UC Irvine

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.