Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 30
A Nature Book Reader
ADRIAN COOPER
Adrian
Adrian Cooper
Cooper runs
runs Little
LittleToller
Toller Books
Books
The
BaronInInThe
TheTrees
Trees
by Italo
Calvino
The Baron
by Italo
Calvino
For a life lived in trees
trees there
there
is Italo Calvino’s The Baron
in the Trees, translated by
Archibald Colquhoun.
Half-Italian, but without
without any
Half-Italian,
knowledge of my ancestors,
I’ve filled the hole-in-myhole-in-my
head with a borrowed cast:
Leopardi, Lampedusa,
Moravia, Silone. Of this
estranged kin I like most
Calvino’s Cosimo Piovasco
di Rondò, a baron of
of trees.
trees.
His story begins in the heat of
of
June, on the Ligurian coast of
1767, when he shoves a plate
plate of
of
snails across the table. An act of
resistance,
resistance, a rebellion,
rebellion, twelve
twelve
year-old Cosimo then leaves
the dining room and climbs a
great
a greatholm
holmoak
oakoutside,
outside,
turning his back on the earthly
earthly
obligations he has as eldest
son and di Rondò
Rondò heir.
heir. Cosimo
Cosimo
becomes a vagabond in the
woods. He studies books sent
to him from Amsterdam and
30
Paris. He falls in love, mourns
publishes
his father’s death, publishes
entitled The Song
pamphlets entitled
of the Blackbird, The Knock
of the Woodpecker, and The
Dialogue of the Owls. Cosimo
never climbs back to earth. He
lives out the rest of his life in
in
the ‘high bridges of the world.’
And although he does meet
other noblemen like him,
living exiled in a colony of
plane trees, Cosimo ages with
loneliness,
loneliness, finding
finding it more and
more difficult to remember
why exactly he decided to
leave the ground. I wish we
were governed by people
who live in trees.
Further Reading
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
Collected Animal
Poems by Ted Hughes
