Lake Garda Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun

“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” This opening sentence of Sea and Sardinia (1921) is strikingly telling about D. H. Lawrence’s life, which can be considered both literally and metaphorically as a journey to the sun. In this respect, as the title of our symposium – “Lake Garda: Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun” – suggests, he began his life-long quest in Gargnano, in 1912. This eponymous book draws together the papers presented at the Gargnano Symposium in 2012 to commemorate the centenary of the writer’s stay in that “paradise” (3 September 1912 – 11 April 1913). The focus of our event was on Lawrence’s “sun search” and “travelling”; two thought-provoking, multifaceted topics for a sparkling critical debate, expanding outside “canonic” criticism into music and painting. This collection, in fact, comes with a CD featuring 12 songs; poems by Lawrence put to music for soprano and piano by the American composer William Neil. It also includes the reproduction of seven paintings from “Via D. H. Lawrence”, out of a sequence of 25, in which the German painter Sabine Frank follows the writer’s footsteps in the Garda area. The result is a unique and stimulating book, combining literature, music and painting. Thus, it provides an invaluable enrichment for all of us, meant to inspire intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas in the domain of Laurentian studies. This is the sort of book that any Laurentian, reading either for academic purposes or pleasure, cannot possibly miss.