JAN 16 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Lawrence Venuti and Michael Wood on Dino Buzzati's The Bewitched Bourgeois
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Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.
Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.
In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati’s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti’s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized “Seven Floors,” an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; “Panic at La Scala,” in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and “Appointment with Einstein,” where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.
Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) studied law at the University of Milan and, at the age of twenty-two, went to work for the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he remained for the rest of his life. He served in World War II as a journalist connected to the Italian navy and on his return published the book for which he is most famous, The Stronghold (NYRB Classics). A gifted artist as well as writer, Buzzati was the author of five novels and numerous short stories, as well as a popular children’s book, The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.
Lawrence Venuti, professor emeritus of English at Temple University, is a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan, as well as a translation theorist and historian. He 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 J. V. Foix’s Daybook 1918: Early Fragments (2019), which won the Global Humanities Translation Prize at Northwestern University.
Michael Wood studied French and German at Cambridge University and was a fellow of St John’s College. He taught at Columbia, Exeter and Princeton, where he is now Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature. He has written books on Stendhal, Nabokov, Yeats, and Hitchcock, and is the author, most recently, of On Empson (2017), The Habits of Distraction (2018), and Marcel Proust (2023). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and for several other journals.