Writers and visual artists overlapped in twentieth-century Italy much more than you might expect. F. T. Marinetti & the Futurists demanded an end to conventional typesetting with parole in libertà which splayed words all over the page. Giorgio de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros is a better-than-average Surrealist novel; the memoirist Carlo Levi was equally skilled as a painter. Unsurprisingly, there’s a long and varied tradition of the comic book – called fumetti – in Italy, albeit one that hasn’t often been noticed by those who don’t speak Italian. Fotoromanzi, comic books made from posed photographs of actors, were wildly popular after WWII; they inspired films by Michelangelo Antonioni (1949’s short L’amorosa menzogna) and Federico Fellini (The White Sheik) and turn up in Umberto Eco’s illustrated novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, something of a personal history of the Italian comic book.
To that history belongs Dino Buzzati. Buzzati is known in the English-speaking world primarily on the strength of The Tartar Steppe, a novel from 1940 about a frontier garrison awaiting an attack that will never come. Buzzati was immediately pegged as an existentialist; comparisons to Kafka were unavoidable. But Buzzati’s career – which stretched from the the 1930s to the end of the 1960s – resists such easy pigeonholing. Some of his short stories, published by North Point in the 1980s, might have been written by a Borges who found his way out of the library and into one of de Chirico’s desolate piazze, but as often there’s a playfulness not unlike some of Italo Calvino’s work. A few years back, New York Review Books presented a new side of Calvino by publishing a new translation of The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, an illustrated children’s book with an introduction from Lemony Snicket. A children’s book might be the last thing one would expect from an existentialism, but it feels entirely of a piece with the writer’s fabulism. Now the same press has published Poem Strip, which suggests that we should revise our opinion of Buzzati yet again.
Poem Strip isn’t simply an illustrated book: it’s Buzzati’s attempt to make the form of the graphic novel his own. Originally published in 1969, the book retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orfi is a Beatle-booted musician who makes the girls go crazy; one night he sees his beloved go into a strange door in Milan and follows her down into a weird underworld where straightforward narrative is abandoned in favor of dream-logic and landscapes taken from Caspar David Friedrich, Arthur Rackham, Fellini, and F. W. Murnau. The narrative is recognizably Buzzati’s work: a card catalogue extends into infinity, while the Guardian Demon of the afterlife is a talking coat. While Buzzati’s illustrations aren’t as polished as the similar work of Guido Crépax or Roland Topor, he acquits himself rather well for a writer at the age of retirement. One wonders what sort of work he would have done had he been born in 1956 rather than 1906; he might have ended up doing work like Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, a Borgesian encyclopedia written in a made-up language describing a made-up world.
While it’s a shame that it’s taken Poem Strip forty years to appear in English, NYRB should be congratulated for bringing it out: it’s a book that should be seen by a variety of audiences. For the curious, Will Schofield’s indispensable blog A Journey Round My Skull has a variety of illustrations from the book; he’s also featured some of Buzzati’s other visual work.
