 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. |
|
Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012) |
|
Italian writer, a master of the short story and novella, professor of Portuguese language and literature. As a scholar and translator Tabucchi was especially known for his work on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Although Tabucchi did not belong to a particular literary 'school' or current, his stories constantly play in line with postmodern narration techniques with the contradiction between author and reader. "He blew his nose again and went on: Besides, the one hundred escudo notes are cool, they've got a picture of Fernando Pessoa on them, and now let me ask you a question, do you like Pessoa? Very much, I replied, I could even tell you a good story about him, but it's not worth it"... (from Requiem: A Hallucination, 1992) Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa, in Tuscany, the son of Antonio Tabucchi, a horse trader, and Tina Pardella. He grew up in his maternal grandparents' home in Vecchiano, a village not far from Pisa, which was bombed the Allies during WW II. Tabucchi was educated at the University of Pisa and graduated in 1969 with the thesis Surrealism in Portugal. He then furthered his education at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. As a novelist Tabucchi made his debut in 1975 with Piazza d'Italia, which sought to chart "a short history of the last hundred years of Italy, in tragicomic style", as the author himself said. Although the work had some elements in common with Gabriel García Márquez's magical realist novel Cien años de soledad, beginning with the flexible time concept, Tabucchi dismissed similarities as superficial. Tabucchi's first collection of short stories, Il gioco del rovescio (1981, Letter from Casablanca), won the Pozzale-Luigi Russo Prize. From 1978 to 1987 Tabucchi worked as a lecturer in literature at the University of Genoa. In 1991 he became Professor of Portuguese at the University of Sienna. His time Tabucchi divided between Lisbon, and Italy. He was also a staff member of the Italian Institute of Culture in Lisbon until 1991. Tabucchi's columns appeared in Corriere della Sera, the leading Italian newspaper, and El País, the most influential Spanish newspaper. After reading 'Tabacaria,' a poem by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) on a trip to France, Tabucchi became fascinated by the Portuguese poet, sharing this interest with writers such as the Nobel laureate José Saramago (1922-2010) and the South-African poet Roy Campbell (1901-1957). Pessoa, who masqueraded behind literary alter egos, was relatively unknownduring his life time, and died in obscurity. Tabucchi edited in Italian Pessoa's poems and published critical studies on him, some of which have been collected in Un baule pieno di gente (1990) and Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa (1994), in which Tabucchi examined the last three days in the life of Pessoa. In Sogni di sogni, a collection of short stories of dreams of famous writers and artists, one of the dreamers is Pessoa, who meets his heteronym Alberto Caeiro in South-Africa on March 7, 1914. You must listen to my voice, Caeiro tells his visitor. (Next day, the 8th of March, 1914, Pessoa began to write poetry.) The question of identity has been a central theme in Tabucchi's fiction. In Il filo dell'orizzonte (1986), written in the form of the detective novel, the protagonist is a former medical student, Spino. His name refers to the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who argued that if reality is both thought and thing, anything whatever can be appropriately interpreted in two ways. Spino tries to solve the mystery around the death of Carlo Noboldi, whose identity is elusive. Thus, the body of Noboldi is a thing, but it also unlocks the philosophical dimensions of life and death. In Notturno indiano (1984) the narrator travels to India to search his friend, Xavier, who starts to resemble the narrator's alter ego. Eveltually Xavier becomes the narrator. Requiem; un'allucinazione (1992) was originally written in
Portuguese and later translated into Italian. It was Tabucchi's homage
to Lisbon and the Portuguese language, and captured the melancholy mood
called saudade, an inexplicable longing, a sense of the simultaneous beauty and inescapable sadness of life. In Sostiene Pereira. Una testimonianza
(1994), set in Lisbon in 1938, a widowed and overweight cultural editor
takes stand against Salazar's regime. The narrator relates Pereira's
testimony of an era, when freedom of expression was under attack. The
book became a bestseller, and in Italy the figure of Peraira was
adopted by the left-wing opposition in their parliamentary election
campaign. The target was the media magnate, soon-to-be Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi, whose right-wing coalition won the 1994
election. La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro (1997, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro) partly drew on a report by the Council of Europe on police violence and prophetically denounced the involvement of the Portuguese National Guard. In the story of a murder investigation the guilty party, and the corrupt system, goes unpunished. Tabucchi was criticized by the Portuguese press for his portrayal of police brutality. Tabucchi was one of the founders of the International Parliament of Writers, which among other activities maintains a network of refuge cities for writers and their families. La gastrite di Platone (1998), about the function of the intellectual, Tabucchi dedicated to the memory of Leonardo Sciascia and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Opposing Umberto Eco's view, that the intellectual must stand aloof from practical revolutionary activity, Tabucchi argued that the intellectual can contribute "to creating a state of crisis is he or she is convinced of his or her position." Si Sta facendo Sempre Più Tardi (2001, It's Getting Later All the Time) renewed the traditional epistolary novel. The book consist of 17 letters composed by unidentified men, but the 18th letter, written by an oracular woman, responds to them all. Although Tabucchi's stories have surrealistic elements, they do not belong to the realm of fantasy, from which his countryman Italo Calvino drew a good deal of his ideas. Often Tabucchi deals with painful periods of European history, the Spanish Civil War, Fascism, the Red Brigades era. His writing is clear, but much is left unsaid, and the mood is often melancholic and dreamlike. "Literature for me isn’t a workaday job," Tabucchi has said, "but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy." Tabucchi's awards include Inedito Prize in 1975, Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize in 1981, the French "Medicis Etranger" in 1987, Viareggio and Campiello Prizes in 1994, and the Nossack Prize from the Leibniz Academy in 1999. In 1989 Tabucchi was conferred the title of "Comendador da Ordem do Infante Dom Enrique", by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Mario Soares. In 1996 he was made "Officier des Arts et Lettres" in France. Tabucchi was married to María José Lancastre, a native of Lisbon; they had two children. With her Tabucchi also translated much of Pessoa’s work into Italian. After Roberto Saviano, the writer of Gomorrah, revealed that Naples-area mafia wants to kill him because of the book and he has to flee the country, Tabucchi said that the mafia have “Italy over a barrel, . . . this is proof of that”. Renato Schifani, the president of the Italian senate, decided in 2009 to take Tabucchi to court for an acticle he wrote for L'Unita. Tabucchi had referred to his former connections to people condemned for mafia. A petition, ' Nous soutenons Antonio Tabucchi,' published in Le Monde, was signed by such well-known writers as Martin Amis, Stefano Benni, Yves Bonnefoy, Patrick Chamoiseau, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Claudio Magris, Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth, and José Saramago. Tabucchi died of cancer on 25 March, 2012, in Lisbon. For further reading: The New Italian Novel, ed. by Z. Baránski and L. Pertile (1993); Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier (1993); 'Antonio Tabucchi: Postmodern Catholic Writer' by Charles D. Klopp, in World Literature Today, March 22 (1997); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20the Century, Vol. 4, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); 'Rethinking Modernity in Antonio Tabucchi's Narrative Work' by Assumpta Camps, in Italian Culture, December 22 (2002); L'uomo Inquieto: Identita E Alterita Nell'opera Di Antonio Tabucchi by Pia Lausten (2005); The Novel as Investigation: Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, and Antonio Tabucchi by Jo-Ann Cannon (2006); World Authors 2000-2005, ed. by Jennifer Curry et al. (2007); Postmodern Ethics: The Re-appropriation of Committed Writing in the Works of Antonio Tabucchi and Leonardo Sciascia 1975-2005 by Elizabeth Wren-Owens (2007) Selected works:
|
