Traveling with Marco Polo: Selected Excerpts

Abstract

Published in 2012, Chinese writer Xue Yiwei’s Traveling with Marco Polo is a creative collection that dialogues with Invisible Cities by the postmodern Italian writer Italo Calvino. While Calvino imagines a young Marco Polo describing the fantastic sights of fifty-five cities to an aging Kublai Khan, Xue Yiwei joins the conversation and gives meticulous explication of each one of Calvino’s cities. The following excerpts were translated from the Chinese version of Traveling with Marco Polo by Hu Ying.

Notes

1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1974), 7. All further references to Invisible Cities refer to this edition and appear in-text with page numbers.

2 A reference to Mao Zedong’s poem “Snow: To the Tune of ‘Spring in a Pleasure Garden.’” The poem was composed in 1936 and first appeared in the Chongqing newspaper Xin minbao wankan, Nov. 14, 1945.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ying Hu

Hu Ying is a professor of modern Chinese literature at UC Irvine. Her publications include Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China (Stanford, 2000) and Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship and Loss (Harvard, 2015). She has translated classical and modern literature, from Chinese and from English, in poetry, prose, fiction, and literary theory, by well-known and obscure writers.