#164 Sun (12/4/22) - The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (Manguel and Guadalupi)
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980, 1987, 1999) is a book written by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. It takes the form of a catalogue of fantasy lands, islands, cities, and other locations from world literature—"a Baedecker or traveller's guide...a nineteenth-century gazetteer" for mental travelling.
From Atlantis to Xanadu and beyond, this Baedeker of make-believe takes readers on a tour of more than 1,200 realms invented by storytellers from Homer's day to our own. Here you will find Shangri-La and El Dorado; Utopia and Middle Earth; Wonderland and Freedonia. Here too are Jurassic Park, Salman Rushdie's Sea of Stories, and the fabulous world of Harry Potter. The history and behavior of the inhabitants of these lands are described in loving detail, and are supplemented by more than 200 maps and illustrations that depict the lay of the land in a host of elsewheres. A must-have for the library of every dedicated reader, fantasy fan, or passionate browser, Dictionary is a witty and acute guide for any armchair traveler's journey into the landscape of the imagination.
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Italo Calvino in The Collection of Sand devotes an essay "The Archipelago of Imaginary Places" to some descriptions of this work. It is available but only at the reference desk [ R809.93372 MAN ] at the Urbana Free Library.
The Archipelago of Imaginary Places
On Frivola, an island in the Pacific, life is easy and frustrating. The trees are
as elastic as rubber and their branches bend down to offer fruits that melt in
the mouth like froth. The inhabitants rear fragile and useless horses which
collapse under the slightest weight. To plough the fields, all that is needed is
for the women to play on a whistle and furrows open up in the thin dust,
while in order to sow men just scatter seeds to the wind. In the forests the
wild beasts have soft tusks and claws and their roar is like a rustle of silk.
The local currency is the agatina, which is not very prized on the currency
market.
The Diamond Islands have the property of swallowing up imprudent
travellers, who are captured by their carnivorous diamonds. In order to get
hold of the jewels, crafty merchants scatter bloody pieces of pork over
them, which the diamonds immediately start to suck on; towards evening
the vultures descend, snatch the meat in their claws and fly off with it to
their nests, along with the jewels stuck to the pork. The merchants climb up
to the nests, frighten off the raptors, separate the diamonds from the meat,
and then sell them to unwary jewellers. That is how a ring devours a finger,
or a necklace a neck.
Capillaria, a land beneath the sea, is inhabited exclusively by self -
reproducing women called Ohias: they are beautiful and majestic, two
metres tall, with features like angels, soft bodies and long blonde hair
framing their faces. The Ohias’ skin feels like silk, and is translucent, like
alabaster: through their transparent skin you can see the bones of their
skeleton, their blue lungs, their pink heart, the calm pulsing of their veins.
Men are unknown there, or rather they survive as external parasites called
Bullpops, formed of a cylindrical body about fifteen centimetres long, a
bald, bumpy head, a human face and wiry arms and hands, but they have
legs endowed with huge big toes, fins and wings. The defenceless Bullpops
swim vertically like sea-horses, and the Ohias feed on them since they are
greedy for their marrow, to which they attribute amongst other things
properties that somehow stimulate reproduction.
On the island of Odes the roads are living creatures and they move freely
of their own accord. To travel across the island visitors just have to take up
their position on a road, after finding out where it is going, and let
themselves be carried along. The most famous roads in the world come to
Odes as tourists for a holiday.
London-on-Thames, which is not to be confused with its more famous
namesake, is a city dug out of the top of a rock, inhabited by a tribe of
gorillas whose chief believes he is the reincarnation of Henry VIII and he
has five wives called Catherine of Aragon, Ann Boleyn and so on. The sixth
wife is a white woman, captured by the gorillas, who stays in this role until
she is substituted by another female captive.
On the island of Dionysus there is a vineyard growing where the vines
are women from the waist upwards; vine-leaves and clusters of grapes
dangle from their fingers, and their hair is made of tendrils. Heaven help the
traveller who allows himself to be embraced by these creatures: he
immediately gets drunk, forgets his homeland, family and honour, puts
down roots and becomes a vine as well.
Malacovia is a fortified city made entirely out of iron, and built on the
Danube Delta: it is in the shape of an egg, chock-full of Tartar cyclists who,
as they pedal, make the iron egg go down, so it is concealed in the Delta
marshes, and then back up again. The city lives, waiting for the moment
when the hordes of cycling Tartars will be unleashed to invade the empire
of the Czars.
The sources of these geographical descriptions are respectively: Abbé
François Coyer, The Frivolous Island (London, 1750); The Thousand and
One Nights; Frigyes Karinthy, Capillaria (Budapest, 1921); Rabelais, The
Fifth Book of Pantagruel; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Lion-Man;
Lucian of Samosata’s True Story; Amedeo Tosetti, Pedali sul Mar Nero
(Pedals by the Black Sea) (Milan, 1884).
