Fantastic Tales

Lawrence Venuti, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Global Humanities Translation Prize, among many other awards, has translated into English these Italian Gothic tales of obsessive love, mysterious phobias, and the hellish curse of everlasting life.In this collection of nine eerie stories, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti switches effortlessly between the macabre and the breezily comical. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, his characters court spirits and blend in with the undead: passionate romances filled with jealousy and devotion are fueled by magic elixirs. Time becomes fluid as characters travel between centuries, chasing affairs that never quite prosper. First published by Mercury House in 1992.

CrimeReads

"In Lawrence Venuti’s brilliant new translation of nine stories by cult Gothic storyteller Tarchetti, readers will find themselves confronted by the astounding, the uncanny, and the downright disturbing, immersed in the eerie and the macabre, and elbowed in the side by the comical."

Brian Evenson Tarchetti’s beguiling fantasies are triumphs of imagination as well as masterfully told stories. Tarchetti writes with comic bravura and surrealist invention that makes him a cousin, at least, of Kafka and Isak Dinesen.

If Poe had set out to write Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Cruel Tales, the result might be Tarchetti. Beautifully translated by Lawrence Venuti, these capture Tarchetti’s unique and peculiar flavor: his deep Romanticism, his belief in the obsessiveness of desire, and his fascination with the supernatural.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Legends of the Black Castle I do not know whether the memoirs I am about to write can hold the interest of anyone but me –– I write, at any rate, for myself. Nearly all of them refer to an event pervaded with mystery and terror, in which very often it will be impossible to trace the thread of a narrative, or infer a conclusion, or find any reason whatsoever. I alone will be able to do these things, I who am actor and victim at once. Begun at that age when the mind is susceptible to the strangest and most frightening hallucinations; continued, interrupted, and resumed after an interval of almost twenty years; encompassed by all the apparitions of dreams; completed –– if such can be said of something that had no obvious beginning –– in a land that was not mine and to which I had been drawn by traditions filled with superstition and gloom, I can only consider this the most inscrutable event in my life, an insoluble enigma, the shadow of a fact, a revelation that remains incomplete yet eloquently expressive of a past existence. Were they facts, or visions? Both –– or perhaps neither. In the abyss that swallows up the past, no facts or ideas endure; there is merely the past. The mighty characters of things are destroyed, like the things themselves, and with them ideas suffer transmutations –– truth lies only in the instant –– past and future are deep shadows enveloping us on all sides, amidst which, leaning on our escort, the present, as if detached from time, we make the painful journey of life. Yet did we have a previous life? Have we already lived out our current existence in another epoch, with a different heart and a different destiny? Was there a moment in time when we resided in places we now avoid, loved creatures whom death snatched away years ago, lived among people whose works we see today, or whose memory we pursue in chronicles or obscure traditions? I have no definitive answers to these questions. And yet for all that… yes, I have often heard something speak to me of a past life, something murky and confused, I admit, but distant, infinitely distant. I possess certain memories that cannot be contained within the narrow bounds of my life; to reach their origin, I must retrace the curve of years, journey back very far… two or three centuries… Before today, too, I frequently had occasion to linger in some countryside on my travels and exclaim, “I must have already seen this place. I was here, several times… These fields, this valley, this horizon –– I recognize them!” And who has not declared now and then, thinking that he has recognized a familiar countenance in some person, “That man, I have seen him before. Where? When? Who is he? I cannot be definite, but surely we have seen one another before, we know one another!” In my childhood, I often saw an old man I certainly knew when he was a boy, and who certainly knew me when I was quite old; we did not converse but rather looked at one another like people who sense that they have met. Along a road to Poole, near the beach at Manica, I found a stone where I vividly recall sitting, about seventy years ago, and I remember that it was a dreary, rainy day and I was waiting for someone whose name and face I have forgotten, but who was dear to me. In an art gallery at Graz, I saw a portrait of a woman I loved, and I recognized her immediately, even though she was younger then, and the portrait was painted perhaps twenty years after our separation. The canvas bore the date 1647. Most of these memoirs go back roughly to that period. There was a time in my boyhood when I could not listen to the cadence of certain songs the country women sang to us on the farms without feeling suddenly transported to an epoch so remote from my life that I could not reach it if I multiplied my present age many, many times. I had only to hear that melody to lapse instantly into a condition like paralysis, a spiritual lethargy that made everything around me seem strange, whatever my state of mind when it overtook me. After twenty years, I have never again experienced that phenomenon. Did I never hear the melody again? Or has my spirit, already quite inseparable from my current existence, become deaf to the call? Either my nature is infirm, or my thinking differs from other men’s, or they undergo the same sensations, but without realizing it. I feel, yet am unable to express how, that my life –– or what we properly use this term to designate –– did not begin with the day of my birth and will not end at my death; I feel this with the same force, with the same fullness of sensation that I feel life at this instant, although in a way that is more obscure, stranger, more inexplicable. On the other hand, how do we feel that we are living at this instant? One says, I am alive. But this is not sufficient: when we sleep, we have no awareness of existing –– and nonetheless we live. This awareness of existing cannot be fully circumscribed by the narrow boundaries of what we call life. We can contain two lives: this belief, in various forms, has been accepted by every people in every period. One life is essential, continuous, perhaps imperishable, whereas the other is changeable, progressing its fits and starts, more or less brief, more or less recurrent. One is essence; the other relevation, form. What dies in the world? Life dies, but the spirit, the secret, the force of life does not die: it lives forever in the world.

About the Author

Iginio Ugo Tarchetti was born in San Salvatore Monferrato in Piemonte, in 1839. After his military life was cut short due to illness (or for writing an antimilitarist novel, depending on who's telling the story), he moved to Milan and became involved with the 'scapigliatura', literally meaning 'dishevelled', an artistic movement that rebelled against traditional values and the Italian artistic and literary canon at that time. He published articles in several newspapers. Considered the first Italian writer to experiment with the Gothic style, Tarchetti is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe. He died at the age of 29 from tuberculosis. Lawrence Venuti is a translation theorist and historian. He translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. His translation projects have won awards and grants from the PEN American Center, the Italian government, the NEA, and the NEH. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his translation of Giovanni Pascoli's poetry and prose and his translation of Ernest Farrés's Edward Hopper: Poems won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. In 2018 his translation of J.V. Foix's Daybook 1918: Early Fragments won the Global Humanities Translation Prize.

Reviews

News