After the Bled 46° International Meeting of the Slovene PEN, our International Secretary, Takeaki Hori, and I agreed about this being the right time for him to come to Trieste for a short visit before joining with me the Board Meeting to be held on May 16th/18th in Barcelona.
It has been a
pleasure as well as a great honour for our Centre to have Hori-san among us
after having celebrated our first Decennial, and an acknowledgment by PEN
International of our modest achievements.
We tried to do
our best in making his stay in our city significant whilst trying also to make
it pleasant: there is so much to be seen in Trieste, and not only in terms of
monumental and architectural objects, but above all in the atmosphere, in the different
literary and cultural aspects of this multicultural place.
In the
official part of this very friendly and informal visit, Hori-san met the City
Counsellor for Cultural Affairs Franco Miracco at the City Hall, the Vice
President of the Province of Trieste Igor Dolenc at the Galatti Palace,
exchanging views about the role of PEN International and the significance of
PEN Trieste’s activity.
He was also
asked to give a speech about PEN international and its activity to about a
hundred interested students at the Classical Lycée entitled to Dante Alighieri.
I was very proud to introduce him to the students in the very Assembly Hall in
which I gave a speech about Luigi Pirandello on March 16th, 1961. We gave out many copies of the Girona Manifest, of
the Bled Manifest of Writers for Peace Committee and the Declaration on Digital
Rights in their Italian version.
Hori-san attended
also a meeting of the experimental PEN Trieste Readers chapter and found it
very interesting. Afterwards he gave an informal speech about PEN International
aims to our Members.
We introduced
him also to the publishing house Hammerle and had a chat about our new book
series “I LIBRI DEL PEN TRIESTE”, of which the second number is currently
coming out.
Obviously we
could not miss a visit to the famous Antico Caffé San Marco and to the three
statues of Joyce, Saba and Svevo walking down the streets of Trieste to their
historical places of work. In the one you will find below you may see Takeaki
presenting my last book to Italo Svevo :-)
All in all, we
had a very good time together. We spoke of literature, of PEN and of some
(dishevelled) dreams of PEN Trieste, but that’s another story for another time.
I only regret
that the local Italian newspaper, Il Piccolo, did not take note of the visit,
whilst the local Slovene newspaper, Primorski Dnevnik, did it and I have to
thank them for it.
Below Juan Octavio Prenz, Antonio Della Rocca and Takeaki Hori with Svevo.
