Life, they say, is a bitch and then you die. But before you do, it always has a few good surprises in store. For me, there is a special friend I met some 15 years ago and whose company I have been enjoying ever since: Eugenio Alberti Schatz, a Russian-Italian bespectacled ad (gentle)man and artisan of writing. This post is just a small attempt to express my gratitude for his intellectual generosity and his continual inspiration.
Listing all the projects Eugenio has been involved in would be definitely too long – from literary translation to book authoring, from filmmaking to transcontinental travelling. Somewhere on the web there’s a curriculum vitae in italian. More importantly, on the web there’s also his über-highbrow short stories website whose title, Øspite ambiguo (“The Ambiguous Guest” ), is somehow inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne (?)[1]. In the past I’ve occasionally contributed a couple of texts, like the Italian translation of my Marinetti: l’accident à la mode (2005, republished in French on February 2009 in this post of Bodyspacesociety.eu).
It was a pleasure and an honour to be in the number of “those who are about to die”: not everybody’s given the opportunity to write his own epitaph. (The only creepy part was when I had to sign the release form yielding the rights to exploit it commercially to the Italian publisher – but, hey, what do you wanna do? I don’t always manage to put every bit of what I write under Creative Commons license).
[↩1] Turns out the Italian title was inspired by Edward Gorey’s masterpiece The Doubtful Guest (1957). Eugenio himself explained it in his 2004 op-ed.