Ad alta voce - Individual readings of the whole of The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines was published in England in 1987. It came out in Italy as Le vie dei canti in 1988 as part of the Biblioteca Adelphi series; it was translated by Silvia Gariglio. Set in Australia, this book—part novel, essay and travel diary—recounts Chatwin’s journey through the Aboriginal tradition of the ritual songs that have been handed down from generation to generation. The book puts forward the theory that Aboriginal songs are both the story of creation (events from the ancestral era Dreamtime, from which everything descends) and maps of the area. Songlines are thousands of imaginary lines which, Chatwin concludes, cross the entire continent; each traditional song is a musical map of the geographical and topographical features of a part of these lines. Chatwin takes a look at the concept of songlines, but along the way he muses on recurrent themes such as nomadic culture as an innate part of the human condition, as well as anthropological theories on the origin of society, arms and violence.

Bruce Charles Chatwin was born on 13 May 1940 in a Sheffield, northern England. After completing his studies at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, in 1958, he started to work at Sotheby’s auction house, London, where he became an expert on Impressionism. In 1973, he was employed by the Sunday Times Magazine as a consultant on art and architecture. His professional relationship with the magazine was to prove essential in nurturing his innate narrative talent. While he was interviewing 93-year-old architect Eileen Gray at her home, Chatwin noticed a map of Patagonia she had painted. Shortly afterwards, Chatwin set off for Argentina. The result of the first six months of his stay was In Patagonia (1977), which cemented his name as a travel writer. His works also include The Viceroy of Ouidah, a study on the slave trade in Ouidah, an old slave village in Africa; the book also took him to Bahia, in Brazil. Chatwin travelled to Australia for The Songlines. One of his last works was called Utz, a fictional tale about people’s obsession with collecting objects. Towards the end of the 1980s, Chatwin contracted the HIV virus. He and his wife Elizabeth Chanler moved to the South of France where he spent the last months of his life in a wheelchair. He died in Nice on 8 January 1989 at the age of forty-eight.
The Songlines was the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984).