Fernanda Pivano *
E ' was my father taught me the love of books. I was a little more than a child, but every Saturday afternoon took me in his precious library ten thousand volumes and a small ceremony quarter of an hour they choose one of Fedor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert and Guy de M aupassant, Thomas Mann, Alfred Doblin, Ljos Zilahy and Ferenc Körmendi (fashionable at the time), or the prose of Italian art such as America bitter Emilio Cecchi. I explain what ra and asked me what I thought of the book that gave me the Saturday before. I did read a magazine arrived in his tiny hands on the streets of anti, " Culture " , which had kept copies of the early thirties and where Cesare Pavese had written articles on Sherwood Anderson and John Don Passos, and especially Edgar Lee Masters: articles, in that atmosphere of "cultural self-sufficiency," he had helped to dismiss the "principle of Italian" and address the "plutocracy decadent" and "democracy Judeo-Masonic" which were called the Anglo-Saxon civilization.
E 'was even him to give me the first copy of Moby Dick , translated by Cesare Pavese in 1932 and published ancient Frassinelli , the glory of publishing anti-fascist Turin. Cesare Pavese The same would be my alternate high school Italian Massimo D'Azeglio of Turin . In his lectures there was talk of Francesco De Sanctis and Benedetto Croce , one day I came home and I asked my father, who called himself the father, if he knew these authors. And he, without saying anything, took me in his library and showed me their books. You should have seen the face of this unusual Pavese professor the next day when I took them in the classroom. Pavese I saw him in 1938 after his confinement in Calabria. And 'he really introduced me to understand the difference between European literature and American literature, then unknown in Italy. In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made his famous speech on the four freedoms: freedom of speech, of worship, from want and fear. Freedom is at all levels : Do not be afraid, be free, without dictatorships. This was the basis of the American dream and its literature, literature that I'm in love. For me, America represents freedom in a time when there was no freedom in Italy. fact shortly after the war broke out, and with my family to we were forced to evacuate in Mondovi, in a hotel guarded by the Nazis . In that tiny room I translated The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper with my mother who helped me at the typewriter. I dreamed that Uncas came to liberate us.
I had already translated 's Spoon River Anthology and since then I have translated several other books with the hope of making them known in Italy. I do not think I could do anything else because this is my passion. When freedom arrived in our country, I went to America to try one by one these famous authors are not yet among us, because for me it is essential to know who is the writer, who attended, from where it is: why wrote what he wrote. All my lyrics are only love letters, whether from indifference shake someone and cause him to be interested in at least one of the books described and the author have achieved their goal. 
Today, many, many years later, the authors thank all Americans who have loved and I say to you thank them, one by one. Every time you make love with a guy who is not your husband, or with a girl who is not your wife, say thanks to Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso. Say thanks to my writer friends . And do read their books that do not support the corruption, not fear, not violence that sustain freedom. * Introduction to "Free the reader" (2010, Knopf), the book containing the 'love letters' Fernanda Pivano (18 July 1917-18 August 2009) to 'his' American authors.
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Nanda, the Victorian-Beat girl
Interview with Julia Santerini Fernanda Pivano
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