The Meaning of the Journey: Tiziano Terzani's Travels

• Published in: Queen's quarterly 2009-12, Vol.116 (4), p.508
• Main Author: Leroux, Georges
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Foreign correspondents; German; Juncture; Khmer; Laughter; Morality; Politics; Questing; Reporters; Spiritual life; Terzani, Tiziano; Theme; Tiziano, Terzani; Travel; Travel literature; Vietnamese; War; Writers
• ISSN: 0033-6041

The German magazine Der Spiegel eventually recruited him, sending him to Singapore in 1971 and then on to Saigon. The reports that he filed from there are collected in his first two books, which offer a lucid and passionate chronicle of the final years of Vietnam's long conflict. But that war had barely ended when [Tiziano Terzani] moved to Cambodia, where, in 1975, he witnessed the capture of Phnom Penh by Khmer Rouge forces. There is no complacency in these initial stories, nor any attempt to avoid scorn. Through reports from the fall of Saigon to the massacres in Cambodia, these books display a single passion to understand how and why violence breeds violence, but while Terzani at first took the side of the Vietnamese, his description of the Cambodian genocide is more the account of a universal and detached observer. His support is no longer the same; the moralist's outlook is becoming more refined. "1 wanted," he writes, "to be a Florentine who sees the world a different way." He succeeded. In every case where chance is the real reason for what might be presented as an achievement, the author steps aside and makes room for drifting fate. Such a rich and dense succession of travels and writing might have no unifying theme, but in Terzani 's memory, the essential framework is the banality of the desire for power, and the slow and disjointed moulding of a consciousness that reaches beyond appearances. Indeed history awaits its great reporter just as frantically as it carries its heroes: witness to the great political convulsions of the second half of the twentieth century, our reponer surveys the scene, stares violence and evil in the face, and describes tyrants' cynical dimensions just as much as he dwells on the misery of the oppressed. But he - as in a scene recording memories of Phnom Penh's opium dens - necessarily learns that, because he is not an actor in these absurdities, he can be the protagonist only of his own life. He becomes a philosopher. It is at this juncture that the encounter with India comes about. HE tells his attentive son everything, the passions and the disappointments. He describes the role of books, but also his love for simple objects brought from places rich in tradition. But above all he tells stories, like the one about the treasure of Yamashita, the kind of story that [Michael Herr] loved, the hidden undersides of grand History. The more these stories pile up, the clearer the sound of Terzani's Buddha-like laughter, and when