MHRA News - 'The Path to the Writer's Nest'

24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest ews Texts N bout Open A unding tyle F he Path to the ews item: Oct 14, 2024 • ll Publications A ournals J egenda L S T N embership M Writer s ' announcements est N arbara Burns talks to Claudia Dellacasa, whose book Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs was published on Open Access this summer in Legendaʼs Italian Perspectives series. B t o alvino (1923-85) was a postmodernist talian author who enjoyed international acclaim for his work which was translated into many languages. is connections with the avant-garde literary scene in aris are well known, but your book focuses on the effect of a two-week visit he made to apan in 1976. Why did alvino travel to apan, and in what ways was his brief encounter with this country so important for his development as a writer? . al BB I C I H P J https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html C J 1/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest s mple answer is that alvino was invited by the apan oundation to visit the country in a period of his life when he was residing in aris and was at something of a creative standstill after the publication of l castello dei destini incrociati [The astle of rossed estinies] in 1973. e had already achieved national and international recognition — l barone rampante [The aron in the Trees] had been published in 1957 and e città invisibili [ nvisible ities] in 1972, for example — but he was not yet the author of Se una notte d inverno un viaggiatore [ f on a Winter s ight a Traveler] and alomar [ r alomar], two of his masterpieces that most bear the mark of apanese inspiration, as argue in my book. . he i CD T C J F P I C D C H I B I ʼ L C I ʼ N P J https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html M P I 2/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest laudia Dellacasa C n apan he visited okyo, yoto, ikkō and ara, attended a meeting at the ihon- taria yoto- aikan, and one at the talian ultural nstitute of okyo. e also met important apanese translators and authors, such as e enzaburō ( obel rize in literature in 1994) and be ōbō, potentially as an emissary of inaudi on the lookout for interesting authors to be translated into talian. o here we have alvino, an eminent intellectual figure, writer and cultural commentator whose prestige had already crossed international borders, spending two weeks experiencing cultural venues and tourist attractions, and engaging I J T K K N K I N C J I Ō A K N T K I H N P E I S https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html C 3/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest with a oundation for the promotion of international cultural exchange between apan and the rest of the world. ut to think that those two weeks are the only justification for alvinoʼs interest in apan would be to underestimate his intellectual vivacity. n fact, alvino had already been reading apanese novels and uddhist texts, as the volumes in his personal library show. hese books, and the travel experience itself, resonated with a way of looking at the world that alvino had been gravitating towards for decades: a view of landscape as a space where human and non-human beings may possibly interact in harmonious, nonhierarchical ways; a view of the written (verbal) and the unwritten (non-verbal) world as illuminating one another; and, crucially, a view of time as simultaneously linear and circular and as a category that is transcended the more one tries to circumscribe it through limited logical tools. ll of this brings us back to the point that focussing on alvinoʼs travels as only happening during those two weeks spent bodily in apan is reductive: he reflects afterwards on how time can expand and even evaporate, and we all know that lifechanging experiences exceed the limits of material events. F J B C I J J C B T C A C J This is a picture taken during Calvinoʼs meeting at the Nihon-Itaria Kyoto-Kaikan in ovember 1976. I wish to thank Prof. Amano Kei and the Kaikan for granting me permission to use this and other photos, which also feature in my book. N ow did you become interested in alvino, and especially in the apanese influences on his work? . started working on alvino as an undergraduate at a apienza University of ome, when examined e città invisibili for my thesis, highlighting the strategies through which alvino constructs a suspended temporality in the extremely poetic atmosphere of . BB H C CD I J C I L L S R BA C https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 4/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest the novel. or my thesis, looked at another book by alvino, l barone rampante. n addition to pursuing my interest in the novelʼs temporal dimension, investigated the botanical exactitude of this work, whose main character climbs up a holm oak one day in his youth and then decides to spend his entire life in trees. his made me realise that could bring together my ecological interests, which have cultivated since was a child thanks to my family, and my literary and linguistic research. While time had been central in my linguistic analyses up to that point, space became more and more relevant from then on. nd here mean space as both an environmental and a geographical category. n my h project, looked at how alvinoʼs contact with apanese culture – gardens and temples in particular – engendered a decentralisation of his Western point of view (a geographical and cultural decentralisation), which in turn challenged the centrality of the human in the surrounding world (in other words, a post-human perspective shift). ut my research began, as any process does, with more questions than answers – questions that first arose as was helping digitise the catalogue of alvinoʼs personal books, on which rof. aura i icola ( a apienza) has worked for many years. then noticed that alvino had an entire shelf dedicated to apanese literature, with around sixty volumes of talian, nglish, rench, and panish translations of novels and short stories by be, kutagawa, ndō, awabata, ishima, atsume, e, and anizaki, among others. nd he also owned several