Recommended by Kevin Brockmeier

Issue No. 23



THE FIRST GREAT INSTALLATION to slow down time was built near Grosseto, in Mariscano. In fact, the inventor, the famous Aldo Cristofari, was a native of Grosseto. This Cristofari, a professor at the University of Pisa, had been interested in the problem for at least twenty years and had conducted marvelous experiments in his laboratory, especially on the germination of legumes. In the academic world however, he was thought a visionary. Until, under the aegis of his supporter, the financier Alfredo Lopez, the society for the construction of Diacosia was created. From then on Aldo Cristofari was regarded as a genius, a benefactor to humanity.

Read more of the story at electricliterature.com.

About the Author



Dino Buzzati (1906-72) was born in Belluno in Northern Italy and spent most of his life in Milan. By vocation he was an editor and correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. His novels, stories, plays, and paintings, all strongly marked by the fantastic, made him a major figure in twentieth-century Italian culture. Currently available in English are two book-length narratives: The Tartar Steppe and Poem Strip.





About the Guest Editor



Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. Recently he was named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.





About the Translator



Lawrence Venuti is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, and Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, as well as the editor of The Translation Studies Reader. His translations include the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss, and Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems, for which he won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.



“La macchina che fermava il tempo taken from Il Crollo Della Baliverna by Dino Buzzati. Published in Italy, by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano.



Copyright © Dino Buzzati Estate. All rights reserved handled by Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, Milan, Italy.



English translation Copyright © 1984 by Lawrence Venuti. From The Siren: A Selection from Dino Buzzati (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).





Want it on your Kindle? Click below!