Antonio Tabucchi

Antonio Tabucchi (Pisa, Italy, September 24, 1943-Lisbon, Portugal, March 25, 2012) was an Italian writer and teacher of Portuguese language and literature.

Biography

He grew up in the house of his maternal grandparents in Vecchiano, a place near Pisa. During the years of university studies at the University of Pisa Tabucchi made numerous trips around Europe, following in the footsteps of the authors that he had found in the rich library of his maternal uncle. During one of these trips, in Paris, on a bench at Lyon Station, he found the poem Tabacaria signed by Álvaro de Campos, one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, in the French translation by Pierre Hourcade.. From here arose the intuition that he had found the theme for the next twenty years of his life.

He traveled to Lisbon, a city for which he developed a true passion. He wrote a doctoral thesis on surrealism in Portugal. He completed advanced studies at the Normal Superior School of Pisa and in 1973 was commissioned to teach Portuguese language and literature in Bologna. In 1978, he transferred to the University of Genoa.

Between 1985 and 1987 he was director of the Italian Institute of Culture in Lisbon.

For a long time he lived half the year in Lisbon, where he wrote, with his partner —born there— and their two children. The other half of the year he lived in Tuscany, teaching at the University of Siena. In 2004 she obtained Portuguese citizenship.

Tabucchi died on March 25, 2012 at the Red Cross Hospital in Lisbon, due to cancer.

Work

Viscerally in love with Portugal, he was the best connoisseur, critic and Italian translator of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Tabucchi was introduced to Pessoa's work in the 1960s, at the Sorbonne, and was so fascinated by it that upon his return to Italy he attended Portuguese classes to better understand the poet.

Her books have been translated in eighteen countries. Together with María José de Lancastre, his wife, he translated many of Pessoa's works into Italian. She also wrote a book of essays and a theatrical comedy about him.

He won the French Médicis prize abroad for his novel Notturno Indiano, and the Campiello prize for Sustains Pereira. In 2004 she received the Francisco Cerecedo Journalism Award in Spain.

Some of the most recurring themes in his work are related to the search for identity and its concealment, travel, the passage of time and death, memory and remembrance, dreams and the dream world, games and their mistakes. He also tends to include anthropological themes in his works, such as the regional gastronomy of the places visited by his characters —especially Portuguese cuisine—, and his concern for cultural, sexual, and ethnic minorities.

Some of his best-known books are Notturno Indiano (Sellerio, 1984), Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Feltrinelli, 1985), Un baule pieno di gente (Feltrinelli, 1990), Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa (Sellerio, 1994), Sustiene Pereira (Sellerio, 1994), La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro (Feltrinelli, 1997) and Si sta facendo semper più tardi (Feltrinelli, 2001). Several of his books have been made into movies, among which stands out Pereira Holds , where Marcello Mastroianni stood out in one of the last interpretations of him, in 1995, just a year before the death of he. In 2013, Per Isabel. A mandala by the Feltrinelli Editoriale label.

Books

• Piazza d'Italia (1975)
• The setback (1981)
• Lady of Porto Pim and other stories (1983)
• Hindu Night (1984)
• Little unimportant equivocal (1985)
• The line of the horizon (1986)
• The volatiles of Blessed Angelico
• The Black Angel (1991)
• Réquiem: a hallucination (1992)
• Sustains Pereira (1994)
• The Lost Head of Damascus Monteiro (1997)
• Plato gastritis (1998)
• Dreams of dreams. The last three days of Fernando Pessoa (2000)
• It's getting done later. (2001)
• Other Autobiographies: Poetics at a later stage (2003)
• Tristano dies: a life (2004)
• The occa at the pass: news from the darkness we are going through (2004)
• Time ages quickly: nine stories (2009)
• Travel and other travel (2010)
• For Isabel. A mandala

Theater

• Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento (1999), ISBN 88-380-8010-0
• Ena poukamiso gemato likedes (A camicia piena di macchie. Conversazioni di A.T. with Anteos Chrysostomidis1999)