Dino Buzzati’s Fantastic Universe

Valentina Polcini reviews Dino Buzzati’s “The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories.”

By Valentina PolciniFebruary 8, 2025

• Fiction

THE BEWITCHED BOURGEOIS, a new collection that gathers 50 short stories by Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906–72), is destined to become a must-have volume––especially because it fills a publishing gap that lasted 40 years. Whereas Buzzati’s novels have been translated into English, reprinted several times, and even retranslated, his short fiction—the literary form in which he truly excelled—has failed to gain the attention it deserves.

Before the publication of The Bewitched Bourgeois, only a small number of Buzzati’s stories—whose complete corpus boasts around 500 short pieces—was available to the English-speaking audience. Of the three collections published in English—Catastrophe (1965), Restless Nights (1983), and The Siren (1984)—only the first was, and still is, easily accessible (in its 2018 reprint by Alma Classics in the United Kingdom and Ecco in the United States) while the other two have long been out of print. Together with these, a handful of individual stories have been included in themed anthologies and literary journals, but many of them are difficult to find. This shortage of English translations of Buzzati’s short fiction makes The Bewitched Bourgeois a gem, all the more so if we consider it in the broader context of the writer’s reception in the Anglophone world (as compared to the output of translations in other languages).

Buzzati’s longer fiction includes two novelettes (1933’s Bàrnabo delle montagne [Barnabo of the Mountains] and 1935’s Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio [“The Secret of the Old Forest”]), three novels (1940’s Il deserto dei Tartari [“The Desert of the Tartars”], 1960’s Il grande ritratto [“The Great Portrait”], and 1963’s Un amore [A Love Affair]), a graphic novel (1969’s Poema a fumetti [Poem Strip]), a children’s book (1945’s La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia [The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily), and an illustrated tale (1971’s I miracoli di Val Morel [“The Miracles of Val Morel”]). Two of these books, Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio and I miracoli di Val Morel haven’t been translated into English. Of the remaining six titles, an English translation of A Love Affair appeared in 1964, The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily in 1947, and Barnabo of the Mountains in 1984 (included in The Siren), while Poem Strip came out in English in 2009. Two books have been translated twice: Il deserto dei Tartari as The Tartar Steppe in 1952 and as The Stronghold in 2023, and Il grande ritratto as Larger than Life in 1962 and as The Singularity in 2024.

If Buzzati hasn’t been completely ignored by the English-language publishing industry, some neglect of his work is nevertheless apparent, as Buzzati scholars have noticed. As early as 1983, Lawrence Venuti—translator of The Bewitched Bourgeois—wrote, in his introduction to Restless Nights,

Dino Buzzati has been strangely neglected in the English-speaking world since his death in 1972. From the forties on, his fiction commanded an international readership, and it continues to be very popular in Europe, particularly in his native Italy but also in such other countries as France and Germany. […] In the United States and England, however, he has not fared so well. Unlike Kafka, with whom he is often compared, or the French surrealists, or even his countryman Italo Calvino, Buzzati is not readily available in English translation, and his writing, especially his short fiction, remains unfamiliar to most English-language readers. Certainly Buzzati deserves a wider audience.

In 1994, discussing the 1952 English translation of Il deserto dei Tartari by Stuart Hood (which was reprinted by several publishers until 2018), Mario Mignone underlined the need for a new translation that “could reveal further dimensions of Buzzati’s text.” Likewise, in 1996, illustrating the state of the art of Buzzati’s work in translation, Nella Giannetto observed that “Buzzati’s fortune in Great Britain and North America is inferior to that of French-, Spanish- and German-language countries.” She also encouraged a new translation of Il deserto dei Tartari as well as of Buzzati’s other major works, whose translations “are often far from being perfect, although they have been reprinted several times.” Surprisingly, the situation hasn’t changed much since then, and there are still fewer translations of Buzzati in English than in French, Spanish, or German—languages in which more than one translation of the same work as well as translations of entire short story collections have been printed.

