The modern Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) was adept at turning current events into fantastic fiction that depicted social and political nightmares. His 1948 story “Panic at La Scala” was inspired by the assassination attempt on the Communist politician Palmiro Togliatti. In July of that year Togliatti was shot by a fascist student, and in response strikes and protests were organized throughout Italy to demand that the country’s first ever democratically elected government be suspended. Militants took up arms, leading to violent confrontations with police which left 30 people dead and over 800 injured. By October the centrist news magazine L’Europeo (circulation: 300,000) was serializing Buzzati’s satirical story about “the old Milanese bourgeoisie” who attend the Italian premiere of a controversial oratorio at the famed opera house. They wind up spending the night in the lobby, cowering in the mistaken fear that a left-wing revolution is erupting in the streets and they will soon be made its victims.
Buzzati’s stories definitely touched a nerve in Italy. In 1958 a selection from his prolific output won the most prestigious Italian literary prize, the Premio Strega. Paolo Milano, book critic for the muckraking newsweekly L’Espresso, described their effect as “a bourgeois shudder.” He saw Buzzati as a writer of horror designed to frighten the Italian middle classes, plumbing their political unconscious by staging their worst fears. In Milano’s view, these were cheap thrills: Buzzati wasn’t a radical intellectual or avant-garde experimentalist who championed a High Modernist aesthetic. He was rather a widely known journalist at a major Italian newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, and he belonged to the class he critiqued, the Milanese bourgeoisie. His fantasies invited his readers’ vicarious participation by combining elite literary traditions with popular genres, what the leftist cultural critic Dwight MacDonald would have called “Midcult,” the lamentable “products of lapsed avant-gardists who know how to use the modern idiom in the service of the banal.” Yet Buzzati was writing for mass consumption, articulating collective anxieties, although with a marked tendency toward moralizing. In his stories, Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling’s television anthology series, The Twilight Zone.
I have been obsessing about these points as I translate Buzzati for New York Review Books. The publisher has been relaunching his writing in English, bringing out new translations as well as reprints, and I am assembling a retrospective selection of fifty stories. The Italian texts pose unique challenges to a translator, partly because they were written some time ago (1930s-1970s), but also because the fantastic is perhaps the most subversive of narrative discourses, resistant to understanding, or indeed any form of interpretive control. It establishes an unreal world that disrupts dominant notions of what is real, making them seem variously unfamiliar, questionable, irrational – i.e., unreal in turn.
Can this unsettling effect, I wonder, be recreated in a translation of Buzzati’s stories today, many decades after they were first published in Italian? I would be establishing a different sort of equivalence to his writing, not just to his words and phrases, but to his use of the fantastic and its overall social impact. Would I need to adapt the stories freely, making them relevant to the cultural and political debates that divide our own tumultuous moment?
As soon as I pose this question, however, I hear another interrogative voice wondering whether we should even read a foreign work in terms that are so recognizably familiar as to conjure up our commitments and concerns. Wouldn’t that kind of reading suppress what makes the work foreign in the first place, transforming it into a mirror of our own interests, resulting in a response that is self-congratulatory, if not simply narcissistic?
~
Buzzati wrote a huge body of short fiction, several hundred texts. They offer a remarkable inventory of fantastic premises and tropes, international in the reach of their geographical settings, at times commenting on Italian issues but usually reflecting the worldwide horrors, catastrophes, fanaticisms that characterized the twentieth century. Buzzati extended traditions of the fairy tale and the Gothic in narratives that shift between two registers: the marvelous, a supernatural or unnatural incident that couldn’t occur in the reader’s reality, and the mimetic, a plausible situation where the unreal turns out to be illusory, deriving from a confusion experienced by a narrator or protagonist. Sometimes Buzzati ventured onto the unstable ground between these registers by eliciting sympathy for a character’s uncertainty, suspending the reader between conflicting explanations of the action.
