9780241519318

P EN GU IN P RES S REQUIEM M O D E R N

Antonio Tabucchi Requiem

Translated by

Margaret Jull Costa

‘My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life’ It is a hot July Sunday in Lisbon and our narrator has an appointment to meet a dead poet by the quayside. But when his guest does not arrive, he spends the day wandering the deserted city, encountering both the living and the departed: a disoriented taxi driver, a cemetery keeper, an accordionist, a Seller of Stories and, finally, the long-awaited ghost of the late, great Fernando Pessoa. A dreamlike exploration of the real and the illusionary, Requiem is above all, in Tabucchi’s words, ‘a homage to a country I adopted and which, in turn, adopted me.’

Date: 21.05.2021 Designer: Arran Prod. Controller: Pub. Date:

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ISBN: 9780241519318

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Cover artwork Untitled, 2009 by Nikias Skapinakis. © Nikias Skapinakis Estate.

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon – Modern Art Center.

Photo: Paulo Costa.

Author photograph © Isolde Ohlbaum

FIN IS H ES

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‘Tabucchi is a master of illusion and allusion, and this is a literary puzzle that teases, amuses and provokes’ Sunday Telegraph

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I S B N 978-0-241-51931-8

P ROOFIN G M ET H OD

Antonio Tabucchi Requiem

A Hallucination 28/05/2021 12:12

pen g ui n m o d er n cla s s i cs

Requiem ‘Reading this is like having a buzzed after-dinner conversation with a mind too brilliant to get into nuts and bolts. And yet the streamlike writing, spliced by endless commas, contains a charm that shines through the monochrome’ Kirkus Reviews ‘Beautifully translated … perhaps his most accessible work to date’ The Nation ‘In the narrator’s conversations and in his memories of the past, there is created a personal requiem for the old Lisbon, Tabucchi’s Lisbon, not the traditional, solemn celebration of the mass for the dead, with its organ music and cathedrals, but the street music of mouth-organs and barrelorgans’ Jack Byrne, Review of Contemporary Fiction ‘Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive and disquieting; his writing is, paradox­ ically, sensuous and economical’ Boston Review ‘This imagined world is created with elegance and complexity’ Robert Gray, Publishers Marketplace ‘Tabucchi’s books are economical surreal-comic novellas. There’s a cosmopolitan eeriness here’ Amit Chaudhuri, Times Literary Supplement ‘Winner of the 1991 Italian PEN Prize, this playful bagatelle, translated from the original Portuguese, is partly homage to Portuguese culture, partly a mellow autobiographical fantasy’ Publishers Weekly ‘A wonderful, enchanting tribute to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa … aptly subtitled, this book brilliantly creates a story that, like a delicious cocktail, most readers will finish in one gulp and will return to savor’ Library Journal

abo ut the aut h o r Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa, Italy in 1943. His critically acclaimed novels and short story collections include Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Requiem: A Hallucination and Pereira Maintains, which won the Premio Campiello, Premio Viareggio and the Aristeion Prize, amongst others. Tabucchi was professor at the University of Siena, and also taught at Bard College in New York, the École des Hautes Études and the Collège de France in Paris. He died in Lisbon, his adopted home, in 2012.

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marías, José Saramago and Eça de Queiroz, and poets: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Ana Luísa Amaral. Her work has brought her numerous prizes, most recently, the 2018 Premio Valle-Inclán for On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes. In 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

Antonio Tabucchi Requiem A Hallucination Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

P E NG UI N B O O K S

penguin classics UK | US A | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Portuguese as Requiem by Quetzal Editores 1991 This translation first published in Great Britain by Harvill Press 1994 First published in Penguin Classics 2021 001 Text copyright © Antonio Tabucchi, 1991 ‘Note on Recipes’ © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1992 Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa and New Directions, 1994 The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted Set in 11.25/14pt Dante MT Std Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. The authorized representative in the E E A is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin d02 yh68 A CI P catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn: 978–0–241–51931–8

www.greenpenguin.co.uk Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

Note This story, which takes place on a Sunday in July in a hot, deserted Lisbon, is the Requiem that the character I refer to as ‘I’ was called on to perform in this book. Were someone to ask me why I wrote this story in Portuguese, I would answer simply that a story like this could only be written in Portuguese; it’s as simple as that. But there is something else that needs explaining. Strictly speaking, a Requiem should be written in Latin, at least that’s what tradition prescribes. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’d be up to it in Latin. I realised though that I couldn’t write a Requiem in my own language and that I required a different language, one that was for me a place of affection and reflection.

Besides being a ‘sonata’, this Requiem is also a dream, during which my character will meet both the living and the dead on equal terms: people, things and places that were, perhaps, in need of a prayer, a prayer that my character can only express in his own way, through a novel. But this book is, above all, a homage to a country I adopted and which, in turn, adopted me, to a people who liked me as much as I liked them.

Should anyone remark that this Requiem was not performed with due solemnity, I cannot but agree. But the fact is that I chose to play my music not on an organ, which is an instrument proper to cathedrals, but on a mouth-​­ ​­ organ that you can carry about in your pocket, or on a barrel-​­ ​­ organ that you can wheel through the streets. Like Carlos Drummond de Andrade, I’ve v

Note

always had a fondness for street music and I agree with him when he says: ‘I have no desire to be friends with Handel, I’ve never heard the dawn chorus of the archangels. I’m happy with the noises that drift up from the street, which bear no message and are lost, just as we are lost.’ a.t.

The Characters Encountered in this Book The Young Junky The Lame ​­Lottery-​­Ticket Seller The Taxi Driver The Waiter at the Brasileira The Old Gypsy Woman The Cemetery Keeper Tadeus Senhor Casimiro Senhor Casimiro’s Wife The Porter at the Pensão Isadora Isadora Viriata My Father as a Young Man The Barman at the Museum of Ancient Art The Copyist The Ticket Collector The Lighthousekeeper’s Wife The Manager of the Casa do Alentejo Isabel The Seller of Stories Mariazinha My Guest The Accordionist

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