The demand for a more extensive translation of Buzzati’s work in English, together with the urge to update the existing English texts, has also been voiced by English-speaking readers, as witnessed by the plethora of reviews that can be found online. These readers tell about how they first came across Buzzati’s books, either by word of mouth or browsing in secondhand bookshops, and when they tried to find more of him, they were disappointed by the lack of available translations, to the extent that they had to consider spending a fortune on out-of-print editions.

Scrolling through these reviews and comments has something of a secret-book-society thrill, but it is also very telling. One reader thinks it is “a real shame” that his whole oeuvre hasn’t yet been translated; someone else claims that “Buzzati is certainly someone that deserves to be more widely read and appreciated than he is”; another commentator wishes that “some publishing house will see fit to rerelease his small catalogue that’s available in English and maybe translate his works that are only available in Italian” while yet another pleads with the publishing industry to “bring more of his work into print in English”; one writes that Buzzati is “criminally underrated, at least in the English-speaking world.”

The wish to have Buzzati more readily and widely accessible has recently come true thanks to NYRB Classics, which seems to have responded to these readers’ calls with a Buzzati project that is much needed and fundamental. It started in 2003 with a reprint of The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (translated by Frances Lobb); continued in 2009 with the first-ever translation (by Marina Harss) of Poema a fumetti as Poem Strip; resumed in 2023 with two titles, A Love Affair (translated by Joseph Green) and The Stronghold (Venuti’s translation of Il deserto dei Tartari); and continued in 2024 with a new translation (by Anne Milano Appel) of Il grande ritratto as The Singularity.

The Bewitched Bourgeois is the latest addition to NYRB’s Buzzati series, and it also has the merit of featuring Buzzati’s own artwork on its cover—just like the Italian editions do. This undoubtedly represents an added value for readers, who are given the chance to become familiar with another medium through which Buzzati expressed his artistic genius, as well as to approach his fantastic universe on a visual level before setting off on a personal journey into his fictional worlds.

On top of working as a journalist for the major national daily newspaper the Corriere della Sera and pursuing a successful career as a creative writer, Buzzati was also a much-appreciated painter and illustrator who experimented with subjects and techniques. The subjects of Buzzati’s paintings are often inspired by his fictional characters or situations, and conversely, some of his stories were written after having visualized them on canvas. In some works, then, he combined images and words in a way that became distinctive of his artistic output in general. As he put it:

The fact is this: I find myself the victim of a cruel misunderstanding. I am a painter who, as a hobby, during a rather prolonged period, has also worked as a writer and journalist. The world, however, believes that it is vice versa and therefore cannot take my paintings seriously. Painting for me is not a hobby, but a profession; writing for me is a hobby. But painting and writing are the same thing after all. Whether I paint or write, I pursue the same goal, which is to tell stories.

With these semiserious words, Buzzati described his own polymorphous artistic talent—which he also expressed as a poet, librettist, playwright, and set designer.

The cover image chosen for The Bewitched Bourgeois depicts a recurrent Buzzati subject, one he revisited with variations in a number of paintings: a men’s blazer. To mention only two variants, Buzzati represents the garment as either casually left on a street, as if its owner had just disappeared by magic, or hanging on the back of a chair, as if its owner had hastily abandoned it (perhaps due to an unexpected catastrophic event, as the broken windows in the background here seem to suggest). In either case, there is no trace of the person to whom the jacket is supposed to belong, which prompts the viewer to wonder what became of him.

Confirming Buzzati’s typical osmosis between painting and writing, he also explored the motif of the empty jacket in one of his most widely read stories, “La giacca stregata” (literally “the bewitched jacket”), included in this collection as “The Jacket.” It is a brilliant version of the pact-with-the-devil theme, featuring an unnamed protagonist who profits from the crime-derived money popping out of the pocket of a jacket made by a Mephistophelian tailor.

