I write this on February 24 as I sit, sadly, on a plane on my way back from Bologna, the city best associated with Umberto Eco in his role as professor of semiotics at the Alma Mater Studiorum, Universita degli Studi di Bologna, the oldest University in Europe.
Yesterday, the 23rd, I travelled with some of my fellow doctorate students from the 1990s to Milano, where the great man lived and where he worked in his study whose large windows overlooked the Castello Sforzesco - the same castello which welcomed his body as the crowds gathered to pay their respects and to bid a last farewell.
His was a humanist funeral, a lay affair, to which a few thousand people came to pay their respects.
Among them, standing behind family and close friends, were many of Eco’s ex-students. As we gathered there - some who’d come by train from nearby Bologna, some by car from France, others by plane from various parts of the world – we exchanged memories and stories of events, of conversations, of long evening lectures and seminars in the 1990s followed by drinks at the Bar Commercianti where Eco would have a table reserved for his doctorate students to continue the discussion over a few drinks.
He was famous by then, having published his erudite yet bestselling novel The Name of the Rose in the early 1980s, but he had time for his students and he got to know us.
The first time he spoke to me at after-lecture-drinks he asked about Carmelo Borg Pisani and proceeded to tell me more about him than I had ever learnt at school. His was an amazing memory.
He could roll out details at the hint of an allusion. He believed that we should train our memories daily, and not rely on technology to do the full job for us.
Philosopher, journalist, novelist, academic, translator - Eco remains with us through the vast list of writings he has left behind.
Of all his achievements his most important is his theory of semiotics, a theory describing the way we interpret the world and all within it, how we make sense of things, how we build on experience, communicate meaning, and manipulate it, how we lie, or simply tell fantastical tales - which is another form of lying but one in which the writer pulls us into his fabrication and as we become part of the fictionalised, possible, alternative worlds created in language, which overlap our experience and add to our fantasy, we lose ourselves, as readers, in journeys and lives that take us beyond the borders of our own.
Eco was known to say that those who read live many more lives in the same allotted time which we are granted on earth. Owner of a library of over 50,000 books - many of them rare, or first editions, or printed with defects, or part of conspiracy theories of the past - Eco certainly practiced what he told his students. A voracious reader, he was also a prolific writer.
His novels are very self-indulgent and he said that he probably writes ‘for masochists’
However, he was an academic, a philosopher, a semiotician first – and a novelist only as a hobby, something he did at the weekends. In fact, his novels are very self-indulgent and he said that he probably writes ‘for masochists’ as his novels are not the easiest or most pleasurable reads.
I had the privilege to become one of Eco’s doctorate students in the first half of the 1990s. I was offered an Italian Cultural Institute scholarship to continue my studies as the first Maltese post-graduate student to read for a dottorato di ricerca in Italy. I insisted on going to Bologna to study with the man who seemed to bring it all together.
I had just read his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984) and this showed me how he had brought the philosophy of mind and of language, linguistic theory, and reader-response theories focusing on the role of reader-cooperation, to all bear together on the response of what it is to live in the world and to read it, understand it, and to make sense of experience.
In other words, semiotics is the theory of how we all make sense of the world around us, whether we intend to or not, and how we share it, communicate it, and manipulate it through systems of meaning, or languages.
One of his heroes was Arthur Conan Doyle, master of the art of reading detail, of logical deduction and induction, and another was American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, who developed the related concept of abduction – a logical process based on the educated guess and the role of habit in our understanding.
As a bestselling author, Eco’s work was translated into many languages – some which he knew and many which he did not.
He was himself a translator from French, he translated Gerard de Nerval’s Sylvie among others, and he was therefore familiar with the trials and the creativity involved in the interpretative act of translation.
His collaborative experience with his own translators led to a deeper understanding of translation as a semiotic and cultural activity, and not a strictly linguistic one.
He published three important books on his ideas of ‘translation as an act of negotiation’ which today form essential reading in translation studies courses the world over, including the translation, terminology and interpretation post-graduate course at the University of Malta, where I have the pleasure to teach his work.
We salute a great man, a man who believed in the value of the cultural spirit of Europe. One who lived through the ravages that WWII inflicted on families as Europeans fought other Europeans. His vast reading led to an overwhelming thought that was expressed at his funeral.
That culture is the means to know each other better – and the better we know each other, the less likely we are to kill each other.
Wars are the result of lack of knowledge and of fear of the unknown, and the important role of ministers of culture is to help us know each other to better avoid the mistakes of the past.
Clare Vassallo is professor at the Department of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta.