The Tartar Steppe. Dino Buzzati

      

       About the Author

      Dino Buzzati was born in Italy in 1906. After receiving a law degree from the University of Milan, he worked as a reporter and later as special correspondent and editor for the Corriere della Sera/ His literary career began in 1933 with the publication of Barnabas of the Mountains and The Secret of the Old Forest; however, it was not until he wrote The Tartar Steppe in 1940 and The Seven Messengers in 1942 that he received proper recognition in the mainstream of contemporary European literature. His works have been translated into many languages. Buzzati died in Milan in 1972.

      Tim Parks is the author of Destiny, Europa, Adultery and Other Diversions, An Italian Education and other works of fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Verona, Italy.

      First published in Italy under the title Il Deserto dei Tartari Copyright © 1945, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, s.p.a, Milano

      English translation first published in Great Britain in 1952, by Secker & Warburg

      Introduction first published by Penguin Books, 2000

      This edition first published in 2007

       by Canongate Books Ltd,

       14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

      This digital edition first published in 2012

       by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Dino Buzzati, 1945

       English translation copyright © Stuart C. Hood, 1952

       Introduction copyright © Tim Parks, 2000

      The moral right of Dino Buzzati and Stuart C. Hood to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 84767 757 0

      canongate.co.uk

      Contents

       About the Author Title Page Copyright Introduction: Throwing Down A Gauntlet Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty

      Introduction

       THROWING DOWN A GAUNTLET

       Tim Parks

      ‘Now a book lives’, wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead’. He uses the remark to launch an attack on allegory, indeed on all stories that offer a neat equivalence between their characters or settings and abstract qualities. ‘A man is more than a Christian,’ he protests, ‘a rider on a white horse must be more than mere faithfulness and truth.’

      Written in 1938, The Tartar Steppe is the story of a young officer dispatched to do service in a remote mountain garrison overlooking a vast northern desert. At first desperate to escape and return to the pleasures of normal life, he nevertheless falls under the spell of the place to the point that he will spend the next thirty years there, sustained only by the vain hope that one day an enemy attack will offer a moment of glory and fulfilment. Buzzati remarked: ‘The idea of the novel came out of the monotonous night-shift I was working at Corriere della Sera in those days. It often occurred to me that that routine would never end and so would eat up my whole life quite pointlessly. It’s a common enough feeling, I think, for most people, especially when you find yourself slotted into the time-tabled existence of a big town. Transposing that experience into a fantastical military world was an almost instinctive decision.”

      Is the book, then, a mere allegory of equivalences? Buzzati had originally called his story The Fort and the title was only changed on the insistence of the publishers, who were eager to avoid allusions to the sensitive military situation in Europe. One Italian critic remarks: ‘The “desert” of the novel is thus the story of life in the “fort” of the newspaper which promises the wonders of a solitude that is both habit and vocation.’ You can already hear Lawrence muttering, ‘fathomed and dead!’

      But if it’s a commonplace that something explained is very largely explained away, it is also true that faced with any phenomenon the mind instinctively sets out to construct an explanation. Here is an irony Lawrence doesn’t follow up. Confronted with a story, any story, we immediately seek to fathom it out, to know it, even though we realize that if we succeed it will no longer be interesting, it will die. Oddly, then, the greatest pleasure we can get from a story only comes when the smaller satisfaction of having explained it away is thwarted. The mind discards,