How to Travel with a Salmon
And Other Essays
Umberto Eco
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY WILLIAM WEAVER
A HELEN AND KURT WOLFF BOOK
A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.
SAN DIEGO NEW YORK LONDON
© 1992 Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A.
English translation copyright © 1994 by Harcourt, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or
any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,
Harcourt. Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
This is a translation of II Secondo Diario Minimo.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eco, Umberto.
[Secondo diario minimo. English]
How to travel with a salmon & other essays/Umberto Eco;
translated from the Italian by William Weaver,
p. cm.—(A Harvest book)
"A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book."
ISBN 0-15-600125X
I. Weaver, William, 1923– II. Title.
PQ4865.C6A28 1995
854'.912—dc20 95-16885
Designed by Lori J. McThomas
Display type set in Spectrum and Alternative Gothic
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 1995
M O Q P N L
Contents
Preface • [>]
How to Travel with a Salmon • [>]
How to Replace a Driver's License • [>]
How to Eat in Flight • [>]
How to Go Through Customs • [>]
How to Travel on American Trains • [>]
How to Take Intelligent Vacations • [>]
How to Use the Taxi Driver • [>]
How Not to Talk about Soccer • [>]
How to Use the Coffeepot from Hell • [>]
How to React to Familiar Faces • [>]
How to Be a TV Host • [>]
How Not to Know the Time • [>]
Stars and Stripes • [>]
Conversation in Babylon • [>]
On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1 • [>]
How to Eat Ice Cream • [>]
How It Begins, and How It Ends • [>]
How to Justify a Private Library • [>]
How to Compile an Inventory • [>]
How to Spend Time • [>]
How to Buy Gadgets • [>]
How to Follow Instructions • [>]
How to Become a Knight of Malta • [>]
How to Deal with Telegrams • [>]
How Not to Use the Fax Machine • [>]
How Not to Use the Cellular Phone • [>]
Three Owls on a Chest of Drawers • [>]
Editorial Revision • [>]
Sequels • [>]
How to Use Suspension Points • [>]
How to Write an Introduction • [>]
How to Write an Introduction to an Art Catalogue • [>]
How to Set the Record Straight • [>]
How to Watch Out for Widows • [>]
How to Organize a Public Library • [>]
How to Speak of Animals • [>]
How to Play Indians • [>]
How to Recognize a Porn Movie • [>]
How to Avoid Contagious Diseases • [>]
How to Choose a Remunerative Profession • [>]
The Miracle of San Baudolino • [>]
Preface
Between 1959 and 1961 I was responsible for a regular column entitled "Diario minimo" in the literary magazine II Verri, edited by Luciano Anceschi. The very existence of the column represented an act of courage on Anceschi's part, because cultural reviews in those days took themselves very seriously indeed, and the "Diario," on the other hand, consisted of droll observations on contemporary life, bookish parodies, fantasies, and various lunacies by a number of contributors, among them many of Italy's most gifted younger poets, critics, philosophers, and novelists. We also ran clippings from newspapers, eccentric quotations, and so on, which, as I recall, various contributors to the magazine turned in occasionally, to enrich the column. Since I was in charge, I contributed more than anyone else: at first, moralities, then, increasingly, literary pastiches.
Around 1962 the editor and poet Vittorio Sereni asked me to collect these pieces of mine in a volume for the publisher Mondadori, and as the column no longer existed and "Diario minimo" had become virtually a generic term, I used this title for the book that came out first in 1963 and was reprinted in 1975. For this later edition, which eliminated many of the moralities (some of them were too closely linked to transitory events), I favored the pastiches, including several more recent pieces. Some years afterwards, the volume was adapted into English and entitled Misreadings.
That first Diario has had quite a history; it has gone through several editions, and I know that the students of several architecture departments are required to ponder the "Paradox of Porta Ludovica," and a department of classical philology created a seminar to discuss whether scholars of the ancient world look on the Greek lyric poets in the way my Eskimos of the next millennium looked on the contents of a tattered collection of popular song texts. Parisian friends, founders of Transcultura, an organization that imports African and Asian anthropologists to study European cities, say that their program was inspired by my "Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society," in which Melanesian anthropologists analyzed the primitive Milanese by sophisticated phenomenological parameters.
But, that little volume aside, I have written other "minimal diaries." They appeared in other guises or remained in a desk drawer after I subjected friends to them, frequently co-authors or, at least, prompters. Indeed, after almost apologizing for the first little volume, as if it were less than serious to pursue the pathways of parody, I have since continued with righteous boldness, convinced that it was not only a legitimate procedure but actually a sacred duty.
Almost thirty years went by, the desk drawers became crammed with abandoned manuscripts, and friends kept asking me what had become of certain pieces that only an oral tradition had kept alive. So now I have published a second Diario minimo, still convinced of what I wrote in concluding the preface to the first, in 1975: "For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile—and without a blush—in steadfast, virile seriousness."
I should add only that not all the pieces here are in the vein of parody. I have included also pure divertissements, with no critical or moralistic intentions. But I feel no need for ideological justification.