Fantastic Tales

January 1, 1992
Tarchetti (1839-1869) has been called an Italian Edgar Allan Poe, and in these nine exceptionally well-translated tales he does indeed share Poe's fascination with the gothic. Romance and death are frequent partners. Through dream visions of a centuries-old lover, a man receives intimations of his past lives and of his impending death (``The Legends of the Black Castle''); a deformed musician takes possession of an unattainable beauty's corpse (``Bouvard''). As Venuti points out, Tarchetti occupies a singular place in Italian literature as an antecedent of the great innovators of this century, including Calvino and Pirandello. A member of the scapigliaturi (literally, the disheveled ones)--a movement that, in Venuti's words, ``saw style as revolt''--Tarchetti imported his stories from abroad, rewriting works by Mary Shelley, the Alsatian collaborators Emile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian, and Theophile Gautier. While the stories are marvelous in and of themselves, in Venuti's thoughtful presentation they serve as entree into an equally strange and marvelous literary phenomenon.

July 15, 2020
Originally published in English in 1992, these reissued translations will introduce Tarchetti's short, fantastic works to a new generation of U.S. readers. Tarchetti (1839-1869) was a novelist, journalist, and poet aligned with a scrappy Milanese collective of artist-agitators known as the Scapigliatura (from scapigliato, "disheveled"). As is evident in this collection, Tarchetti, who also worked as a translator, was heavily influenced by gothic literature from abroad, favoring the morbid, the metaphysical, the socially and sexually outr�. However, despite frequent use of Italian settings in earlier works by gothic authors from other countries, by Tarchetti's time, gothic literature had not taken hold in Italy, and until Venuti discovered otherwise while translating these stories, Tarchetti was credited with writing the first gothic tale in Italian in 1865. This story, about a young man who drinks a potion to relieve himself of love for his disloyal sweetheart, which appears in this collection as "The Elixir of Immortality (In Imitation of the English)," was actually an unattributed translation (with a few notable tweaks) of Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal." Whether viewed as a pure act of literary subterfuge or, as Venuti does, also a sly statement on the anti-bourgeois ethos of the Scapigliatura, comparing Venuti's retranslation into English with Shelley's original is in itself a brief and illuminating education in the art and artifice of literary translation. While certain stories, like "The Letter U (A Madman's Manuscript)" and "Captain Gubart's Fortune," will likely seem less fresh to modern readers than they would have to 19th-century Italian audiences, others still feel remarkably vivid and innovative. In "A Spirit in a Raspberry," when the myopic and supercilious Baron B. eats the fruit of a mysterious raspberry bush that has sprouted following a maid's disappearance, the most interesting aspect isn't what happens next but the way it unfolds in an almost psychedelic portrayal of the resultant war for dominance of personality and gender expression within the baron's body. In "Bouvard," it isn't the perverse but ultimately predictable ending but the young Bouvard's unassailable belief in his future success despite the disadvantages of his birth, the sensitivity he displays toward nature and the inspiration he draws from it for his art, and ultimately the disillusionment he feels with society when his talent and fame as a violinist fail to produce the acceptance and affection he most desires. The collection overall is well worth the read for these and other inventive tales. A collection of nine classic macabre tales, exquisitely translated from the Italian by Venuti.

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