Curious how the mind: some time after reading first Baron rampant, in a copy I got from a public library in Oviedo, arose in me a sense that Italo Calvino might not sufficiently explored the link for your main character with the birds.
Not that I had noticed that detail, but slowly they began to revive in my mind the main features of this delicious novel, for the days when I had just crystallized in my love-I got to feel that there were fewer birds than expected from the biographical story of noble Italian who spent most of my life gone to the trees. That feeling, at first vague and indefinable, and never confirmed in a book he had read borrowed gradually began to become the idea that there were virtually no bird references therein. The thing came to a head just a month ago when, after exposure to Florence the reasons for my enthusiasm for the novel, declared, breast swelling with pride: "And yet, it is an incomprehensible default: do not show birds!".
Last week, finally went back to read it. Back in October 2006, when I returned from Spain, I realized I had the novel in my books, in a commercial edition of thirty years ago, Mexican pink cover with magenta shooting, but neither then nor later I Splashed even occurred. As Thursday of every week I encourage a reading circle in which I have been proposing read some that I liked from the first time (in Flaubert, Coetzee, García Márquez, Thomas Mann ...), eventually reaching the turn of Calvino's novel. I take my land back, or I should say-of Ombrossa fronds (note the lucky name of a region best known for its forests) to record any mention of bird, if nevertheless it was the case there was any. He also had an enormous desire to read again my favorite episode of all that make life Piovasco of Cosimo Rondo, Biaggio told by his brother: his encounter in Olivabassa population, with a group of English families in exile that as he lived among the branches of trees.
Rarely have I read a very keen and intuitive portrait of the English character - Bacon says no need to acknowledge that great art can be a cartoonish element? - The women of blanket, weaving; men ruined because of ill will and machinations confusing, and they delivered them and sigh and a nostalgia for lost greatness, physical and moral, with all the gravity of their lives on their backs, suspended a few feet off the ground. Because of an edict had forbidden them to tread even those lands, they decided to jump into the leaves, and lived there under the conditions of this strange circumstance, which helps improve Cosimo. Our hero falls in love there an Andalusian to have waived once the decree is revoked and the English decide to start back, as they would go with good footing, which has vowed never will again.
revisit The Baron in the Trees has helped me to remember the kind of anomalies that are subject to my memory and has warned me again about the consistency of my certainties when I have no care to examine them again and again. But above everything is back to show me curious mind works, or at least mine, even - or especially! - when it comes to the things that excite me. Or how to explain, if not, the thick bird shop that fills the novel? I do not understand how I got rid of all these allusions as tight flocks, which vibrate, chirp, flutter and stir in many pages of The Baron in the Trees, to stop monopolizing your pages with a profusion worthy of a baroque altarpiece.
The scoring was genuine at first experimental effort, then the habit a bit mechanical, but never failing to smile, and finally when the flock became a busy crowd was laughing uproariously in the selectivity of my memory, I confess, and with a certain ennui.
The translation, of one Francesc Miravitlles, is not very reliable if only because from time to time we do see a holly Cosimo jump to another and even among the bushes one of them, which anyone who knows this tree, whose leaves pierce like knives, may encourage even imagine.
With such prevention, and my almost total ignorance ornithological I can say that in the book are blackbirds, starlings, agates, finches, wrens, francolins, sparrows, thrushes, shrikes, owls, jays, chickens, more blackbirds, snipe, quails, orioles, woodcocks, finches, quail, crows, greenfinches, snipe, plover, more and more blackbirds blackbirds, robins, doves, finches, birds countless anonymous Upupa other greenfinches, woodpeckers, pigeons and owls ...
To make matters worse, the image the bird just chairing the novel, to the extent that our hunter Baron becomes first of which, after his friend and finally a bird himself! Calvin has it: "In the midst of these conflicting judgments, Cosimo was really mad. Where once was completely dressed in furs, now began to adorn the head of feathers, as the aborigines of America, hoopoe feathers [I read that it is the hoopoe] and Verderol, bright colors, and in addition to the head [sic ], the clothes had been scattered. Fraques eventually be completely covered with feathers, and imitate the habits of various birds, like woodpeckers [which I understand is the woodpecker], taking the logs worms and larvae and praising them with great wealth " (P. 209). Nothing I say the end of the beautiful fable, in order not to spoil the reading of whom still do not know.
________________
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino , number 14 Club Bruguera, Editorial Bruguera, first edition, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bApril 1980.
0 comments:
Post a Comment