The Aeneid as it has never been told

From Thursday 5 October until Sunday 8 Alghero returns to being, for the tenth time, a cultural crossroads between Italy, Spain and Latin American countries with the arrival of some of the most important Spanish-speaking authors, artists and intellectuals from different countries of the world.

“Tra due sponde” opens its doors, the Spanish-American section of the international literary festival “On the other side of the sea”.

Inaugurating the event on Thursday will be, among others, Irene Vallejo , who will present her latest novel "My bow rests mute" (Bompiani, 2023, pp. 224, also e-book), in which the Spanish writer gives a new voice to the characters of the Aeneid and also to its creator, the poet Virgil .

“My bow rests silent”, translated by Monica Bedana, presents itself as a novel full of love for the classical world, a journey into the myths of the past that also illuminates our present. We then find Aeneas exiled from Troy engulfed in flames. He lost his father Anchises on the coast of Sicily and set off towards the unknown when a storm causes him to be shipwrecked on the African coast with his son and a handful of soldiers. His destiny as an exile and a castaway is now in the hands of Elissa, queen of Carthage, and of the gods who, on a whim, can hurl a horde of enemies or an arrow against him that makes him fall in love with the beautiful queen and prevents him from carrying out his mission. prophecy that wants him to be the founder of an empire.

Centuries later, Virgil also struggles to fulfill his destiny: Augustus commissioned him a work that celebrates the glory of Rome by telling its founding myth, but the poet hesitates, fears not being up to it, is ready to give up, to destroy his verses. But the emperor prevents it to deliver to History, and to us, the masterpiece that is the Aeneid.

"My bow rests silent" is therefore a mix of voices which, from an epic past, reaches very vividly to these pages, a passionate homage to the art of storytelling and the eternal value of the myth. It is a book that fits fully into the best tradition of the historical novel, in which history and invention mix to give life to something alive, renewed, suitable for readers of every era.

Irene Vellejo allows those who read her pages to get on an imaginary time machine and find themselves dropped directly into a distant era. It offers the possibility of traveling through time and myth, realizing a dream that we all share. It then brings us into close contact with heroes and heroines, with whom we can practically converse and, why not, empathize.

Finally, it allows us to find in the past those great characters, those great passions and those great feelings that writers no longer have the courage or perhaps the ambition to propose in literature set in the contemporary world.