Canto di D’Arco

Every month newitalianbooks asks a translator to suggest a book he or she would like to translate. This month, Richard Dixon presents:

Antonio Moresco, Canto di D’Arco, Milan, SEM, 2019

Antonio Moresco’s three-part metaphysical thriller Canto di D’Arco (D’Arco’s Song) was published in 2019, four years after the completion of his monumental trilogy Giochi dell’eternità (Games of Eternity). “My name is D’Arco and I’m a dead cop,” he announces in the opening line. Since his murder, three years before, he’s been living and working at the police headquarters in the City of the Dead. Now he is sent back to the City of the Living on a mission to fight the evil that is throttling the city. Over the next seven hundred pages he encounters a dazzling array of fantastical characters – the naked Light Man, the Great Bride and Groom in the prison of love, a man with a half-titanium head, the god of Love dressed in rags, and finds himself battling his own hologram in a bubble of light, before being flown beyond the Frontier Cities on the back of a winged creature, into the stratosphere for the final battle of light against the tide of darkness. Moresco blurs the boundaries of life and death, good and bad, love and hate, human and animal. His electrifying prose is hauntingly lyrical, sometimes shocking, and never dull. What more could a translator (or a reader) ask for?

Richard Dixon

Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His translations of Antonio Moresco include Distant Light (La Lucina) and Clandestinity (Il combattimento). He has translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, Paolo Volponi, Stefano Massini, Marcello Fois, Adrián N. Bravi and Gianni Solla.