Between Nature and Literature "This is the country I learned to know thanks to the author I love, but what I found when I came here was much more than I expected" If a man's life is really equivalent to "that of three horses", as Erri De Luca maintains, then he personally entered the second phase of his literary experience by doing his current tour of California. Author of Tre Cavalli (Three Horses) and of more than forty works including novels, poetry collections, anthologies, and short stories, the writer Erri De Luca began his American adventure at the beginning of April with a tour that brought him from the rain forests and the foggy weather of northern California to the coastal dunes of San Diego. A "first time" in America for him, in line with the tones of his works and enriched by the things that matter the most in its narrative: nature, the land and the men that shape it, the rhythm of seasons, and the basic forces human beings have to deal with. His was an unorthodox tour, where he alternated meeting with Italian language and culture students at various colleges with full immersion in the natural wonders of the area. He traveled from the Muir Woods National Monument (the redwood forest dedicated to the Scottish naturalist John Muir, to whom we owe the preservation of places such as the Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park) to Stinson Beach and Alcatraz, two of the major bird sanctuaries in the world. Erri De Luca told us about his encounter with the Pacific coast north of San Francisco: "I have been among the tallest trees in the world, among the redwoods pushed up towards the sky, by centuries and their own roots. They are described like the columns of a cathedral, but what I saw in them is spears jabbed into the ground by now disappeared giants. Spears like tufts, aimed against clouds and stars, spears that put out roots and branched out leaves. I saw a forest made of spears, that left no space for sun rays." Such a reality reminded the author of the humidity of the streets of his native city. "On the ground, in the redwood forest, there was the same humidity of the small alleys in Naples, but nothing of its smell," De Luca explains, "the forest was narrow, filled, dark, opposite to the sunny city image of Naples. The steps I walk one after the other on the soil of California take me towards the opening of horizons that face the biggest ocean of the planet." But California and the U.S. are not only nature and literature for the writer, even if the influence of Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Bob Dylan, and Ernest Hemingway are deeply felt. They are also the contrast between culture and politics. "With so much space and nature available, why leave it to fight wars in the most remote areas of the world?" De Luca wondered, "with so much magnificent surface, why do you want to go to the Moon, send ships in space? This geography would keep me happily here within its borders. Instead, it incited its people to tread remote tracks of land, of ocean, of sky. I do not understand this." De Luca was amazed by the great interest with which the American public that packed the room, and who had read his work in Italian, followed the discussion between him and his translator, Michael Moore, about the narrative relevance of a word when translated as a noun as opposed to an adjective. In the words of Amelia Carpenito-Antonucci, director of the San Francisco Italian Cultural Institute, "He never stopped to be surprised by the fact that all those people were genuinely interested in his personal stories and had even read his book in the original Italian language. De Luca offers to the American public the perfect portrait of somebody who is an author because of love. A writer that works with modesty and dedication, and looks after his art with no conceit, with no interest for fame". After San Francisco, the author went to Los Angeles to meet the public at the University of Southern California on April 6, at the Los Angeles Italian Cultural Institute on April 7, and at the University of California, Los Angeles on April 8. The final event was in San Diego on April 10. "My feeling is that I have come to a place that can teach us a lot in terms of diversity and democracy, and we can see that with the election of President Obama after the Bush obscurantism years" was the last observation of De Luca. "Here I find the country I came to know through the books of the authors I love, but at the same time much more of what I expected and this makes me want to start travelling again, like when I was eighteen and I was reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road." To celebrate this trip, his American publishing house, Other Press, published a new edition of Three Horses. This novel is now considered a classic in the United States. first published on April 10, 2010 go to the Translations page | go to the Main page |
