Four authors dominated SFT in 20th century Italy: Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, Italo Calvino, and Primo Levi. The first three wrote what most would call “fantastic” literature, while Levi wrote more allegorical and historical science fiction. Referred to as fantascienza (a fusion of fantasy and science) in Italian, the speculative fiction coming out of that country following World War Two was necessarily influenced by the political and social upheavals of that devastating war and the fascism that had dominated Italian politics under Mussolini.
In 1962, two of these Italian authors entered the Anglophone literary world in translation: Italo Calvino with his novellas The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, and Buzzati with Larger Than Life. Calvino was particularly interested in language and how it could manipulate and be manipulated. He often experimented with fairy tales, metanovels, surrealism, and the intersection of mythos and science. The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, two-thirds of his Italian Trilogy, also called the Our Ancestors trilogy, explore questions of literal and metaphorical perspective, identity, and the nature of good and evil. Set during the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with many secrets, The Nonexistent Knight follows the adventures of a white suit of armor…with nothing in it. In The Cloven Viscount, the two halves of a nobleman who was split by a cannonball pursue their own independent adventures.
Meanwhile, Buzzati was influenced by Kafka’s surrealism and penchant for the absurd, and he wrote a number of allegorical, fable-like stories. Larger Than Life, first translated by British war poet and radio play author Henry Reed, is a dream-like story about a top-secret military installation, the purpose of which is only gradually revealed to the scientist who has been invited (along with his wife) to oversee it. Eventually, the scientist learns that the installation is actually an attempt to use a kind of AI to recreate his dead lover in the form of an entire city.
Both Buzzati and Calvino have a number of texts in English, making it relatively easy for the interested Anglophone reader to learn more about their unique brands of speculative storytelling. Have you read any of their works? If not, it might be worth your time to revisit these translated Italian works of the past as you move toward imagining how yesterday’s tomorrow might help reshape our present at Seattle Worldcon.
Dino Buzzati is my favorite author.