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'The Thousand Gardens' describes the experience of walking a path through the garden of the imperial villa at Katsura, where each footstep is designed to reveal a new landscape. Were these jars nothing more than a sad 'cemetery of landscapes reduced to a desert'? And yet perhaps they provided a means of allowing the collector to remove herself from 'the confused wind of being, and to have at last for herself the sandy substance of all things, to touch the flinty structure of existence.' However, Calvino wonders whether it is possible for containers of sand to retain traces of lived experience: the sight of an indigo sea, the heat of the wadi, the sensations of the beach. Calvino describes becoming absorbed in their minute differences, although at first he 'takes in only the samples that stand out most, the rust coloured sand from a dry river-bed in Morocco, the carboniferous black and white grains from the Aran Islands.' Reading this reminded me of helping my children make sculptures in these grey Aran Island sands, earlier this year. Among the bizarre collections there was a set of jars containing nothing but sand, each a sample from a different location, carefully labelled. This book's title essay was written after Calvino had been to see an exhibition in Paris devoted to the art of collecting.
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McLoughlin highlights this 'luxuriant arboreal theme', perhaps unsurprising in a book from the author of The Baron in the Trees. Which exhibit a faint pattern of branching, multicoloured veins.' Calvino finds rock sculpted to imitate natural forms (the overgrown temples of Mexico, the frieze of Trajan column) and writes about trees themselves, painted and real. One even mentions George Sand, who aside from her novels painted what she called 'dendrites', landscapes whose textures resemble 'those stones Several essays describe different forms of stone, from the raked gravel gardens of Kyoto to the sculpted rocks of Persepolis. In his introduction, McLaughlin notes Calvino's fondness for mineral imagery: the 'stone' of his earlier collection of essays on politics and literature, Una pietra sopra, has become fragmented into granules of sand in this subsequent volume - short articles on art works and unusual books that captured Calvino's interest, along with travel sketches written after visits to Japan, Mexico and Iran. I don't know why it has taken twenty-nine years for Italo Calvino's Collezione di sabbia to appear in English but now it can be enjoyed here in Martin McLaughlin's new translation. He is the English translator of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among many others.Collection of Sand joins our collection of Calvinos McLaughlin is Professor of Italian and Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College. He died in Siena in 1985, of a brain hemorrhage.Martin L. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. Surprising and profound, Collection of Sand provides a glimpse into the mind of a master of the magination.Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories.
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Books and paintings provoke discussions of artistic motivation, while descriptions of a meticulous Japanese garden, Trajan's column crumbling to dust or a Mexican temple smothered by the jungle lead to contemplations on space, time and civilization. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging curiosity, Calvino writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'.