A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.
“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.
When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action.
In all the things he did (now he does nothing), Del Giudice tried to bring himself, necessarily with irony, but also with joy, to the heart of a frontier, a paradox, the tragedy behind it all, determined to trim away any consolation of the pathetic, which is abused in the age of sharing. Mania, obsession, is another core word of Del Giudice, who even chose it as the title for a book of short stories, Mania, which contains six stories, including the splendid “Fuga”—a story set in a place that “was a cemetery but also a calendar”: an “enlightened structure” that actually existed in Naples, the work of architect Ferdinando Fuga, composed of three hundred and sixty-six mass graves that were opened one a day throughout the year to bury the poor. The word mania for Del Giudice can be a “demon that deranges the mind, true, but also a special form of focus, an extreme way of knowing and coinciding with one’s destiny.” Mania, in short, is a perspective on men and things, which involves its own precise language, its own way of knowing and experiencing our world and its metamorphoses. Mania is seeing the land from the sea, as Conrad did, or men from the sky, as did “brother” aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
I would say that the purpose that has always inspired Daniele Del Giudice has been that of renaming the world, experiencing life, inhabiting the threshold of a writing that is a way of always thinking twice about whatever innovation comes along, never content with being a writerly writer, but talking about writing as “work,” a “secular” word that defines a writer’s job in contrast to the gibberish of art. Daniele has a theory of sorts about friendship. He has told it on various occasions and it comes to mind every time I visit him and sit beside his body for some time, I’m not sure in what capacity.
The theory could be formulated as follows. There are two communities of friends. One is the group with whom he, having grown up in the outskirts of Rome with a passion for engines and motorcycles, talked about carburetors, valves, and pistons, about how to fiddle with motors; the other is made up of friends “who read novels and with whom I spoke about philosophy and literature.” The two communities loathe each other, Daniele says, but spending time with both of them is maieutic to the kind of distraction that, alone, can transport you into the fields of “probability” in which the advance that is heralded in history and in contemporary times takes its first steps toward that attention to the sciences and technology that are “an indispensable cognitive reference, a nourishment, and a curiosity for an imagination that works in a different way.” The science that dialogues with this idea of literature is that which—while discovering new fragments of reality, perhaps invisible—must also invent a language in order to describe them. A language that, like the technical ones and those of mania, must be as clear and precise as possible, knowing, however, that even the most precise word, at the very moment it sheds light on a “stirring of the soul,” also generates an enigmatic side, a shadowy side. “Well then, the conflict with language that I mentioned earlier can also be understood in this way: preserving the shadowy part that each word carries with it.” Someone with a mania, rather than being curious of others’ opinions, is more curious about their manias. Mania is a terrain of love. Tiziano Scarpa understood it perfectly in his superb preface to the latest edition of Del Giudice’s Racconti. In these stories, Scarpa writes—in almost all of Del Giudice’s work I would add—there is “a recurring scene: someone communicates his cognitive passion to someone else; and, in doing so, finds a correspondence in the other, a shared connection; he arouses a keen, sincere curiosity.” The two-way rapport in Del Giudice is the most authentic, Scarpa continues, the only one that allows “the one to accept the other.” The surprising thing is that they do not communicate an interior situation, “but describe an object, a profession, a technical feature. . . The rapport between two people requires a triangulation, a tertium quid: their looks must converge on something they both focus on.” Perfect. The only thing I don’t agree with is the fact that Tiziano Scarpa describes all this as a “melancholy utopia.” I see it more as the representation of an idea of friendship. As a wholly earthly religion, without glory and without salvation, and in this respect, true, a little melancholy; as a time and place not of gushing effusion but of what is unsaid, like a “shadow” of mania’s precise language, and also as what we have and not just as what we have left. The explicit, insistent language of mania as a form of understatement of affections.
The third and last word of the three I would choose is “phantasia” as opposed to mimesis, in the Greek sense. A distinction into which the universe of writers could be sorted. On the one hand the classic style, “essential and ‘realistic,’” on the other “baroque and mannerist Asianism.” Despite everything that has always been said, appropriately or inappropriately, about Del Giudice’s dry, even cold, style, he has always considered himself (and is) on the side of phantasia: reality and the language that interprets it are invention, just as in the most advanced scientific research. But in Del Giudice the mimesis and phantasia duo cannot be separated from a very singular theory of shipwrecks, according to which narration entails navigating in a sea studded with buoys marking unforgettable shipwrecks: the Kafka shipwreck, the Conrad shipwreck, the Hemingway shipwreck, the Calvino shipwreck . . . Being shipwrecked is the insurmountable existential condition that unites them, but each one, albeit shipwrecked, has advanced a little further the way in which reality and language intersect. It is pointless, futile even, to repeat those shipwrecks. It is essential, instead, to “find a new space in which to fulfil a small, personal shipwreck,” finding a prospective way in which reality and language can intersect.
