By chance this morning, I noticed a blurb on the UMass home page advertising a talk by an Italian writer, Erri De Luca, scheduled for 4 pm this afternoon in Herter Hall.  Although I had never heard of the guy, I decided to attend.  I guess I am an ignorant provincial, because Mr De Luca, a novelist, poet, essayist, and translator, is rather well-known, at least in Europe and in his native Italy.  He has written over 60 books, which have been translated into 30 languages; his most recent novel translated into English appeared in bookstores on Tuesday.  I’m glad the room was full and the event organizers even had to bring in more chairs — at least other people in the five colleges realized what a great opportunity this was.

The talk began with a showing of di là dal vetro [“Beyond the Glass”], a short film written by Mr De Luca and in which he stars with his mother.  Oddly enough, it’s produced by the Italian pasta maker Garofalo.  Then Mr De Luca talked for a bit about his life and work and answered questions from the audience.  Finally, we all agreed that we wanted to see the short clip about Naples that he wrote and narrated, so we watched that as the finale to the discussion.  By the way, these were not YouTube-type clips but rather high-quality professional productions.

Erri De Luca was born in 1950, in the exact middle of the tempestuous, revolution-addled twentieth-century, in sun-drenched, tufa-built Naples.  There is a Neapolitan expression which says that one’s homeland is the place that feeds you; if it can no longer do that, you become a migrant, a person who leaves to obtain sustenance elsewhere.  De Luca left Naples at age 18, to feed his hunger in northern Italy where he worked as a manual laborer and began writing.  His first book was published in 1989, and ever since then he has been pondering the effects of time and place on his life, and telling his stories.

I was particularly struck by his reflections on war and poetry:

• in the old wars, soldiers died — in the new, civilians do
• the air-raid siren is the soundtrack of the twentieth century
• aerial bombardment of cities in which civilians are killed indiscriminately is a terrorist act

Between 1993 and 1997, De Luca drove convoys in the Bosnian War, trucking in supplies for the relief of besieged Sarajevo

• in Sarajevo, he met poets who organized soirees for poetry readings
• poetry was a method of resistance against the destruction all around them
• poetry kept the communal heart beating
• due to fuel shortages, the citizens were forced to burn books; in the first year, it was philosophy, in the second, novels, in the third, drama (Chekhov was the last to go), and in the fourth year, they could not hold out any longer and consigned poetry to the flames

De Luca is self-taught in Hebrew and Yiddish; he learned those languages because he felt in some way responsible for the destruction of the European Jewish culture

• as a writer, his responsibility is to write
• as a man, it is to live humanely

The UMass library has a couple of De Luca’s books — I’m going to check them out next week.