uddhist texts, placed on a different shelf. started asking myself why hadnʼt even imagined that was possible, subsequently found out about his travels, and the rest came gradually with my research, which the rts and umanities esearch ouncil generously supported at the University of urham, where was supervised by rof. atrin Wehling- iorgi. F MA I I C I I T I I A I I I P D I C J B I P L C D N L S I C J I A E A F E A S K M N Ō T B I I A R C D P K H I G https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 5/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest picture of the Sala Italo Calvino, within the area ‘Biblioteca del Novecento letterario italiano Enrico Falquiʼ at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma. This room reproduces different environments of Calvinoʼs penthouse at Campo Marzio in Rome, which has now been sold, and hosts all the books that used to be in his library – including the Japanese shelves! A subtitle of your book, ourney through the Shallow epths of Signs, may seem rather enigmatic to the uninitiated reader. an you explain this for us? . he BB T A J D C https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 6/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest alvinoʼs Japanese experience, and my analysis of it, follows closely the textual reading of Japan that Roland Barthes elaborated a few years earlier, in his LʼEmpire des signes [Empire of Signs]. Both Barthes and Calvino are semiotic travellers in Japan: not quite explorers who move toward the risk of the unknown, but not really tourists, who are usually attracted by the security of pure cliché. Calvinoʼs interest in semiotics – perhaps less pronounced than Barthesʼs, but still relevant – allows him to recognise that if, in any cultural context, everything can be read as a sign, and if the surface of things should be understood as a tool to conceal the conventional nature of every form of expression, in Zen culture this dynamic is almost reversed from within. In Zen arts and rituals, forms are made central so as to lay bare the conventionality of forms themselves, and invite the practitioner to play with them and realise that there is no further depth to be looked for. CD. C his is a very refreshing approach for a Western mind, as it implies a fundamental challenge to the hypocrisy of cultural constructions that are ideologically presented as natural and unavoidable, while they are in fact deeply artificial. When artificiality and convention are openly embraced, as they are in many Zen cultural forms (think of the highly ritualised tea ceremony, for example), it is possible to appreciate that there is no need to go further in search of deeper meanings, as everything is on the surface, and every signʼs depth is actually shallow. In Palomar Calvino will write, in my opinion influenced by Zen, that: T Solo dopo aver conosciuto la superficie delle cose […] ci si può spingere a cercare quel che cʼè sotto. Ma la superficie delle cose è inesauribile [It is only after you have come to know the surface of things […] that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.] realise this view of superficiality and depth can be puzzling for many readers, given that we are accustomed to link negative connotations to the former, and positive to the latter. ut this is in line with centuries-old notions of sian philosophies, such as that of emptiness, void, vacuity (śūnyatā). mptiness is another theme deal with, and again, to be empty is not a bad thing. hings are empty in the sense that they do not have autonomous reality, but exist thanks to, in relation with, depending on other things. urfaces, then, take on the positive role of creating such relations, as opposed to modes of thinking that posit isolated, solipsistic, alltoo-deep selves. see alomar himself as empty, because he makes himself so receptive to inner and outer phenomena. hey belong to an all-encompassing universe of signs, in which what alvino calls ‘ he Written World and the Unwritten Worldʼ are part of the same spectrum. I B A E I T S I P T C T https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 7/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest nother picture from the meeting at the Nihon-Itaria Kyoto-Kaikan in November 1976. A . alvinoʼs interest in Zen Buddhism followed in the wake of the increasing appeal during the 1960s of non-Western philosophies in Europe and America. Did Zen represent for him a turning away from engagement with Eurocentric preoccupations and politics, in particular from his former Marxist convictions? BB C . his is a very important point; thank you for bringing it up. In part itʼs true that when Calvino visited Japan in the 1970s, he was no longer the committed Communist intellectual he had been in the 1940s and 1950s. He had resigned from the Italian Communist Party in 1957, as a reaction to the post-Stalinist invasion of Hungary, and after that had grown gradually disillusioned with the degenerations of Soviet totalitarianism. While aware of this detachment, I was still quite surprised in reading certain reflections, linked in different ways to Japan, where Calvino expresses rather conservative views. For example, in his review in la Repubblica of Kurosawaʼs film Kagemusha, he seems to see social and political hierarchies as unavoidable, while in ‘Il rovescio del sublimeʼ [‘The Obverse of the Sublimeʼ], in the Japanese section of Collezione di sabbia [Collection of Sand], he accepts economic inequalities as material conditions necessary for attaining aesthetic peaks, including those of the imperial gardens he much appreciates. CD T o it can be said that alvinoʼs semiotic reading of apan tends to be a non-ideological one, consistent with his gradually increasing reaction to his past political activism. t the same time, however, the very semiotic reflections that are prompted by a ‘non-politicalʼ approach to apan allow him to challenge many Western philosophical rigidities. nd what is more political than questioning the centrality of (male) human beings and considering them as entangled in a larger, interconnected world? he relational ontology that follows, and that resonates with many recent environmental and