This I believe is a more general form of responsibility felt by Del Giudice the writer, which he then extended to all forms of life and attentiveness: in his work as a consultant for Einaudi, where by using irony at the Wednesday council meeting that had become something of a ritual exhibition of corporate power, he brought everyone back to his role as a curious, passionate reader and nothing more; in directing the scientific committee of “Fondamenta,” one of the very first international cultural meetings that took place at the turn of the twenty-first century in a Venice governed by Massimo Cacciari, where as a participant I saw how he orchestrated the discussion among Christophe Bataille, Enzo Bianchi, Assia Djebar, Amos Luzzatto, Claudio Magris, Pedrag Matvejevic, Maurice Olender, Mario Rasetti, José Saramago, and Paolo Zellini; in the intense way in which he became one of the very first true navigators of the internet when we were all still faltering; in the fervent effort he made, starting with the story “Unreported inbound Palermo” to relate and make known the incident of the Itavia flight that crashed near Ustica. Here too he unobtrusively enacted the idea of the writer’s intervention and civic role, inspired by a short essay of his beloved Conrad, which he cited several times and which is truly one of the finest essays on the responsibilities of the writer. It is entitled “Outside Literature” and is from 1922. In those pages Conrad speaks of the Notices to Mariners that, indeed, are outside literature, and in which “the ideal of perfect accuracy” is cultivated. In fact, the salvation or loss of ships and human lives can depend on those words. Conrad imagines the author of the Notices to Mariners as a Trappist monk who, as he writes, is only thinking about the possibility of life or death that what he is doing entails. A responsibility, a concern, says Conrad, that “clears the mind.” The Notices to Mariners are not literature, Conrad reiterates a number of times, but they can show it the specter of the futility, the utter gratuitousness and at the same time the radical necessity for it to be responsible.
Now Daniele Del Giudice lives in his city of choice, Venice. He lives in a very beautiful, tranquil, welcoming place, as I mentioned. But I don’t know if he knows it, just as I don’t know if he knows that every now and then I go to see him, with the predictable anxiety, perhaps the certainty, that I am doing it more for me than for him. He lives in an inhospitable but resistant body. In reality, not even we, who are on this side with the doctors, know anything about him and his illness, whose name is the only thing we know: Alzheimer’s. He is alive, but I don’t know if he knows he’s alive. I think of that day, when we took off from Nicelli and the plane’s control wheel seemed so light. For our return, Daniele took the controls again, of course. I watched him as he came in for a landing. His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration. He was the one who had the actual responsibility for what we were doing, for that light aircraft on which our lives were dependent. He could not make any mistakes, do something thoughtlessly, he could not afford to be approximate and cursory, he could not relax, he had to be ready to face the unexpected. We too were “outside literature,” and from outside literature I was experiencing what it meant for Daniele Del Giudice—the friend, the writer—to “feel” responsibility.
Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
Originally published in la Repubblica – Robinson.
Ernesto Franco is editorial director of the publishing house Einaudi, as well as a writer and translator. Among his books are Isolario (Einaudi, 1994), Vite senza fine (Einaudi, 1999, 2020), for which he was awarded the Premio Viareggio, and Donna cometa (Donzelli, 2020). He has translated the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Álvaro Mutis, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Sabato, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Daniele Del Giudice published his first narrative, Lo stadio di Wimbledon, in 1983. This was followed by other novels and shorter works including Atlante occidentale (1985), Nel museo di Reims (1988), Staccando l’ombra da terra (1994), Mania (1997), Orizzonte mobile (2009) and more recently I racconti (2016). In 2001, he co-authored I-TIGI, Canto per Ustica, with Marco Paolini. He has also published essays on Italo Svevo, Thomas Bernhardt, Robert. L. Stevenson, and Primo Levi. Del Giudice’s works have won numerous awards: the Viareggio Prize in 1983, the Bergamo Prize in 1986, the Bagutta Prize in 1995, the Premio Flaiano in 1995, the Selezione Campiello Prize in 1995 and 1997, the Accademia dei Lincei award for fiction in 2002, and the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009. His works have been translated into sixteen languages. Staccando l’ombra da terra and Atlante occidentale have been published in English as Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997) and Lines of Light (Harcourt, 1988) respectively. For some years now, he has resided in a care facility in Venice, as a result of Alzheimer’s.
Anne Milano Appel has translated works by a number of leading Italian authors for a variety of publishers in the U.S. and U.K.. Her awards include the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation, and the Northern California Book Award for Translation. Her website is: amilanoappel.com.
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