by Patrick Chamoiseau
Twenty years ago, in this brief and deeply felt portrait, the great Martinican writer described his Italian translator, the writer Sergio Atzeni, as a brother and a friend, an islander and a postcolonial like him, who therefore “already knew” how hard it was to create a language which brought together the language of the invaders with the deep and age-old experience of his land of origin. For Chamoiseau, Atzeni was a berger de la Diversité, a shepherd of Diversity.