that his southern hometown was so small it was like a postage stamp.” In comparison, the narrator of the story regards Hong Kong’s fictional counterpart as merely “a butterfly’s teardrop.” To borrow this analogy, translated Sinophone literature is probably a postage stamp in the larger realm of literature translated into English, while translated Hong Kong literature is only the size of a butterfly’s teardrop. In the postwar period the Italian literary world was deeply committed to politics, and Turin, an industrial capital, was a focal point. Calvino joined the Italian Communist Party and reported on the Fiat company for the party’s daily newspaper. A little-known third collection – La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche ("World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories") (1968), a volume not available commercially in Italy – offered 20 fictions in all, 12 from the previous two collections [ Cosmicomics and t zero] and eight new pieces (seven of these new items are translated here for the first time into English; the other new 1968 tale, the title story, was translated by Tim Parks as "World Memory" in the 1992 volume Numbers in the Dark). References [ edit ] Where shall I begin? Maybe with the fact that, this book cannot be tied down to a particular genre. Nope! I don’t think such trivial things such as, genre existed for Calvino. This book is everything ranging from magical-realism, science-fiction, and philosophy.Mr Palomar never resolves these difficulties, but the story is a classic articulation of one of the conundrums that underpinned Calvino's fiction - the disjunction between the vastness of the universe he has to describe and the comic limitations of the apparatus he has to describe it. Few writers have ever felt more keenly their isolation in their heads, and hardly any have managed Calvino's range of strategic brilliance in countering it. Big Bang! Calvino simply had no boundaries, he could go off in all directions, crossing the literary frontier into uncharted places to show anything is possible, if one simply opens the flood gates of the mind. How does one simply lump Calvino into a single category? it's almost impossible. Qfwfq’! What kind of name is that? Let me tell you that ‘ Qfwfq’ is the least strange name. How about: Captain Vhd Vhd, Granny Bb’b, Mr. Hnw, Uncle N’ba N’ga, little Xlthlx, Dean (k)yK! And there are many more names, that look like mathematical formula and I don’t even know how to type them. With Calvino every word had to be weighed. I would hesitate for whole minutes over the simplest word— bello(beautiful) or cattivo(bad). Every word had to be tried out. When I was translating Invisible Cities, my weekend guests in the country always were made to listen to a city or two read aloud. Without Colors": Before there was an atmosphere, everything was the same shade of gray. As the atmosphere appears, so do colors. The novelty scares off Ayl, Qfwfq's love interest.

There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. This is a scholarly work, grounded in many years of research of Russian-language archival sources available in the post-Soviet era. It is a fascinating account of the epic achievements and struggles of the USSR’s space programme, from its origins to the 1970s, and enjoyable reading for anyone interested in history as well as space. Eventually I get down to writing and then the real problems begin. If I start something from scratch, that is the most difficult moment, but even if it is something I started the day before, I always reach an impasse where a new obstacle needs to be overcome. And it is only in the late afternoon that I finally begin to write sentences, correct them, cover them with erasures, fill them with incidental clauses, and rewrite. At that very moment the telephone or doorbell usually rings and a friend, translator, or interviewer arrives. Speaking of which . . . this afternoon . . . the interviewers . . . I do not know if I will have the time to prepare. I could try to improvise but I believe an interview needs to be prepared ahead of time to sound spontaneous. Rarely does an interviewer ask questions you did not expect. I have given a lot of interviews and I have concluded that the questions always look alike. I could always give the same answers. But I believe I have to change my answers because with each interview something has changed either inside myself or in the world. An answer that was right the first time may not be right again the second. This could be the basis of a book. I am given a list of questions, always the same; every chapter would contain the answers I would give at different times. The changes would contain the answers I would give at different times. The changes would then become the itinerary, the story that the protagonist lives. Perhaps in this way I could discover some truths about myself. Without Colors: Before there was an atmosphere, everything was the same shade of gray. As the atmosphere appears, so do colors. The novelty scares off Ayl, Qfwfq's love interest. What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq. Thus "All at One Point" begins:

The Dinosaurs: How some dinosaurs lived after most of them had become extinct, and how it felt to be that last existing dinosaur in an age where all the current mammals feared his kind as demons.