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Sunday, 10 April 2022 1:46 pm / Standing Room Only / Lynn Freeman
Author David Groves invites us to travel the Silk Road from fabled Asian capital Xanadu to Venice, with adventurer Marco Polo and the Emperor Kublai Khan as our guides, in his novel Intelligible Cities.
In it, the two old men talk reflect on the strengths, and weaknesses, of language and different ways it can be translated.
David is deeply versed in Italian language and culture, and his novel is impossible to pigeonhole - part travelogue, part allegory, part treatise on translation all encapsulated in a comic novel.
David tells Lynn Freeman that it's also a tribute to an Italo Calvino novel that was published 50 years ago:
Tuesday 29 March, 2022 / Mark Amery
Fantasically, Intelligible Cities, a new book by Paekākāriki resident David Groves, sees Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan discussing the weird and wacky ways in which the inhabitants of 26 cities communicate with strangers who arrive at their gates speaking an unknown language.
Groves taught Italian language and culture for 30 years before working as a professional translator of Italian for 20. Now retired, his new book draws on that background, paying homage to a modern classic, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, first published in Italy in 1972. Groves’ career in Italian was founded on a four and a half year residence teaching at the University of Genoa. He got heavily involved in Italian political and cultural life, meeting many writers including Italo Calvino.
Groves’ book has just been published in Florence. “The cities,” he says, “are given women’s names (as is done in Calvino’s book). The names of my cities are arranged in alphabetical order. The chapters can be read as a novel or as a series of linked bedtime stories.”
“I deliberately didn’t reread Calvino’s Invisible Cities before writing my book. I just based myself on the recollection of the feel of it.”
Groves’ dialogues are imaginary, taking place everywhere and nowhere: “I sneak in a kākāriki and the flight of godwits to link a mythical China to us.”
“I thought I had got to the end and realised I had missed out a letter of the alphabet! – I was one city short! A prize of a bottle of Italian red wine is offered to the first reader who identifies the city that was written last (it is not Z).”
14 August 2022, Sunday Star-Times
Having discussed Translating Myself and Others, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Tilly Lloyd comments that Lahiri’s luminous writing …chimes perfectly with Paekakākārikian David Groves’ recent witty translation novel ‘Intelligible Cities’ (published on the 50th anniversary of Italy Calvino’s Invisible Cities and borrowing its dialogue form).
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