"Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority." -- Antonio Tabucchi
Antonio Tabucchi (born September 23, 1943) is an Italian writer and academic who teaches Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy.
Deeply in love with Portugal, he is an expert, critic and translator of the works of the writer Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronomouses. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that, back in Italy, he attended a course of Portuguese language for a better comprehension of the poet.
His books and essays have been translated in 18 countries, including Japan. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, he translated many works by Pessoa into Italian and has written a book of essays and a comedy about the writer.
Tabucchi has been awarded the French prize "Médicis étranger" for Nocturne indien (Notturno indiano) and the premio Campiello, and the Aristeion Prize for Sostiene Pereira.
"An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.""As a writer, I've always been interested in others.""But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.""But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.""Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because when I'm given a shirt that's too clean, one that's completely white, I immediately start having doubts.""Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.""I claim the right to take a stand once in a while.""I don't go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.""I don't have any doubts either about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps some more should be added to the list, but I don't have the slightest doubt about human rights.""I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves.""I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.""I live quietly at home among my family and friends.""I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia.""I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.""I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.""I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.""In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.""It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.""It's very useful when politicians have doubts because there are so many choices to be made in the world.""Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.""Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.""My books are about losers, about people who've lost their way and are engaged in a search.""My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself.""No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job.""People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.""Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.""The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.""The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.""There are some fundamental values it's impossible to be wrong about.""We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.""When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.""Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression."
Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa but grew up at his maternal grandparents' home in Vecchiano, a nearby village.
During his years at university, he travelled widely around Europe on the trail of the authors he had encountered in his uncle's library. During one of these journeys, he found the poem "Tabacaria" (tobacco shop) in a bookstall near the Gare de Lyon in Paris, signed by Alvaro de Campos, one of the heteronyms (a kind of poetical personality) of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. It was in the French translation by Pierre Hourcade. From the pages of this libel he extracted the intuition of his interest in his future life for at least twenty years.
A visit to Lisbon sparked his love of the city of the fado and of that country as a whole. As a result, he graduated in 1969 with a thesis on "Surrealism in Portugal". He specialized at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in the seventies and in 1973 he was appointed as teacher of Portuguese Language and Literature in Bologna.
That year he wrote his first novel, Piazza d'Italia (Bompiani 1975), in which he tried to describe history from the losers' point of view, in this case the Tuscan anarchists, in the tradition of great Italian writers of a more or less recent past, such as Giovanni Verga, Federico De Roberto, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Beppe Fenoglio, and contemporary authors, like Vincenzo Consolo.
In 1978, he was appointed to the University of Genoa, and published Il piccolo naviglio, followed by Il gioco del rovescio e altri racconti in 1981, and Donna di porto Pim (1983). His first important novel, Notturno indiano, was published in 1984, and became the basis of a 1989 a film directed by Alain Corneau. The protagonist tries to trace a friend who has disappeared in India but is actually searching for his own identity.
He published Piccoli equivoci senza importanza in 1985 and, the next year, Il filo dell'orizzonte. This novel features another protagonist (Spino) on a quest to discover something (here, the identity of a corpse) but who is also looking for his own identity...which was to become a common mission for Tabucchi protagonists. Whether these characters succeed in the attempt is uncertain, but they are compelled to face their image as mirrored by others. A film was drawn from this book, too, in 1993 directed by the Portuguese Fernando Lopes.
In 1987, when I volatili del Beato Angelico and Pessoana Minima were published, he received France's Prix Médicis for best foreign novel (Notturno indiano). The next year he wrote the comedy I dialoghi mancati. The President of Portugal appointed him the title Do Infante Dom Henrique in 1989, and that same year the French government named him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Tabucchi published Un baule pieno di gente. Scritti su Fernando Pessoa (Feltrinelli) in 1990, and the next year, L'angelo nero (1991). In 1992 he wrote in Portuguese Requiem, a novel later translated into Italian (winner of Premio P.E.N. Club italiano) and he published Sogni di sogni.
In 1994 he released Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, as well as the novel that brought him the most recognition: Sostiene Pereira, winner of the Prizes Super Campiello, Scanno and Jean Monnet for European Literature. The protagonist of this novel becomes the symbol of the defence of freedom for information for the political opponents of all anti-democratic regimes. In Italy, during the election campaign, the opposition against the controversial communication magnate Silvio Berlusconi aggregated around this book. The director Roberto Faenza drew from it the eponymous film (1995) in which he cast Marcello Mastroianni as Pereira and Daniel Auteuil as Dr. Cardoso.
In 1997 Tabucchi wrote the novel La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro (The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro) based on the true story of a man whose headless corpse was found in a park. It was discovered that the man had been murdered in a police station of the Republican National Guard (GNR). The news story struck the writer's sensitiveness and imagination. The event's setting in Porto also gave the author the opportunity to show his love for the city. In order to finish this novel, Tabucchi worked on the documents gathered by the investigators at the European Council in Strasbourg who enforce civil rights and the conditions of detention in Europe, including the relationship between citizens and police. The novel proved prophetic when police Sergeant José dos Santos later confessed the murder, was convicted and sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment.
Also in 1997, Tabucchi wrote Marconi, se ben mi ricordo, followed the next year by L'Automobile, la Nostalgie et l'Infini (1998). That year the Leibniz Academy awarded him the Prize Nossack.
He wrote Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento and Ena poukamiso gemato likedes (Una camicia piena di macchie. Conversazioni di A.T. con Anteos Chrysostomidis) in 1999.
In 2001 Tabucchi published the epistolary novel, Si sta facendo sempre più tardi. In it, 17 letters which celebrate the triumph of the word, which like "messages in the bottle", have no addressee, they are missives the author addressed to an "unknown poste restante". The book received the 2002 Prize France Culture (the French cultural radio) for foreign literature.
He spends six months of the year in Lisbon, with his wife, a native of the city, and their two children. The rest of the year he spends in Tuscany where he teaches Portuguese literature at the University of Siena. In fact Tabucchi considers himself a writer only in an ontological sense, because from the existential point of view he is glad of being able to define himself a "university professor". Literature for Tabucchi is not a profession, "but something that involves desires, dreams and imagination".
Tabucchi regularly contributes articles to the cultural pages of the newspapers Corriere della Sera and El País. In 2004, he was awarded the Francisco de Cerecedo journalism prize, granted by the Association of European Journalists and handed by Spain's Crown heir, Prince Felipe de Borbón, in recognition for the quality of his journalistic work and his outspoken defence of freedom of expression.
In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège.
