Author David Groves invites us to travel the Silk Road from fabled Asian capital Xanadu to Venice, with adventurer Marco Polo and the Emperor Kublai Khan as our guides, in his novel 7 Intelligible Cities. In it, the two old men talk reflect on the strengths, and weaknesses, of language and different ways it can be translated. David is deeply versed in Italian language and culture, and his novel is impossible to pigeonhole - part travelogue, part allegory, part treatise on translation all encapsulated in a comic novel. David tells Lynn Freeman that it's also a tribute to an Italo Calvino novel that was published 50 years ago: 7 Intelligible Cities by David Groves is published by goWare.