As Buzzati’s stories unfold, the marvelous abruptly intervenes in such varied forms as a mythological goddess, a talking shark, a magic formula in a secret tabulary, a scientific or technological calamity, an institutional screwup. A story like “The Shadow of the South” (1939), where a mysterious Arab keeps reappearing uncannily along the northeastern coast of Africa, leaves unanswered the question of whether he is a figment of the narrator’s imagination. By the end, the question comes to seem pointless because of the ideological stakes: the narrator’s speculation about the Arab’s identity so obviously involves European typecasting of the colonized subject, deeply Orientalist in its phantasmagoria.
Buzzati imitated Kafka’s adaptation of fantasy to realistic conventions, treating the unreal with verisimilitude, making it seem plausible enough to compel a reader’s engagement with the narrative, at least for as long as the reading lasts. Buzzati’s spin was to assimilate the fantastic to journalism, often actual newspaper genres like profiles of famous or unusual people and news reports covering disasters. “The Scandal on Via Sesostri” (1965) begins like an obituary: “Professor Tullio Larosi, holder of the chair in gynecology at the university and director of Santa Maria Immaculata Hospital (commonly known as The Maternity Hospital), died of a myocardial infarction at the age of sixty-nine.” The narrative then becomes a surreal exposé of an apartment building where the well-to-do tenants are all revealed to be criminals under assumed names. They comprise a bizarre collection that includes a Nazi collaborator, a fraudulent businessman, a jewel thief, an embezzler, a terrorist, and several murderers, all of whom have maintained a masquerade of respectability.
Buzzati’s stories showed skepticism toward the authority of social institutions from his first pieces in the 1930s. His targets range from the medieval aristocracy to modern technocrats to the professional-managerial class. In a story like “The Falling Girl” (1963), the satire of the urban bourgeoisie turns grimly fanciful: the post-WWII economic boom in Italy (1958-1963) is depicted as the mass suicide of young women, who throw themselves off of skyscrapers, enthralled by the romance of the affluent, fashionable city. Occasionally Buzzati would even criticize himself, as in “Alienation” (1969), a wry meditation on literary celebrity where he finds his by-line attached to a newspaper article he didn’t write, sending him on a deranging search for a much younger double.
The bourgeois shudder crosses national boundaries in “Appointment with Einstein” (1950), where a gas station attendant in Princeton identifies himself as the “Angel of Death” and confronts the scientist with the diabolical consequences of his discoveries–the atomic bomb. Buzzati makes the attendant African American, deploying a centuries-old racist stereotype, the black devil, to challenge the global scientific community. The character wears “a red baseball cap” and “an old military overcoat,” glancing at social developments in the United States. In 1947 Jackie Robinson was signed to a major league baseball team, breaking the color line that had relegated black players to a separate league; in 1948 President Harry Truman issued an executive order that banned racial segregation in the armed forces. Buzzati the journalist was fantasizing about American news for Italian readers, giving a foreign take on US cultural images that were intertwined with a history of discrimination and ideological complacency.
~
When translating Buzzati’s stories, I use his recurrent narrative strategy, the realistic adaptation of fantasy, as a parameter to guide my verbal choices. I pay particular attention to passages where, simultaneously, the fantastic is made to seem real and what passes for the real is made to seem fantastic. In a 1980 essay Italo Calvino described the effect I hope to produce when he outlined the basic form of the Buzzatian story: “precise as a machine, stretched from beginning to end in a crescendo of expectation, premonition, anguish, fear, becoming a crescendo of irreality.”
Translating passages where the marvelous enters can be straightforward in evoking surprise or wonder, whether in a protagonist or in the reader. At a climactic moment in Buzzati’s programmatic story “The Bewitched Bourgeois” (1942), the title character faces a transformed landscape where a resort hotel in the mountains has suddenly been replaced by “an ominous fortress” perched on a “cliff,” its walls “crowned with sun-bleached skulls that seemed to be laughing.” In the Italian text, the change of setting is described minimally with the phrase “Non c’era più” (it was no longer there). I use “it had vanished” to make explicit the abrupt metamorphosis. My choice exceeds the Italian by heightening the melodrama of the scene. But it sends a signal that the realistic narrative has veered off into a different sort of world.
