{"product_id":"fantastic-tales-isbn-9781939810625","title":"Fantastic Tales","description":"\u003cb\u003eLawrence 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\"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 \u003ci\u003eFantastic Tales\u003c\/i\u003e, he is brought to our attention once more.\" \u003cb\u003e-- Esmé O'Keeffee, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e-- Brian Evenson, author of \u003ci\u003eDead Space: Martyr\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSong for the Unraveling of the World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e- Guy Davenport\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e-James Marcus, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e— CrimeReads\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e-Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e-- \u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e--William Weaver\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"[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.\" \u003cb\u003e--Enrica Maria Ferrara and Stiliana Milkova\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eReading in Translation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIf 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.\u003cbr\u003e — Brian Evenson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e — Guy DavenportIginio  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.\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLawrence 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.The Legends of the Black Castle\u003cbr\u003e I do not know whether the memoirs I am about to write can hold the interest of anyone\u003cbr\u003e but me –– I write, at any rate, for myself. Nearly all of them refer to an event pervaded\u003cbr\u003e with mystery and terror, in which very often it will be impossible to trace the thread of a\u003cbr\u003e narrative, or infer a conclusion, or find any reason whatsoever. I alone will be able to do\u003cbr\u003e these things, I who am actor and victim at once. Begun at that age when the mind is\u003cbr\u003e susceptible to the strangest and most frightening hallucinations; continued, interrupted,\u003cbr\u003e and resumed after an interval of almost twenty years; encompassed by all the apparitions\u003cbr\u003e of dreams; completed –– if such can be said of something that had no obvious beginning\u003cbr\u003e –– in a land that was not mine and to which I had been drawn by traditions filled with\u003cbr\u003e superstition and gloom, I can only consider this the most inscrutable event in my life, an\u003cbr\u003e insoluble enigma, the shadow of a fact, a revelation that remains incomplete yet\u003cbr\u003e eloquently expressive of a past existence. Were they facts, or visions? Both –– or perhaps\u003cbr\u003e neither. In the abyss that swallows up the past, no facts or ideas endure; there is merely\u003cbr\u003e the past. The mighty characters of things are destroyed, like the things themselves, and\u003cbr\u003e with them ideas suffer transmutations –– truth lies only in the instant –– past and future\u003cbr\u003e are deep shadows enveloping us on all sides, amidst which, leaning on our escort, the\u003cbr\u003e present, as if detached from time, we make the painful journey of life.\u003cbr\u003e Yet did we have a previous life? Have we already lived out our current existence\u003cbr\u003e in another epoch, with a different heart and a different destiny? Was there a moment in\u003cbr\u003e time when we resided in places we now avoid, loved creatures whom death snatched\u003cbr\u003e away years ago, lived among people whose works we see today, or whose memory we\u003cbr\u003e pursue in chronicles or obscure traditions? I have no definitive answers to these\u003cbr\u003e questions. And yet for all that… yes, I have often heard something speak to me of a past\u003cbr\u003e life, something murky and confused, I admit, but distant, infinitely distant. I possess\u003cbr\u003e certain memories that cannot be contained within the narrow bounds of my life; to reach\u003cbr\u003e their origin, I must retrace the curve of years, journey back very far… two or three\u003cbr\u003e centuries… Before today, too, I frequently had occasion to linger in some countryside on\u003cbr\u003e my travels and exclaim, “I must have already seen this place. I was here, several times…\u003cbr\u003e These fields, this valley, this horizon –– I recognize them!” And who has not declared\u003cbr\u003e now and then, thinking that he has recognized a familiar countenance in some person,\u003cbr\u003e “That man, I have seen him before. Where? When? Who is he? I cannot be definite, but\u003cbr\u003e surely we have seen one another before, we know one another!” In my childhood, I often\u003cbr\u003e saw an old man I certainly knew when he was a boy, and who certainly knew me when I\u003cbr\u003e was quite old; we did not converse but rather looked at one another like people who sense\u003cbr\u003e that they have met. Along a road to Poole, near the beach at Manica, I found a stone\u003cbr\u003e where I vividly recall sitting, about seventy years ago, and I remember that it was a\u003cbr\u003e dreary, rainy day and I was waiting for someone whose name and face I have forgotten,\u003cbr\u003e but who was dear to me. In an art gallery at Graz, I saw a portrait of a woman I loved,\u003cbr\u003e and I recognized her immediately, even though she was younger then, and the portrait\u003cbr\u003e was painted perhaps twenty years after our separation. The canvas bore the date 1647.\u003cbr\u003e Most of these memoirs go back roughly to that period.\u003cbr\u003e There was a time in my boyhood when I could not listen to the cadence of certain\u003cbr\u003e songs the country women sang to us on the farms without feeling suddenly transported to\u003cbr\u003e an epoch so remote from my life that I could not reach it if I multiplied my present age\u003cbr\u003e many, many times. I had only to hear that melody to lapse instantly into a condition like\u003cbr\u003e paralysis, a spiritual lethargy that made everything around me seem strange, whatever my\u003cbr\u003e state of mind when it overtook me. After twenty years, I have never again experienced\u003cbr\u003e that phenomenon. Did I never hear the melody again? Or has my spirit, already quite\u003cbr\u003e inseparable from my current existence, become deaf to the call?\u003cbr\u003e Either my nature is infirm, or my thinking differs from other men’s, or they\u003cbr\u003e undergo the same sensations, but without realizing it. I feel, yet am unable to express\u003cbr\u003e how, that my life –– or what we properly use this term to designate –– did not begin with\u003cbr\u003e the day of my birth and will not end at my death; I feel this with the same force, with the\u003cbr\u003e same fullness of sensation that I feel life at this instant, although in a way that is more\u003cbr\u003e obscure, stranger, more inexplicable. On the other hand, how do we feel that we are\u003cbr\u003e living at this instant? One says, I am alive. But this is not sufficient: when we sleep, we\u003cbr\u003e have no awareness of existing –– and nonetheless we live. This awareness of existing\u003cbr\u003e cannot be fully circumscribed by the narrow boundaries of what we call life. We can\u003cbr\u003e contain two lives: this belief, in various forms, has been accepted by every people in\u003cbr\u003e every period. One life is essential, continuous, perhaps imperishable, whereas the other is\u003cbr\u003e changeable, progressing its fits and starts, more or less brief, more or less recurrent. One\u003cbr\u003e is essence; the other relevation, form. What dies in the world? Life dies, but the spirit, the\u003cbr\u003e secret, the force of life does not die: it lives forever in the world.","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299881275621,"sku":"NP9781939810625","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810625.jpg?v=1767726721","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/fantastic-tales-isbn-9781939810625","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}