That, at least, is how they are cited (I take no responsibility for their
veracity) in the book from which I drew this information: The Dictionary of
Imaginary Places, by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Toronto:
Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1980). This is an enormous volume with the
layout of a geographical dictionary and entries in alphabetical order (from
Abaton, a city that has a variety of geographical locations, to Zuy, the
Elves’ shopping centre), and it comes complete with maps and engravings
like those of an old-fashioned encyclopedia.
A book published in Canada and the product of a collaboration between
an Argentine and an Italian has all the credentials for epitomizing
geographical confusion. In the Library of the Superfluous, which I would
like all our bookshelves to find a space for, it seems to me that a Dictionary
of Imaginary Places would be an indispensable reference work.
Every city or island or region has an entry as in an encyclopedia, and
every entry begins with information on its geographical position, population
and any economic resources, as well as its climate, fauna and flora. The rule
behind the Dictionary is to present every place as though it really existed.
This information is derived from the sources, which are given at the end of
every entry: thus for Atlantis are listed Plato’s Critias and Timaeus, Pierre
Benoît’s novel and also a lesser known work by Conan Doyle.
Another rule that the authors obey is to exclude imaginary toponyms
used by novelists to represent real or at least probable places: so Proust’s
Balbec is not there, nor Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. And given that the
geography concerns the present and the past but not the future, the whole of
futuristic science-fiction, whether extra-terrestrial or political or social
fantasy, is also excluded.
This is not a book that hooks you immediately. On the contrary, the first
impression as you thumb through it is that imaginary geography is much
less attractive than the geography of real places: a methodical dullness
hangs over utopian cities, from Francis Bacon’s Bensalem to Cabet’s Icaria,
as well as over countless eighteenth-century satirical-philosophical
voyages, not to mention the edifying religious-allegorical stages along
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And a sense of satiety, not to say lack of
oxygen, accompanies the packed topographies in The Wizard of Oz, Tolkien
or C. S. Lewis.
However, as one works one’s way through the single entries one soon
comes across worlds that are governed by a more evocative fantasy logic,
and I have tried to provide some examples of these above; I have not quoted
(because it is already well known in Italy thanks to Masolino d’Amico and
Giorgio Manganelli) what remains the most elegant and ingenious
invention: Abbot’s geometrical Flatland.
It is above all minor literary fiction that reveals endless resources for
creating these poetic myths; whole atlases of visionary countries flow from
the pen of talented professionals in entertainment literature. The most
quoted author is Edgar Rice Burroughs, not only for his cycle of Tarzan
books but for a large number of works describing fantasy lands. Taken from
novels that were considered merely as page-turners and whose authors are
not recorded in literary histories, many such states went on to become
myths of the cinema such as the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon, the Ruritania
of The Prisoner of Zenda and the Island of Count Zaroff in The Most
Dangerous Game. The Dictionary also includes countries that were created
directly for the screen, such as the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia in Duck Soup,
and Pepperland in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; however, I do not see the
cities from René Clair’s films of political satire.
Italian literature is well represented, from Boiardo’s Albraca to Zavattinia
in Totò il buono, even though it is not the richest in this field: still the
Bastiani Fortress in Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe is there, as is Gadda’s
Maradagal and Pinocchio’s Toyland. Amongst the curiosities worth
mentioning I will point out two tunnels: one that leads from Greece to
Naples, for the exclusive use of unhappy lovers, which is explored in
Sannazaro’s Arcadia; and the other that links the Adriatic (through the
valley of the river Brenta) to the Tyrrhenian Sea (leading to the Gulf of La
Spezia), constructed in the fourteenth century by the Genoese in order to
invade the Republic of Venice. The latter was tracked down and explored in
Salgari’s novel, I naviganti della Meloria (The Sailors of the Meloria)
(1903): in the novel the sailors actually found in the tunnel phosphorescent
fauna consisting of jellyfish and giant molluscs.
[1981]
metres tall, with features like angels, soft bodies and long blonde hair
framing their faces. The Ohias’ skin feels like silk, and is translucent, like
alabaster: through their transparent skin you can see the bones of their
skeleton, their blue lungs, their pink heart, the calm pulsing of their veins.
Men are unknown there, or rather they survive as external parasites called
Bullpops, formed of a cylindrical body about fifteen centimetres long, a
bald, bumpy head, a human face and wiry arms and hands, but they have
legs endowed with huge big toes, fins and wings. The defenceless Bullpops
swim vertically like sea-horses, and the Ohias feed on them since they are
greedy for their marrow, to which they attribute amongst other things
properties that somehow stimulate reproduction.
On the island of Odes the roads are living creatures and they move freely
of their own accord. To travel across the island visitors just have to take up
their position on a road, after finding out where it is going, and let
themselves be carried along. The most famous roads in the world come to
Odes as tourists for a holiday.
London-on-Thames, which is not to be confused with its more famous
namesake, is a city dug out of the top of a rock, inhabited by a tribe of
gorillas whose chief believes he is the reincarnation of Henry VIII and he
has five wives called Catherine of Aragon, Ann Boleyn and so on. The sixth
wife is a white woman, captured by the gorillas, who stays in this role until
she is substituted by another female captive.
