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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.
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 Farres'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.
"Tarchetti’s project was not only to entertain, but to challenge
and subvert. He is at his best when musing on such philosophical
matters as time, beauty, morality and truth. His writing blurs the
line between life and death, good and evil, beauty and ugliness,
male and female . . . Thanks to [Lawrence] Venuti, and this
reprint of his excellent edition from 1992, the first and only
English translation of Fantastic Tales, he is brought to our
attention once more." -- Esmé O'Keeffee, Times Literary
Supplement
"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." -- Brian
Evenson, author of Dead Space: Martyr and Song for the Unraveling
of the World
"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." - Guy Davenport
"Tarchetti was pretty much the sole practitioner of the Gothic tale
in his own language. Until his death in 1869 at the age of 29, he
poured out a stream of freakish and fervid stories that made him
moderately famous -- and definitively minor. Does I. U. Tarchetti
deserve better? Judging from Lawrence Venuti's elegantly translated
collection, "Fantastic Tales," the answer is yes." -James Marcus,
The New York Times Book Review
"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." — CrimeReads
"Tarchetti occupies a singular place in Italian literature as an
antecedent of the great innovators of this century, including
Calvino and Pirandello ... Tarchetti imported his stories from
abroad, rewriting works by Mary Shelley, the Alsatian collaborators
Emile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian, and Theophile Gautier.
While the stories are marvelous in and of themselves, in Venuti's
thoughtful presentation they serve as entree into an equally
strange and marvelous literary phenomenon." -Publishers Weekly
"Tarchetti, who also worked as a translator, was heavily influenced
by gothic literature from abroad, favoring the morbid, the
metaphysical, the socially and sexually outré . . . remarkably
vivid and innovative . . . A collection of nine classic
macabre tales, exquisitely translated from the Italian by Venuti."
-- Kirkus
"While current Italian literature in English translation is closely
followed by publishers, critics, and readers, the Italian writers
of the past...are largely ignored. Lawrence Venuti now presents the
nineteenth-century writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti--a strange, romantic
figure now almost forgotten even by Italian readers...Tarchetti is
emblematic, the child of his times and their taste. These stories
are enjoyable to read simply for themselves, but they also
illustrate a literary culture of notable fascination. The
translations flow, yet retain the flavor of their period and are
true to the style and personality of their curious, gifted author."
--William Weaver
"[Tarchetti] strived and succeeded in creating his own style which,
on the one hand, anticipated elements of the great naturalistic
novel by Zola and Verga while, on the other hand, pushed the
boundaries of expressivity in an experimental direction." --Enrica
Maria Ferrara and Stiliana Milkova, Reading in Translation
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