Developing the mimetic register can be more complicated. Verisimilitude is generally secured in fiction with an accumulation of plausible detail, so that in a translation it seems best served by clear, precise language–even when a description plunges into fantasy. “The End of the World” (1942) opens with this startling passage:
Un mattino verso le dieci un pugno immenso comparve nel cielo sopra la città; si aprí poi lentamente ad artiglio e cosí rimase immobile come un immenso baldacchino della malora.
One morning about ten o’clock an immense fist appeared in the sky above the city. Then it slowly unclenched into a claw and remained this way, motionless, like an enormous canopy of ruin.
Italian, like other Romance languages, has a formal literary convention to create a reality effect, the preterite verb tense or passato remoto, indicating narrated events that have already occurred: in Buzzati’s Italian, the verbs “comparve” (appeared), “si aprí” (opened), “rimase” (remained). English has comparatively little of this inflectional support for realistic narrative, so the translator needs to rely on other linguistic features to produce a similar literary effect. Buzzati’s repetition of “immenso” could be varied (“immense,” “enormous”) to avoid breaking the illusion by diverting attention from the fantastic visual image to the words themselves. The English should be the standard dialect, believable in its familiarity, although here made more exact in its representational force. I translated “si aprí” as the tangible “unclenched” instead of the vaguely general “opened.” And I chose “motionless” for the Italian “immobile” to suggest the power of the fist, the possibility of destructive movement, even if suspended in uncertainty (whereas “unmovable” might imply an inability to move or be moved, whether physically or emotionally, a lack of power). This meaning fits the context, since the narrator who describes the scene subsequently invokes omnipotence: “It was God, and the end of the world.”
True-seeming details, especially those linked to specific cultural situations and historical periods, do much more than contribute to a realist illusion: they reverberate with new meanings in the move between languages. “Appointment with Einstein,” whether in English or in Italian, suggests an image of the US filtered through the paintings of Edward Hopper and contemporaneous Hollywood movies, riddled with class divisions and racial politics. Einstein encounters the Angel of Death at a gasoline pump that has mysteriously appeared, the whole scene sketched with a few resonant particulars:
C’era soltanto una colonnetta di benzina a strisce gialle e nere, sormontata dalla testa di vetro accesa. E vicino, su un panchetto di legno, un negro in attesa dei clienti. Costui portava un paio di calzoni-grembiule e in testa un berretto rosso da baseball.
There was only a gas pump with yellow and black stripes, topped by an illuminated glass dome. And close by, on a wooden footstool, sat a negro waiting for customers. He was wearing a pair of overalls and a red baseball cap.
Buzzati presents the attendant as inclined to avoid work: at the very start of the encounter, he asks Einstein to light his cigarette butt and buy him a drink. He seems modelled on Stepin Fetchit, the comic role played so successfully by stage and film actor Lincoln Perry (1920s-1950s). Mel Watkins, Perry’s biographer, describes the role as a wily trickster whose seeming shiftlessness harks back to deceptive behavior adopted by slaves as a survival tactic: they called it “puttin’ on ole massa.” Stepin Fetchit contrives to have his white employer do the work he should be doing. Buzzati’s attendant is explicitly announced as a stereotype when he is described as bursting into “a classic negro laugh” (“una risata classica da negro”). This happens just when he tells Einstein that his death threat was a joke, meant to pressure the scientist to make more destructive discoveries. The attendant, like Stepin Fetchit, performs a shtick that functions as a put-on, masking who is really in charge. So, Buzzati’s story has the black devil unleashing the evil of the atomic bomb. Is he using one racist stereotype to confirm or to defamiliarize another? Can he be doing both simultaneously?
~
Today an anglophone reader who comes across the word “negro” in my translation may find it peculiar, possibly tendentious, in view of current US controversies about race. Is “negro,” you might wonder, the best English word to translate the Italian “negro,” the most effective choice, however “effective” is defined, whether as more accurate or least offensive or conforming to some other standard? Despite identical spelling, the words can’t be considered perfect equivalents. For one thing, they are pronounced quite differently in each language, the Italian as “nay-grow,” the English as “nee-grow.” Most importantly, they have had such different histories as to signify very different meanings.
