Read Online If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino - Free Book Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Ads: Link
you don't want to come, then don't come; as far as I'm concerned, the department could even be abolished. But to come here only to... No, that's too much."
"Only to—what?"
"Everything. I'm forced to see everything. For weeks on end nobody comes, but when somebody does come it's to do things that. . . You could remain well away from here, I say, what could interest you in these books written in the language of the dead? But they do it deliberately, let's go to Bothno-Ugaric languages, they say, let's go to Uzzi-Tuzii, and so I'm involved, forced to see, to participate...."
"In what?" you inquire, thinking of Ludmilla, who came here, who hid here, perhaps with Irnerio, with others.
"In everything... Perhaps there is something that attracts them, this uncertainty between life and death, perhaps this is what they feel, without understanding. They come here to do what they do, but they don't sign up for
----
the course, they don't attend classes, nobody ever takes an interest in the literature of the Cimmerians, buried in the books on these shelves as if in the graves of a cemetery...."
"I was, in fact, interested in it.... I had come to ask if there exists a Cimmerian novel that begins... No, the best way is to tell you right off the names of the characters: Gritzvi and Zwida, Ponko and Brigd. The action begins at Kudgiwa, but perhaps this is only the name of a farm; then I believe it shifts to Pëtkwo, oh the Aagd...."
"Oh, that can be found quickly!" the professor exclaims, and in one second he is freed from his hypochondriacal fog and glows like an electric bulb. "It is unquestionably Leaning from the steep slope, the only novel left us by one of the most promising Cimmerian poets of the first quarter of our century, Ukko Ahti.... Here it is!" And with the leap of a fish swimming against rapids he aims at a precise spot on a shelf, grasps a slim volume bound in green, slaps it to dispel the dust. "It has never been translated into any other language. The difficulties, to be sure, are enough to discourage anyone. Listen: 'I am addressing the conviction...' No: 'I am convincing myself to transmit...' You will note that both verbs are in the present progressive."
One thing is immediately clear to you: namely that this book has nothing in common with the one you had begun. Only some proper names are identical, a detail that is surely very odd, but which you do not stop to ponder, because gradually, from Uzzi-Tuzii's laborious extempore translation the outline of a story is taking shape, from his toilsome deciphering of verbal lumps a flowing narrative emerges.
----
Leaning from the steep slope
I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings. I have noticed this ever since I have been in Pëtkwo. Every morning I leave the Kudgiwa Pension for my usual walk as far as the harbor. I go past the meteorological observatory, and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or, rather, which has been in progress for a long while. If the end of the world could be localized in a precise spot, it would be the meteorological observatory of Pëtkwo: a corrugated-iron roof that rests on four somewhat shaky poles and houses, lined up on a shelf, some recording barometers, hygrometers, and thermographs, with their rolls of lined paper, which turn with a slow clockwork ticking against an oscillating nib. The vane of an anemometer at the top of a tall antenna and the squat funnel of a pluviometer complete the fragile equipment of the observatory, which, isolated on the edge of an escarpment in the municipal garden, against the pearl-gray sky, uniform and motionless, seems a trap for cyclones, a lure set there to attract waterspouts from the remote tropical
----
oceans, offering itself already as the ideal relict of the fury of the hurricanes.
There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to
"Only to—what?"
"Everything. I'm forced to see everything. For weeks on end nobody comes, but when somebody does come it's to do things that. . . You could remain well away from here, I say, what could interest you in these books written in the language of the dead? But they do it deliberately, let's go to Bothno-Ugaric languages, they say, let's go to Uzzi-Tuzii, and so I'm involved, forced to see, to participate...."
"In what?" you inquire, thinking of Ludmilla, who came here, who hid here, perhaps with Irnerio, with others.
"In everything... Perhaps there is something that attracts them, this uncertainty between life and death, perhaps this is what they feel, without understanding. They come here to do what they do, but they don't sign up for
----
the course, they don't attend classes, nobody ever takes an interest in the literature of the Cimmerians, buried in the books on these shelves as if in the graves of a cemetery...."
"I was, in fact, interested in it.... I had come to ask if there exists a Cimmerian novel that begins... No, the best way is to tell you right off the names of the characters: Gritzvi and Zwida, Ponko and Brigd. The action begins at Kudgiwa, but perhaps this is only the name of a farm; then I believe it shifts to Pëtkwo, oh the Aagd...."
"Oh, that can be found quickly!" the professor exclaims, and in one second he is freed from his hypochondriacal fog and glows like an electric bulb. "It is unquestionably Leaning from the steep slope, the only novel left us by one of the most promising Cimmerian poets of the first quarter of our century, Ukko Ahti.... Here it is!" And with the leap of a fish swimming against rapids he aims at a precise spot on a shelf, grasps a slim volume bound in green, slaps it to dispel the dust. "It has never been translated into any other language. The difficulties, to be sure, are enough to discourage anyone. Listen: 'I am addressing the conviction...' No: 'I am convincing myself to transmit...' You will note that both verbs are in the present progressive."
One thing is immediately clear to you: namely that this book has nothing in common with the one you had begun. Only some proper names are identical, a detail that is surely very odd, but which you do not stop to ponder, because gradually, from Uzzi-Tuzii's laborious extempore translation the outline of a story is taking shape, from his toilsome deciphering of verbal lumps a flowing narrative emerges.
----
Leaning from the steep slope
I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings. I have noticed this ever since I have been in Pëtkwo. Every morning I leave the Kudgiwa Pension for my usual walk as far as the harbor. I go past the meteorological observatory, and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or, rather, which has been in progress for a long while. If the end of the world could be localized in a precise spot, it would be the meteorological observatory of Pëtkwo: a corrugated-iron roof that rests on four somewhat shaky poles and houses, lined up on a shelf, some recording barometers, hygrometers, and thermographs, with their rolls of lined paper, which turn with a slow clockwork ticking against an oscillating nib. The vane of an anemometer at the top of a tall antenna and the squat funnel of a pluviometer complete the fragile equipment of the observatory, which, isolated on the edge of an escarpment in the municipal garden, against the pearl-gray sky, uniform and motionless, seems a trap for cyclones, a lure set there to attract waterspouts from the remote tropical
----
oceans, offering itself already as the ideal relict of the fury of the hurricanes.
There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to
Similar Books
