Erri De Luca legge una pagina tratta da "Il torto del soldato", Feltrinelli.

From "The crime of a soldier", translation by Jim Hicks.

"A person who spends his days among rocks, poking around on all fours, has a lot of time to tell himself tales. It does him good at night to take a seat and listen to the stories in some well-made book. I keep myself company with my own writing as well, but when I start to read my eyes grow wider and I return to Naples, to my room in Montedidio.
Isaac Babel without fail puts me back in an old green armchair, with its broken springs. I curl up and with my eyes follow the piper. Babel was executed by firing squad in Moscow on January 27, 1940, and left in a mass grave. He was forty-five years old. What he’d written suffices for me to value him as the best of the twentieth-century Russians. And I don’t miss everything he was never able to write. What weighs on me is the desperation of the man, his well of ink ready to dip into, sealed with slug of lead to his brain.
I don’t visit the tombs of the writers I love. Yet I do beat my fist on the table of my century for not letting a passer-by rest one moment before the stone of Isaac Babel."

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