Tommaso Landolfi: a note and a fragment

by Giuseppe Cornacchia and Santi Spadaro
caricature by David Levine (found in internet)

 

 

 

Tommaso Landolfi, born in 1908, earned a master degree in russian literature. He was writer and translator (russian authors above all: Gogol, Cechov, Puskin, Turgenev, Tolstoj) and got some important italian prizes (Viareggio, 1958; Bagutta, 1964; Strega, 1975) for short stories collections and novels. He died in 1979.

 

His ironic and inventive mood, his skills in language and deep culture hardly ever let readers understand whether he jokes or reveals a dissatisfaction about life; Landolfi was a gambler and liked drawing lots in writing too, but was always conscious of his value and it's impossible not noticing the brightness of his best pages, so that young italian artists still look at him as an example.

 

 

 

 

 

Tutti, rio tempo sconoscente,
Tutti ci hai fatti servi della gleba.
Ma non è aratro la penna:
Ché, quanto più tra le mie mani pesa,
Tanto più evanescente segno lascia,
E quanto più la sento lieve,
Tanto più fondo solco traccia.

 

Ungrateful time, look at what you've done
You have made a serf of everyone of us
But the pen is nothing like a plough:
the more it weighs my hand
the more its trace fades away
And the more it gets lighter
The more deepens its mark.

        (transl. Santi Spadaro)

 

 

 


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