Fall is here, and very late one night as I was clicking the remote control to find some program to watch while I fell asleep, I saw Sandokan appear on the screen, and then Yanez, Tremal Naik and the sweet lady ;Marianna, known as the Pearl of Labuan. I wasn’t daydreaming. It was just that I’d come upon broadcast clips from a 1976 screenplay entitled Sandokan, in six episodes, with Kabir Bedi as the title character, Philippe Leroy (Yanez), Ganesh (Tremal Naik), and Carole André (Marianna). These six broadcasts drew a record audience: about 27 million viewers per episode.

It seems almost superfluous to add that I watched the old images filmed in India, Malaysia and Thailand with pleasure and emotion, also because they coincide with a renewed interest in the figure of Emilio Salgari, born in Verona on August 21, 1862, who died in Turin on April 25, 1911, i.e., ninety years ago. There was a conference, and some reprints were published, almost as if to repair the injustice done to this writer, who took his own life by slashing open his belly with a sharp razor. A newspaper at the time commented on the tragic event with these words: “Salgari, who evoked exotic lands, thought in the end of offended samurai, of the horrible and honored harakiri that tested the stoicism of those noble warriors in the face of death”. The question now is this: what can remain of Salgari’s world aside from a transitory revival? Meanwhile, before we answer the question, let us establish that it is pronounced Sal-GAH-ree, with the accent on the next-to-the-last syllable, and not SAL-gah-ree with the accent on the first syllable, as millions of readers pronounced and still pronounce it. The reason for this pronunciation is easily explained: in Veneto dialect, Salgàr means “willow,” and in the plural it can only be Sal-GAH-ree. So what can be left of Salgari’s world? Everything seems stacked against it; what were once mysterious maps of seas can now be found on any travel-agency brochure. Everything is against it, everything conspires against it, but things can change. Just as Salgari turned to those gold mines of fascination that were the geographic journals of his era, we can turn to him, to his empire of dozens of novels and stories. It is true that this high mountain of words and adventures cost immense sacrifices, turned Salgari into a slave of his desk, exposed him to plagiarism, forgeries, stupid imitations, and lawsuits. But distance is also useful for this: not to forget, but to gather, not just the often cruel facts of Salgari’s life but also the atmosphere of his time: a time of sports clubs, halls of arms and armor, velocipedes. Salgari grew up in that bourgeois tension that sought to reject the “current dimension of life,” preparing muscles and knife points for the dream of duels and raids. Now the dream has been turned upside-down. We don’t want to travel with Salgari, duel with his heroes, challenge the snares of the jungle. All of this, like so much of fantasy, has been lost. Our dream is a simple hiding place in the heart, a corner where the Pearl of Labuan fuses with the girls we loved in our youth. It is strange, but the flashes of light, the horizons giving signs of storms and shipwrecks, the omnipresence of death and ambush make us serene. As if Sandokan might actually appear in those yellowed photos of athletes from la Belle Epoque with their handlebar mustaches. Salgari was emotion: now he is the ghost of a distant friend. To what do we owe this metamorphosis? Why does Salgari withstand all attempts at demythification? Why do we always find a place for him, even if literary histories deny him one? I will answer with the words of a great critic. With the ink he made with his own hands from berries, Salgari “continues to extract the enormous fascination of the Orient: a dream of blood, putrefaction, fanaticism, delirium, the revelation of terrible mysteries, the triumphs of a melodramatic fantasy.” Salgari pours onto his pages the frustrations of a poor man who, out of all nascent industrial civilization, knows only the rough assembly line of writing without interruption. He rummages about in the great emporium of fictional conflicts, of theatrical challenges, of frightening lightning bolts, of chilling forebodings. And to describe this world he plunders encyclopedias, dictionaries, travel journals, and navigators’ diaries. Salgari’s language came about in this way: a mishmash of oddities and exoticisms. Some have justifiably spoken of “a philological hallucination.” Salgari starts with a magical word that he perhaps read incorrectly and writes it in his own way: the irresistible charm of language thus becomes a mangling. Look at a sequence like this: “The air was balmy with the soft perfume of the sciambagas, of the mussendas and the nagatampos.” And there are other, infinite voices in Salgari’s language: the kriss, the dayachi, the babirussa, the maharatti, the bughesi, the pomponasse, the paletuvieri, the baribal bear, the botano-motoko. And there are the mysterious oaths like “saccaroa!” preferred by Sandokan. We are dealing here with the language of a small epic that does not and should not care about scientific rigor. What counts is not so much the object he describes but his ability to light up a sort of magic halo all around a word. There is in Salgari a contagious force associated with names, inventions, sounds. We are bewitched by the candor of his enthusiasm: we are bewitched to such an extent that we even accept the unavoidable rhetoric and the innocent mythomanias. If it is true that writing, especially fiction writing, is the continuous production of the imaginary, I don’t think anyone could deny Emilio Salgari the definition of true writer. The whole of his works seems to me a machine that manufactured imagination and broadened the ordinary figures of the world. At this point, I think I owe my readers a clarification. I am not a Salgarian who imagines himself wearing the mask of Sandokan despite my advanced age and white hair. I believe I belong to another type of Salgarian. I pursued other desires when I came upon sentences like these: “They fled chittering, these splendid doves known as morobos... the lovely alude with their turquoise-colored feathers disappeared.” No encyclopedia records similar birds, whose names are the result of who knows what kind of mangling. Now, I’m the kind of Salgarian who would have liked to raise morobo and alude in a cage.