fragility and graceful ferocity
Today a friend wrote to lament the passing of a lovely soul, the Italian novelist, activist, and translator Antonio Tabucchi. “I wish he had written more, had not had Berlusconi to counter, and had lived longer.” Amen.
And yet some may remember Tabucchi today only for his novel of political awakening, Pereira Declares (or even for the film, one of Mastroianni’s last, made from the book). They would not entirely be wrong to do so.
Yet Tabucchi was also, as Cesare Segre remarks in Corriere della Sera, a narrator who took his inspiration from a poet, the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa. Capable, like his protagonist Pereira, of taking up arms in a world turned upside down, Tabucchi also had the lightness and generosity of spirit to find silence more resonant than profession, questions more convincing than answers. As with any author, we remember him best by reading his works: in addition to his Pereira, look for Requiem, Indian Nocturne, The Edge of the Horizon, and, also in English, the short story collection, Vanishing Point. Here, as aperitivo, is a piece of Tabucchi’s that I happened to translate some years ago, for a collection of essays on Melville.
A Whale Sights Men
Always so frantic, with long, frequently waving appendages. And not round enough, without the grandeur of achieved and sufficient forms, but with instead a tiny, motile head, in which all of their strange life appears concentrated. They arrive sliding over the sea, although they don’t swim (almost as if they were birds), and they cause death, with fragility and a graceful ferocity. Silent for long periods, they then shout among themselves with improvised fury, with a tangle of noise that is almost invariable and that lacks the essential perfection of our sounds: calls, love, and cries of mourning. Their love must be pitiful: bristly, immediate, even brusque—without a soft blanket of fat and fostered by their wiry or threadlike nature (which doesn’t allow for either the heroic difficulty of unions or for the magnificent, tender challenge of achieving them).
They don’t love water, and they fear it—why they frequent it isn’t easy to understand. Like us, they travel in herds; however, they don’t take females with them, one may assume that the females remain elsewhere, although they have yet to be sighted. Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song is not a call but rather a sort of longing. They tire quickly and, when the sun goes down, they stretch out on the small islands that guide them about, and perhaps they fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide away in silence, and you realize they are sad.
From Antonio Tabucchi, Donna di Porto Pim (Palermo: Sellerio, 1983)
