Search SFE    Search EoF

  Omit cross-reference entries  

Buzzati, Dino

Entry updated 14 April 2025. Tagged: Author.

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

pic

(1906-1972) Italian journalist, artist and author, active from before 1930, much of his work being fantasy irradiated by the surreal as conveyed through narratives whose speculative thrusts have at times a profoundly non-mimetic, almost allegorical clarity, though (see Fantastika) they seem invariably to benefit from being read literally; he shares many characteristics with his compeers Italo Calvino and Tommaso Landolfi. From his first unsettling children's stories in the 1930s, beginning with Bàrnabo della montagne ["Barnabo of the Mountains"] (1933 chap), he was noted for the Kafka-like anxiety riddling his apparently simple plots, though he argued futilely against the link. His best-known early work is probably La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (1945; trans Frances Lobb as The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily 1947), which leaves the bears' success in cohabiting with humans very much up in the air.

Buzzati wrote short fiction throughout his active career, the first extensive assembly being Sessanta racconti ["Sixty Stories"] (coll 1958). English translations from this and other volumes begin with Catastrophe: The Strange Stories of Dino Buzzati (original stories 1949-1958; coll trans Judith Landry and Cynthia Jolly 1965; exp vt, some new trans E R Low some anonymous, as Catastrophe and Other Stories 1982; further exp 2018) [for details see Checklist] is perhaps the most fully successful volume issued during his life; many of its stories are surrealist fables, always with a parable-like moral edge. Later selections, which intensify a sense of the claustrophobia of worlds about to collapse like eggshells into chaos, include Restless Nights: Selected Stories (coll trans Lawrence Venuti 1983) and The Siren: A Selection (coll trans Lawrence Venuti 1984) (they are also taken from various sources). A second extensive collection, The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (coll trans Lawrence Venuti 2025), assembles material from as early as 1936.

Il deserto dei Tartari (1940; trans Stuart C Hood as The Tartar Steppe 1952; new trans Lawrence Venuti vt The Stronghold 2023) surreally describes what begins as a four-month stint but becomes the thirty-year tour of duty of its soldier protagonist in a remote outpost overshadowed and ensorcelled by the highest of mountains; here he awaits, seemingly for ever, in an eerie routine-obsessed Kafkaesque trance, the assault of the Tartar foe; just as the latter do arrive, he dies: and the story is kaput, just short of the World War Two it conspicuously though "timelessly" anticipates. Seemingly awkward in its use of traditional material, Buzzati's sf novel, Il Grande Ritratto ["The Great Portrait"] (1960; trans Henry Reed as Larger than Life 1962; new trans Anne Milano Appel as The Singularity 2024), is in fact a complex – and singularly non-Christian – speculative meditation on what makes a human being: the story, complete with Mad Scientist and a sentient Computer which bears/embodies the mind but is fatally not housed in the body of his dead wife, movingly affirms the ineluctable union of mind and body: there is no soul without world. [JC]

see also: Italy.

Dino Antonio Buzzati-Traverso

born San Pellegrino, Belluno, Italy: 16 October 1906

died Milan, Italy: 28 January 1972

works

collections and stories

links

previous versions of this entry



x
This website uses cookies.  More information here. Accept Cookies