The idea of being bewitched is one of the threads that links together many of the texts in this collection, including the title story. Bewitchment for Buzzati’s characters means coming into contact with the strange side of human existence (“strange” being a high-frequency word in Buzzati), which we don’t normally see because it lies behind the repetitive yet reassuring facade of our daily routines. Discovering the irrational side of reality results in the realization of some sad truths about life or, alternatively, in the awareness that our existence would be unbearably pointless without fantasy—and this is also where the metafictional aspect of Buzzati emerges.

“Il borghese stregato” (“The Bewitched Bourgeois”) tells the story of an ordinary middle-class man—“Giuseppe Gaspari, forty-four, a grain dealer”—who has the chance to take his own “wonderful revenge” against the mediocre and boredom-ridden life he leads. This happens in an absolutely uncanny way when, having joined a group of children playing cowboys and Indians, Gaspari gets “killed” by an imaginary arrow in his chest. Once he has overcome the initial shock, he is proud to die, thus paying “the price for his arduous enchantment.” As the narrator explains, “His faith [in imagination] was so strong that everything had become real: the gorge, the savages, the blood. He had entered a world that was no longer his, the world of fairy tales, beyond the boundary that at a certain point in one’s life can’t be crossed with impunity.” To believe in the power of imagination is an act of rebellion for Buzzati, a challenge to a social system that he saw as a cage in which consumerism and standardized routine have numbed our sense of wonder.

We could regard the figure of the bewitched bourgeois as a self-portrait of Buzzati himself. Born into a well-off family of aristocratic descent, he began work for the Corriere della Sera at the age of 22. Even though he achieved success as both a journalist and a writer, Buzzati was haunted by anxieties about failing to reach international literary acclaim and remaining trapped in the quicksand of an ordinary “bourgeois” life. His decision to embrace the fantastic mode at a period in Italy when realism was the main key to interpret the world was dictated not only by his personal vocation but also by what, in his introduction to this collection, Venuti identifies as “skepticism toward authority and social institutions,” including middle-class values.

Whether in a negative or a positive way, many protagonists of these stories are bewitched: Giovanni Drogo in “Our Moment” (deceived by the illusion that success will make him happy), Giuseppe Corte in “Seven Floors” (led to death by his hypochondria), Lucio Predonzani in “The Late Mistaken” (slowly killed by the fake news of his death), Stefano Roi in “The Colomber” (haunted by a sea creature he mistakenly believes to be evil), Marta in “The Falling Girl” (fatally enchanted by the glamour of city life), Stefano Caberlot in “Stefano Caberlot, Writer” (scared of dying in the same way as one of his characters), and Dino Buzzati (yes, him!) in “Confidential” and “Alienation” (obsessed by his lack of self-confidence). To some extent, they can all be seen as Buzzati’s literary doubles.

As well as feeling sad, or even touched, when led to reflect on universal themes like the fear of death, life as a futile wait, the “irreparable flight of time,” the missed opportunity, the absurdity of human existence, the loss of fantasy, or the consequences of unethical use of science and technology, readers will also find themselves smiling when Buzzati challenges them in riddle-like stories such as “The Prohibited Word,” or tales in which he adopts a humorous tone such as “The Saucer Has Landed,” or works that treat his own fears and literary ambition with cutting irony—e.g., “Confidential,” “The Writer’s Secret,” “The Ubiquitous.”

If it is true that Buzzati is a classic chronicler of modern-day anxiety, it is also true that his fiction is suffused with real humor—although this aspect of his work has been underrated. Anna Pozzi noticed that, in Buzzati, “there is always a clear perception of a need for irony, for laughter, albeit bitter,” and that he uses this irony to exorcise injustices, suffering, and fears. Buzzati’s humor in turn mixes understatement with exaggeration, surrealism with nostalgic melancholy. In a 1971 interview with Yves Panafieu, Buzzati defined his humor as “more akin to British humor, which for me is the ultimate example of humor.” Significantly, in a 1947 letter to translator Frances Lobb, Buzzati praises her for having “convey[ed] the tone and rhythm of the passages in verse, even recreating, with perfect British humour and style, all those idiosyncrasies and staccatos that I thought untranslatable.”

