The history of literature is filled with examples of works that were written out of time, novels that failed to achieve success with contemporary readers but were later recognized as masterpieces by subsequent generations. Translations, by bringing to light works in a more opportune moment, when their concerns are more in line with the zeitgeist of the time, can spur just this kind of reversal of literary fortunes for texts consigned to a minor role within their own national literary tradition. Anne Milano Appel’s new translation of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity is one such timely translation: long considered one of the author’s minor works, Buzzati’s parable of artificial intelligence and the ethics of technology will resonate deeply with today’s readers.
The Singularity is set in the near future, just over a decade after the novel was published in 1960. “In April 1972, Ermanno Ismani, a forty-three-year-old university professor of electronics, received a letter from the Ministry of Defense” (1). After receiving this unsettling, mysterious, and eminently Kafkaesque summons, Professor Ismani presents himself at the local government building, only to be passed from one guard to the next, entering ever deeper into the government apparatus, learning only that he is being drafted to participate in a top-secret government mission, possibly involving leading scientists in his field. The nature of the mission remains opaque and impenetrable even after he reaches the highest government official, who assures him that there isn’t a single person in the ministry who knows what the summons is about. “Our job is to protect the secret,” he is told. “What’s concealed inside it, however, is none of our concern” (5). This obscurely mysterious scenario is characteristic of Buzzati’s work, and much of the novel will be dedicated to the investigation of this secret. What exactly are they doing in Zone 41, and to what purpose?
Professor Ismani’s first guess is that this mission involves the atomic bomb. For Buzzati’s contemporary readers, Zone 41 may well have evoked the laboratory at Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed. Certainly, he was writing in an era in which, as one of the scientists who worked alongside Oppenheimer later put it, “science became identified with death and destruction” (Joseph Rotblat’s 1995 Nobel Lecture). In the postwar period, the bomb was a powerful symbol of the collusion between science and the military, and Buzzati penned several short stories about the nuclear threat that depict ingenuous, bespectacled scientists who seem “unaware that they are soldiers” (“pareva ignorassero di essere soldati,” Sessanta racconti, 295). In one story, we encounter an Albert Einstein who is bewildered to discover that Hell’s demons are eagerly awaiting the results of his work, ready to make mischievous and destructive use of his abstract and seemingly harmless “little formulas” (“piccole formulette,” Sessanta racconti, 249).
The Singularity stages this complicity between science and military power, warning us against any facile belief that such knowledge can be acquired without cost or risk. Although the scientists in the novel imagine that their thinking machine will “create masterpieces” and “reveal the most hidden mysteries” (65), we are hardly surprised when their creation turns out to have other intentions. Buzzati’s concern with artificial intelligence is thus ultimately part of a larger dialogue about science and ethics in the nuclear era.
Like many works of futuristic fiction, the novel is inspired above all by contemporary events. Buzzati was writing at the birth of cybernetics, not long after the invention of the Turing Test. In 1956, just a few years before the novel came out, the New York Times published a brief article with the lede: “The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence” (New York Times, “New Navy Device Learns By Doing,” July 8, 1958, p. 25). This machine, according to the article, would be finished within a year. Although artificial intelligence would ultimately prove quite a bit further off, at the time the age in which humanity would co-exist with thinking machines seemed imminent.
The question of historicity is fraught and requires careful negotiation on the part of the translator. While Buzzati’s works have often been read as “universal” fables, devoid of temporal specificity, more recent criticism has recognized the extent to which his other-worldly spaces often function as estrangement devices to comment on Buzzati’s contemporary society. The Stronghold, for example, which is his best-known novel, is today recognized as having significant, though veiled, references to fascism. Translator Lawrence Venuti draws attention to this historical context by using the term “goose-stepping” rather than opting for a more neutral term. Literary critic Saskia Ziolkowski is probably right in recognizing that it is not a question of either/or (2020), yet this does not obviate the need for careful and thoughtful translators, since their choices have the power to emphasize or downplay readers’ awareness of the novel in relation to its historical context.
The Singularity, set in a near future that is now long past, frequently demonstrates how questions of temporality can create thorny problems for translators. “Electronic brain,” for example, is a simple translation, but it had dropped from common usage already by the 1980s. Staying true to the original terminology ironically risked compromising the futuristic feel of the novel with a dusty anachronism, but did not, perhaps because “electronic brain” nonetheless retains its original sci-fi patina.
The novel’s title, The Singularity, is a more daring departure from the original title, Il grande ritratto [The Great Portrait]. The term singularity, today used as shorthand to indicate the historical moment in which artificial intelligence will surpass human capacities to the point that it will revolutionize human life as we know it, can be dated back to the 1980s, well after the publication of this novel. Still, the concept certainly existed, and the implications of artificially intelligent machines for human life is a key theme in the novel. Although the word singularity had not yet been coined, the threat that advanced artificial intelligence must pose to humans was already apparent in the postwar era. The new title makes use of a word not available to Buzzati and underscores the resonance of the artificial intelligence theme in our own time.
Yet it is worth observing that there is something obscured by this title change as well. One of the recurring motifs in the novel has to do with the way in which these thinking machines are inevitably created in the image of humanity. “And what if, with a soul like ours, it becomes corrupt like us?” asks Professor Ismani. “Could action be taken to correct it? And with its awesome intelligence, wouldn’t it be able to deceive us?“ (65) The response of the lead scientist on the project — “But it was born pure. Just like Adam. Hence its superiority. It isn’t stained with original sin” — fails to convince Ismani, who finds their project “frightening.” Today, we are all too aware that artificially intelligent machines, far from being “pure” of human bias, in fact reproduce and at times magnify human prejudices, not least because it is trained on a world of data that we have created. The original title, The Great Portrait, references not only the hubris of this endeavor — the appropriation of the divine act of creation — but also positions the scientist as a kind of artist, alluding to a different narrative tradition that finds origin in Ovid’s Pygmalion, the story of a sculptor who creates an artificial woman who is brought to life.
The Singularity marks the fourth major work of Buzzati’s released in translation by the New York Review Books, after his graphic novel Poem Strip (translated by Marina Harss), and the novels A Love Affair (translated by Joseph Green) and The Stronghold (translated by Lawrence Venuti). Readers who have enjoyed these works will recognize the hallmarks of Buzzati’s style: the eerie ambiguity of his story worlds, the vaguely anonymous geographical setting, unsettling landscapes that seem almost alive, invested with agency.
Reflecting on the atomic bomb, Buzzati once wrote that what we must fear the most is the moment in which the atomic threat no longer scares us. No doubt the aura of fear in Buzzati’s novels and stories reflects the anxiety that reigned in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. This novel reveals Buzzati’s intense concern with the end to which scientific discoveries and advancement would be put by the militaries of the great powers, and the risk that the apocalypse was nigh, which may cast a helpful light on his other works.
Although the threatening technologies have somewhat evolved in the 21st century – now we worry more about climate change and automation – the generalized anxiety that Buzzati felt is even more pronounced now than in his time. Thus, although Buzzati anticipated many of the specific threats associated with artificial intelligence, his exploration of generalized dread makes his work more relevant than ever.
Buzzati, Dino. The Singularity. Translated by Anne Milano Appel. NYRB, 2024.
Gianna Albaum teaches Italian literature and culture at Smith College. She received her Ph.D in Italian Studies from New York University in 2021, where she also served as a postdoctoral fellow. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Bad Medicine: Literature and Drugs in Modern Italy.
Works cited
Buzzati, Dino. Sessanta racconti. Mondadori, 1958.
Ziolkowski, Saskia Elizabeth. Kafka’s Italian Progeny. University of Toronto Press, 2020.