The first edition of La traduzione was published by Feltrinelli in 1963,
the year in which its author had just finished serving a long prisonsentence, following a life that already had something of the novelistic
about it: born in Livorno in 1915, Silvano Ceccherini dropped out of
school in the fourth grade, at nineteen he enlisted in the Foreign
Legion and in 1940 he was sentenced to a first five-year prison term for
attacking an officer of the Royal Navy; he managed to escape a year
before his release and began to live off robberies and smuggling,
staying with a prostitute in a tent in the pine forest of Tombolo
(Pisa), near the military base of Camp Darby; arrested following a
firefight with the police, he was sentenced to a second eighteen-year
prison term. It is during this long detention that the "Tolstoyan
anarchist" (as he called himself) embarks on a literary journey in which
readings, writings and translations converge; and his first narrative
work is entitled La traduzione, but in the legal sense of transferring a
prisoner from one prison to another. The plot of the novel has a clearly
autobiographical inspiration: it is 1961 and Olgi Valnisi (twenty years
of imprisonment already served) leaves the prison of Civitavecchia to be
transferred to that of Saluzzo. He begins a long train journey,
punctuated by a series of transits: four days in Pisa, three in Marassi,
seven in Alessandria; then another train to Cavallermaggiore and the
final wait for the last convoy to Saluzzo.
Written in the years 1960-1961, between the psychiatric judicial
hospital of Reggio Emilia and the prison of San Gimignano, La traduzione
is a work of prison literature significant for its ability to probe the
experience of imprisonment in an oblique manner, illuminating it in a
rare moment of mobility that in providing a temporary exposure to free
life renews the drama of imprisonment. In doing so, Ceccherini gives
life to a markedly impressionistic narration, based on sensorial
perception and at the same time on the feeling of his own real
experience, such as to replicate itself from the author's personality to
that of his alter ego: that of Olgi/Silvano is in fact "a thinking that
presupposed a feeling" and that is expressed in the contrast between
inside and outside, temporarily thinned out on the occasion of the
journey. The inside is what coagulates in the narrow spaces of the
prison cars at the end of the trains or in the prisons where the
transits take place: they are the faces of the traveling and cell
companions, the songs and obscenities written on the walls, "the
sickening stench of the heat" and that of tobacco smoke, "that cogwheel
of feet, mouths, noses, viscera, sucked in with no escape by that absurd
coming and going" along the corridors "with all those doors lined up,
still, silent, implacable". The outside is revealed in the radios turned
on at high volume and in the tolling of a bell tower, in the din of the
port works and in the singing of birds, in the smell of the sea and the
pine forest; but also in the fleeting views of the cities and the
countryside, of the "usual people with a job, a suit on, a mediocre
destiny", captured in an instant of life as the train suddenly passes by.
From the advancing train unfold the fragile words that "fled like that
still landscape that nevertheless deceptively fled; the man remained",
desires for love and death that are embodied in the poetic gaze of the
protagonist, resting on "rolling hills soft as a woman's breasts. And
plots of fields quiet as cemeteries"; and it is precisely in the vision
of this ephemeral landscape that the most intimate act of resistance of
the prisoner being transferred is realized, whose eyes "were hooks
thrown to grab as much life as they could, they stole life from life"
until they explode in an unbridled panism in which it seems that
everything "had been expressly created for him. That everything was him,
and he was that everything, in a reciprocity of inseparable bonds".
Olgi's entire story is based on the contrast between a
claustrophobically detailed inside and a fleeting and elusive outside,
measuring a painful distance that can occasionally be filled by a
"forbidden observatory", the fruit of essential technique and a
compensator of visions of free life: "He climbed onto the cot, looked.
Now the world of the living was no longer a distant mysterious reality,
a barred Eden. Heaven or hell, it didn't matter. The world was. This was
all that mattered: that the world was.
And that Olgi could somehow fit in, in the world"; and it is a
reconciliation that is also achieved in the experience of taste, when
Olgi receives the gift of an unexpected lunch from the outside: "Eating
the same food that they ate, it was as if Olgi were also sitting at that
table, a member of the same inalienable family. The fracture was finally
healed, the long atonement concluded. Beyond the laws, in spite of the
laws. In the brotherhood of the human heart".
The entire novel is crossed by a metaliterary reflection that
insistently valorizes the gesture of writing, courageous from the very
possession of the pen, carefully hidden to escape controls. The writing
of a work that is "the only beautiful thing that will come out of this
life of mine, like a flower from a dunghill" and that feeds precisely on
the suffering and love for the life missed: "He was happy that no
breath, no ray of external life penetrated that lair: a necessary
condition for him to be able to work. The more they took life from him,
the more he felt the need to recreate it within himself". From this
effort emerges a literary testimony of moving and intimate existential
depth, together with the portrait of an entire population of prisoners:
Enrico the Calabrian, Gallone the lifer from the Marche, Armando the
alcoholic jackal, Claudio "the tall young man with the gangster face",
Silvio the engineer; Careddu "the shaggy black man with the cut face",
Spaccamonti the street cleaner, Attilio the Sarzana native, the
seductive Marcella, Pasquale the Catania native, Richard B. "the
American born in Italy and with the German name"; and then Riccardo,
Marcello, Germano, Paolino who studies French and many others.
A year after publishing La traduzione, the anarchist from Livorno
attempts suicide by poisoning. Ten years and several novels later, on
December 21, 1974, his body covered in tattoos is found lifeless on the
deserted lakeside of Minusio, in the Canton of Ticino, due to
barbiturate poisoning. Today, half a century later, the invitation is
renewed: remember, read and study Silvano Ceccherini.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
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