An Italian reader in 1950 would not have found “negro” conspicuous. The most prevalent meaning derived from physical anthropology: a human race, dark-skinned, native to sub-Saharan Africa. In wider use, the word acquired negative connotations through reference to enslaved populations in Africa and the Americas: e.g. the idiomatic phrase, lavorare come (to work like) un negro. In Italian usage today, however, “negro” constitutes an offensive slang term of anti-black racism (according to the Treccani Vocabolario, “nell’uso attuale, corrisp. all’angloamer. [n-word]”)
English presents various possibilities for translating the Italian word, all of which can stoke controversy. In English “negro” is a calque of the Italian, but it is also an archaism in current usage. A term that signifies racial blackness, “negro” appeared in late nineteenth-century projects to raise the social and cultural status of black people (hence the word was often capitalized), functioning as a term of respect pitched against the Jim Crow racial regime. Notable examples include W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro and Langston Hughes’s 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a Whitmanesque intervention of black internationalism.
In the 1960s, during the Black Power movement, “negro” was questioned as signifying a new subordination, so it gave way to other terms of racial pride, like “Afro,” whether alone or in compound forms, and “black” with both upper and lower case “b.” “Negro” subsequently became “out of date or even offensive in both British and American English” (Oxford English Dictionary). The semantic drift that this word has undergone was epitomized in the title of Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. Here not only is “negro” pejorative, but it replaces what Baldwin had actually said on the Dick Cavett Show in 1968–“I am not your [n-word]”–so that the replacement absorbs the racism he was criticizing when he used the abusive term.
As an archaism, “negro” functions as a historical marker in my translation, appropriate for the date of Buzzati’s story. But the term goes way beyond establishing any equivalence to the Italian text: for many readers, it can conjure up an entire history of black racial representation, particularly as a term of respect that became a term of abuse. And this historical difference can appear all the more pronounced today, when after the protests sparked by George Floyd’s death in 2020 the capitalized “Black” has been widely adopted in print and electronic media as an anti-racist gesture.
Can my translation be in solidarity with this cultural political agenda without replacing Buzzati’s Italian “negro” with “Black”? Yes, I want to argue, and precisely because I am writing a translation. To translate is to rewrite the source text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers of the translation, although with the proviso that source-text meaning and style be approximated since they can’t be reproduced exactly. Translation necessarily enacts a forceful drive toward assimilation, toward reducing the foreign to the knowable, even to the familiar, usually the values that are currently dominant in the receiving culture. A translation can qualify or counter the assimilation by registering linguistic and cultural difference in the translating language. This difference can never be the same as the difference that makes up the source text (translation processes a foreign language and culture). But the reader can nonetheless be given some sense that foreignness is contained in what seems immediately accessible and recognizable.
To use “Black” would risk a familiarizing effect. It surrenders to what is currently general expectation, inviting complacency, whereas the encounter with a different language and culture (namely, Italian) might occasion a critical attitude, possibly self-criticism. Using “negro” aligns my translation with the dissenting position of a writer like Jesse McCarthy, who in his 2021 book Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? includes “a note on style and usage” that reviews various black racial terms. McCarthy questions the implicit claim of “a unified transhistorical ethnoculture under the rubric of ‘Black.’” The aim of such dissent is to acknowledge and broaden the spectrum of racial representations and identities.
In the end, the key issue may hinge on the project of translating Buzzati’s political fantasy at the present moment. Can “negro,” set against the backdrop of the increasing imposition of “Black,” release a Buzzatian shudder, insinuating a social anxiety that sets going a racial reckoning? The test of translation, as of the fantastic, is whether it can unsettle what passes for the foreign, or the real.
Lawrence Venuti is, most recently, the author of Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019), the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (4th ed., 2021), and the translator of Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (2025).