I am sure Buzzati would have been equally grateful to Lawrence Venuti, who among his “ambassador[s] on the other side of the Ocean” (as Buzzati defined Lobb) has been indubitably the most assiduous and thorough. He first translated Buzzati in the 1980s for North Point Press, in Restless Nights and The Siren. He kept on translating Buzzati’s stories for anthologies, recently retranslated Il deserto dei Tartari as The Stronghold, and has now produced The Bewitched Bourgeois. His has been a consistent translation project aimed at making this “skillful fantasist” and “humane storyteller,” so “in touch with the thoughts and feelings of the people,” available to English-language readers.

In addition to being a capable translator and translation theorist, Venuti is also a profound connoisseur of Buzzati’s oeuvre, capable of offering compelling trajectories through—and scholarly interpretations of—this prolific corpus. As Venuti observes in his introduction, Buzzati is arguably “a master of the short story in world literature,” and this collection makes a case by presenting representative stories that span the writer’s entire career. Focusing on tales that were written over such a long period was even more challenging, Venuti admits, because he had to adapt his translation technique to the evolution of Buzzati’s style while adhering to the basic forms of his short fiction.

The Bewitched Bourgeois is a composite that puts together new translations of stories formerly translated by others, retranslations of texts collected in previous Venuti-edited volumes, and stories appearing in English for the first time. Making available both well-known and unfamiliar Buzzati texts, Venuti presents them all in a fresh light. He skillfully renders Buzzati’s style, which mimics news articles and is characterized by few frills and a peculiar rhythm. His narratives tend to proceed at an apparently flat pace, until an epiphanic moment comes with the blow of an axe, causing the characters—and readers—to suddenly realize a startling truth about human existence.

Venuti also preserves the author’s attention to important recurring words, usually conjunctions or adverbs, that Buzzati uses to signal the moment when fantasy takes over, such as “eppure” (which Venuti translates as “nevertheless,” “yet”), “ma” (“but”), “stranamente” (“strangely”), “affannosamente” (“anxiously”). The translator also reproduces Buzzati’s elegant, almost stilted diction (“curious lethargy” for “curioso torpore,” “acerbic joy” for “acre letizia,” “donned his best suit” for “mise il vestito migliore”); opts for synonyms that are closer to the sound of the Italian (“what buffoonery!” for “che buffo!”); and retains Italian words and phrases that have cultural connotations (“pastina in brodo,” “signor editor,” “papà,” “Perla del Mare,” “Casa Venanzi”). These strategies help familiarize the reader with the atmosphere of the original texts.

All the stories in The Bewitched Bourgeois possess an enthralling and disturbing quality. In Venuti’s words, “they offer a remarkable inventory of fantastic premises and tropes, international in the reach of their geographical settings, at times addressing specifically Italian concerns but usually reflecting twentieth-century horrors, catastrophes, fanaticisms, and anxieties.” Buzzati uncovers the cracks in the facade of reality and shows the consequences of a world from which humans have foolishly banned imagination. He does so by using a variety of fantastic modes and genres: allegory, fairy tale, horror, gothic, the occult, the absurd, science fiction, even dystopian fiction.

As Mario Mignone once wrote, “Buzzati’s narrative world can be understood by Anglophone readers.” Despite being deeply rooted in his native culture, Buzzati was attracted by the British and North American literary imagination, doting on Arthur Rackham’s illustrations and reading extensively in the work of Irving, Poe, Melville, Dickens, Wilde, Stevenson, Conrad, and Huxley. Buzzati absorbed them so much that it is impossible not to feel their presences haunting these pages, sometimes directly in overt allusions or reworkings of classic literary motifs and figures (e.g., his story “Alienation” draws heavily from Poe’s doppelgänger tale “William Wilson”).

Edited and translated by a distinguished Buzzati scholar, The Bewitched Bourgeois is the most comprehensive selection of Buzzati’s short stories in English to date, a long-awaited and quintessential book for those who want to step into the universe of an undisputed master of world fantastic literature.