The last time I was in Trieste was in the summer of 2001. I biked a lot with my girlfriend and I bought a typewriter. In 2001 I was still typing my columns on a typewriter while traveling abroad. I would fax these articles then to the magazine or newspaper – a romantic but not very practical habit.
The students in Trieste were fairly silent except maybe for Valentina and her boyfriend Marco, and Paola who cried before she gave a presentation about the reception of my work in Italy. (The professor told me that Paola has the habit of crying a lot. No relation between Italian reviews and her tears.)
The students discovered that my editor at Instar Libri edited the Italian translation of “The Asylum Seeker” in such a manner that often a correct translation was turned into a wrong translation; once he went so far that the meaning of a sentence changed dramatically.
Maybe this was an exception, maybe not. I will do some research to find out.