scientific discourses ( ʼm thinking S C J A J A T I https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 8/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest out ovelliʼs interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular, which hinges upon relations), is forward-looking enough for me to excuse alvinoʼs sporadically lessprogressive politics. . id alvino make any attempt to learn the apanese language, or was he more interested in non-verbal means of communicating cultural meaning? . alvino did not speak apanese, nor was he particularly aware of basic pronunciation rules of the language. or example, Wada adahiko (now one of alvinoʼs major apanese translators and at the time one of the young students who accompanied the writer during his visits around yoto) remembers that alvino never failed to remark upon the number of pachinko halls they encountered in yoto, but he always misread the signs in rōmaji characters, italianising as /paˈkɪŋko/ what should be pronounced in apanese as /paˈtʃɪŋko/. n one hand, then, alvinoʼs travels happen at an a- (pre? post?) linguistic level, which itself resonates with the overcoming of language at the core of uddhist meditation and in many of the apanese novels he had the opportunity to read. n the other hand, this generates the awareness that reality itself can be read visually, in the absence of verbal handholds. he so-called written world (the world of alphabetic expression) thus loses its mastery over the unwritten world (the world of material expression), and the latter is even more deeply appreciated in its semiotic potential. t is thus thanks to the neutral, empty space of an unknown language – and, what is more, an ideographic one – that alvino develops his reading of gardens as poems (and vice-versa), in what are some of his most interesting reflections that could be filed under the category of biosemiotics. . ave you had the opportunity to travel to apan yourself? f so, were you able to follow in alvinoʼs footsteps, and what insights did your visit give you into the cultural aspects you grapple with in your book? . did, yes, thanks to the nternational lacement cheme, and still remember that as one of the best experiences of my academic (and personal) adventure. spent three months in the spring of 2019 at the ichibunken in yoto, which is the nternational esearch entre for apanese tudies, and made a point of reaching out to as many people as possible who might have had contacts with alvino back in 1976 and of visiting all the temples and gardens alvino wrote about. his gave me an excuse to spend a lot of time around the enchanting city of yoto, and to travel throughout central apan as well, up to the thermal town of ikkō (from which alvino sent a postcard to fellow writer iorgio anganelli) and to the old capital ara. also had some very nice conversations with Wada adahiko, whom have already mentioned, and mano ei, now also a professor (then a student) of talian who met alvino and guided him around yoto. mano still had the bright orange eetle in which he drove alvino through the commercial areas of the city, and you can just imagine my excitement when he offered me a ride, which meant sitting on the very seat on which ‘myʼ author had sat more than 40 years before! What is more, that afternoon was going to visit the yōan Zen temple and garden, which alvino describes in beautiful terms in a couple of texts. couldnʼt help but have that garden on the cover of my book! ab R C BB D C J CD C J F T K C J C K J O C B J O T I C BB H J I C CD I AHRC I P S I I N R C J S K I I C C T K J N C M N T I I I A C K K B I G A C R C I https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 9/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest ere I was visiting the Byōdō-in Temple in Uji, in Kyoto prefecture, in the spring of 2019: I timed my research trip in order to enjoy the hanami. H s there a book or story by alvino in nglish translation which you would recommend to readers as a good introduction to his work? . y favourite alvino books of all time are l barone rampante and arcovaldo, perhaps because of their ecological resonances. hey are very good books for young readers, as well. ut if were to recommend a book that is more connected to my own research, would probably suggest alomar. ʼm sure any reader would notice a somewhat meditative posture there, despite the initial declaration by the main character of his inability to contemplate. he book develops, in my opinion, as a gradual and not-always-patient . BB I C CD M E I C M T B I I P I T https://www.mhra.org.uk/news/2024/10/14/the-path-to-the-writers-nest.html 10/11 24/10/2024, 15:49 MHRA News - The Path to the Writer's Nest appreciation of the continuity between micro and macro, self and cosmos, which has a lot to do with what I have analysed in my book and tried to give a sense of here. . he last few years have involved a lot of interesting moves for you, from Rome to Durham to Tübingen to Dublin and then to the University of Glasgow where youʼve recently taken up a lectureship. How has this wealth of experience affected your perspective, and how are you finding Scotland? BB T or someone who works in comparative literature and is curious about the environment in all its different forms, the last few years have been incredibly rewarding: thanks to many friends made in these places and with the help of my bike (or bikes, as one was actually stolen), managed to explore many different landscapes, both human and non-human – though the two are always interconnected – and to learn to decipher, if you like semiotically, different cultures. gain, the content and the context of my research went hand in hand. f course, that was also emotionally and logistically taxing, and ʼm now enjoying the stability of a permanent job in a city love a little more every day. nd, just as alvino in the 1980s, after living in anremo, urin, and aris, managed to have his complete library (the one helped catalogue) in his penthouse at ampo arzio in ome, am finally relieved to have all my books together in one place! alvino, as it happens, has a shelf of his own. full news feed • subscribe via . 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