On the island of Dionysus there is a vineyard growing where the vines
are women from the waist upwards; vine-leaves and clusters of grapes
dangle from their fingers, and their hair is made of tendrils. Heaven help the
traveller who allows himself to be embraced by these creatures: he
immediately gets drunk, forgets his homeland, family and honour, puts
down roots and becomes a vine as well.
Malacovia is a fortified city made entirely out of iron, and built on the
Danube Delta: it is in the shape of an egg, chock-full of Tartar cyclists who,
as they pedal, make the iron egg go down, so it is concealed in the Delta
marshes, and then back up again. The city lives, waiting for the moment
when the hordes of cycling Tartars will be unleashed to invade the empire
of the Czars.
The sources of these geographical descriptions are respectively: Abbé
François Coyer, The Frivolous Island (London, 1750); The Thousand and
One Nights; Frigyes Karinthy, Capillaria (Budapest, 1921); Rabelais, The
Fifth Book of Pantagruel; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Lion-Man;
Lucian of Samosata’s True Story; Amedeo Tosetti, Pedali sul Mar Nero
(Pedals by the Black Sea) (Milan, 1884).
That, at least, is how they are cited (I take no responsibility for their
veracity) in the book from which I drew this information: The Dictionary of
Imaginary Places, by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Toronto:
Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1980). This is an enormous volume with the
layout of a geographical dictionary and entries in alphabetical order (from
Abaton, a city that has a variety of geographical locations, to Zuy, the
Elves’ shopping centre), and it comes complete with maps and engravings
like those of an old-fashioned encyclopedia.
A book published in Canada and the product of a collaboration between
an Argentine and an Italian has all the credentials for epitomizing
geographical confusion. In the Library of the Superfluous, which I would
like all our bookshelves to find a space for, it seems to me that a Dictionary
of Imaginary Places would be an indispensable reference work.
Every city or island or region has an entry as in an encyclopedia, and
every entry begins with information on its geographical position, population
and any economic resources, as well as its climate, fauna and flora. The rule
behind the Dictionary is to present every place as though it really existed.
This information is derived from the sources, which are given at the end of
every entry: thus for Atlantis are listed Plato’s Critias and Timaeus, Pierre
Benoît’s novel and also a lesser known work by Conan Doyle.
Another rule that the authors obey is to exclude imaginary toponyms
used by novelists to represent real or at least probable places: so Proust’s
Balbec is not there, nor Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. And given that the
geography concerns the present and the past but not the future, the whole of
futuristic science-fiction, whether extra-terrestrial or political or social
fantasy, is also excluded.
This is not a book that hooks you immediately. On the contrary, the first
impression as you thumb through it is that imaginary geography is much
less attractive than the geography of real places: a methodical dullness
hangs over utopian cities, from Francis Bacon’s Bensalem to Cabet’s Icaria,
as well as over countless eighteenth-century satirical-philosophical
voyages, not to mention the edifying religious-allegorical stages along
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And a sense of satiety, not to say lack of
oxygen, accompanies the packed topographies in The Wizard of Oz, Tolkien
or C. S. Lewis.
However, as one works one’s way through the single entries one soon
comes across worlds that are governed by a more evocative fantasy logic,
and I have tried to provide some examples of these above; I have not quoted
(because it is already well known in Italy thanks to Masolino d’Amico and
Giorgio Manganelli) what remains the most elegant and ingenious
invention: Abbot’s geometrical Flatland.
It is above all minor literary fiction that reveals endless resources for
creating these poetic myths; whole atlases of visionary countries flow from
the pen of talented professionals in entertainment literature. The most
quoted author is Edgar Rice Burroughs, not only for his cycle of Tarzan
books but for a large number of works describing fantasy lands. Taken from
novels that were considered merely as page-turners and whose authors are
not recorded in literary histories, many such states went on to become
myths of the cinema such as the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon, the Ruritania
of The Prisoner of Zenda and the Island of Count Zaroff in The Most
Dangerous Game. The Dictionary also includes countries that were created
directly for the screen, such as the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia in Duck Soup,
and Pepperland in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; however, I do not see the
cities from René Clair’s films of political satire.
Italian literature is well represented, from Boiardo’s Albraca to Zavattinia
in Totò il buono, even though it is not the richest in this field: still the
Bastiani Fortress in Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe is there, as is Gadda’s
Maradagal and Pinocchio’s Toyland. Amongst the curiosities worth
mentioning I will point out two tunnels: one that leads from Greece to
Naples, for the exclusive use of unhappy lovers, which is explored in
Sannazaro’s Arcadia; and the other that links the Adriatic (through the
valley of the river Brenta) to the Tyrrhenian Sea (leading to the Gulf of La
Spezia), constructed in the fourteenth century by the Genoese in order to
invade the Republic of Venice. The latter was tracked down and explored in
Salgari’s novel, I naviganti della Meloria (The Sailors of the Meloria)
(1903): in the novel the sailors actually found in the tunnel phosphorescent
fauna consisting of jellyfish and giant molluscs.
[1981]
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