Tristano Dies A Life

It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying. A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life…you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away.” Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major novels, is a vibrant consideration of love, war, devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it means to be a hero.

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon in 2012. A master of short fiction, he won the Prix Médicis Etranger for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem: A Hallucination, the Aristeion European Literature Prize for Pereira Declares, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Together with his wife, Maria José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian. Tabucchi's works include Time Ages in a Hurry, The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, and The Woman of Porto Pim (Archipelago), Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Letter from Casablanca, and The Edge of the Horizon (New Directions). 

Elizabeth Harris's translations appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her translated books include Mario Rigoni Stern's Giacomo's Seasons (Autumn Hill Books) and Giulio Mozzi's This Is the Garden (Open Letter Books). For Tristano Dies, she received a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota.