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Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

Author Antonio Tabucchi
Translated by Tim Parks
Ebook
New York Review Books | Archipelago
On sale Oct 16, 2012 | 150 Pages | 9781935744573
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Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness, and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas . . . because many of them wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters. . . . Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having to be, or bumps on the surface of existence . . . In them, in the form of quasi-stories, are the murmurings and mutterings that have accompanied and still accompany me: outbursts, moods, little ecstasies, real or presumed emotions, grudges, and regrets. —Antonio Tabucchi on The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico
The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

The first creature arrived on a Thursday towards the end of June, at vespers, when all the monks were in the chapel for service. Privately, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole still thought of himself as Guidolino, the name he had left behind in the world when he came to the cloister. He was in the vegetable garden gathering onions, which was his job, since in abandoning the world he hadn’t wanted to abandon the vocation of his father, Pietro, who was a vegetable gardener, and in the garden at San Marco he grew tomatoes, courgettes and onions. The onions were the red kind, with big heads, very sweet after you’d soaked them for an hour, though they made you cry a fair bit when you handled them. He was putting them in his frock gathered to form an apron, when he heard a voice calling: Guidolino. He raised his eyes and saw the bird. He saw it through onion tears filling his eyes and so stood gazing at it for a few moments, for the shape was magnified and distorted by his tears as though through a bizarre lens; he blinked his eyes to dry the lashes, then looked again.
Copyright © 2012 by Antonio Tabucchi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
One of the most beloved writers of his generation, 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 for Pereira Declares, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian. Tabucchi's works include Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Letter from Casablanca, The Edge of the Horizon, and The Woman of Porto Pim.

Tim Parks teaches literary translation at IULM University in Milan. He is a literary critic and the author of An Italian Education, The Server, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, and Teach Us to Sit Still. Twice winner of the John Florio Prize for translation, Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, Fleur Jaeggy, and Antonio Tabucchi.
Antonio Tabucchi View titles by Antonio Tabucchi

About

Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness, and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas . . . because many of them wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters. . . . Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having to be, or bumps on the surface of existence . . . In them, in the form of quasi-stories, are the murmurings and mutterings that have accompanied and still accompany me: outbursts, moods, little ecstasies, real or presumed emotions, grudges, and regrets. —Antonio Tabucchi on The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

Excerpt

The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

The first creature arrived on a Thursday towards the end of June, at vespers, when all the monks were in the chapel for service. Privately, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole still thought of himself as Guidolino, the name he had left behind in the world when he came to the cloister. He was in the vegetable garden gathering onions, which was his job, since in abandoning the world he hadn’t wanted to abandon the vocation of his father, Pietro, who was a vegetable gardener, and in the garden at San Marco he grew tomatoes, courgettes and onions. The onions were the red kind, with big heads, very sweet after you’d soaked them for an hour, though they made you cry a fair bit when you handled them. He was putting them in his frock gathered to form an apron, when he heard a voice calling: Guidolino. He raised his eyes and saw the bird. He saw it through onion tears filling his eyes and so stood gazing at it for a few moments, for the shape was magnified and distorted by his tears as though through a bizarre lens; he blinked his eyes to dry the lashes, then looked again.
Copyright © 2012 by Antonio Tabucchi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

One of the most beloved writers of his generation, 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 for Pereira Declares, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian. Tabucchi's works include Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Letter from Casablanca, The Edge of the Horizon, and The Woman of Porto Pim.

Tim Parks teaches literary translation at IULM University in Milan. He is a literary critic and the author of An Italian Education, The Server, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, and Teach Us to Sit Still. Twice winner of the John Florio Prize for translation, Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, Fleur Jaeggy, and Antonio Tabucchi.
Antonio Tabucchi View titles by Antonio Tabucchi

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