Antonio Tabucchi in the World: Visual Translations

Books and ribbons

This virtual exhibition of covers created for Antonio Tabucchi’s works published in translation confronts us with an apparent conceptual oxymoron: the cover of a book, in fact, together with the smell of the pages and the noise they make when you leaf through them, is one of the most symbolic embodiments of the book as an object, at least in the twentieth century. However, these parts of the book, which are so physical and, at the same time, so metaphysical and metaphorical, can be reproduced digitally on the computer screens of anyone who wants to admire them. This seems to me to be a fundamental juncture of our time: the book, although it has become impalpable, devoid of physical nature, free of the dust and woodworms that have accompanied its life through time since its invention, cannot do without its material nature, since we can only represent it through simulacra that refer to it. However, beyond the pixels that compose them, it is easy to perceive the existence of physical objects, companions on a reader’s or reader’s journey, as much within the private confines of one’s own room as tucked into a jacket pocket, perhaps together with a pencil and a notebook, by inhabitants of some of the world’s most diverse and fascinating places and districts. Yes, because this necessarily partial selection of the covers of Tabucchi’s works published in other languages tells us firstly that Tabucchi was, and still is, a much-loved and much-read writer, regardless of the geographical coordinates and linguistic family he belongs to. One goes from neighbouring (in many senses) Portugal, to the ever-beloved France, to distant (in many senses) Japan, via Thailand or Finland, which, apart from the Germanic ending of their Europeanised names, have very little in common. And then Poland and Serbia, Romania, Turkey, Great Britain and the United States, Germany and Greece, and again Spain and even China.
The covers are obviously very different, as different as the publishers to which they correspond and the languages in which these books have been translated and then read. Some of them, when placed side by side, tell a fragment of the publishing history of the book they contain – this is the case of the English-language covers that testify to the changing translation of the title of perhaps Tabucchi’s most famous work, Sostiene Pereira – others tell the story of a cover itself, which is repeated across countries and languages – this is the case of that of Tristano muore or Si sta facendo sempre più tardi – still others, due to their uniqueness, tell us of special books, published only in that guise, which did not exist in Italy – such as the bilingual volume Cinéma published by Gallimard or the two Greek short stories published in their own right only by the Athenian publisher Agra. There we can also find Tabucchi’s favourite places to set his stories, portrayed through a fragment of azulejo, a typical Lisbon street lamp or the depiction of a whale, and rediscover his great passion for painting and photography: No wonder, since for Antonio Tabucchi the cover of one of his books was an integral part of the book-object he would entrust to the hands of his readers, and he always managed it himself, for all editions of his works, as long as he lived.
Looking at all these covers, one feels a kind of vertigo, as if one could almost travel around the world at a glance. Indeed, Antonio Tabucchi’s works have been translated into more than 40 languages and, therefore, one can be certain that more or less anywhere in the world, at least where books are published, at some point, there has been a scholar, or a translator or a publisher who felt the need to translate a work by the Italian writer into an object-book, at the same time new and identical, capable of reaching those who did not know the mother tongue of the writer. This proves, without a doubt, not only the intrinsic value of Antonio Tabucchi’s novels, short stories and non-fiction production, which, clearly, has long been recognised by critics and literary scholars all over the world, but also their universal potential, which is perhaps – at least for the writer – the most important prerogative of a work of art, regardless of the expressive form chosen by the artist to realise it. There are books that, however successful they may be at the time of their release, are soon forgotten, even by those who had appreciated them. And there are others, on the other hand, capable of travelling through time, of passing from father to daughter at special moments of existence, or of being hidden in the pocket of a girlfriend’s coat – not without causing a long shiver down the spine – in some country afflicted by a terrible dictatorship, and of travelling through space, changing form like the god Proteus, thanks to translators and publishers, so as to be understood by men and women all over the world. Here, Tabucchi’s books belong to the latter category, which is why they are so important.
One is reminded of what Maria Lai, the great Italian artist who in the 1970s managed to use a blue ribbon to tie the people and houses of her village, Ulassai, to the mountain that dominated it. Indeed, Lai maintained that art should leave the galleries and return to the people, because its greatest power, apart from its ability to amaze, was precisely its ability to unite them, the people. And the blue ribbon that the people of Ulassai patiently managed to tie dozens and dozens of times, overcoming grudges and differences, symbolised, for Lai, art itself.
Observing the covers of Tabucchi’s works next to each other perhaps succeeds in visually restoring this universal power of his writing, capable of speaking to very heterogeneous people and thus uniting them, just like Maria Lai’s blue ribbon. Literature is in itself universal, impervious to labels and nationalism, because it is essentially and profoundly human.

Clelia Bettini, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature