A glory-starved soldier spends his life awaiting an absent,
long-expected enemy in this influential Italian classic of
existentialism, now newly translated and with its originally intended
title restored.
At the start of Dino Buzzati's The Stronghold, newly commissioned
officer Giovanni Drogo has just received his first posting: to the
remote Fortezza Bastiani. North of this stronghold are impassible
mountains; to the south, a great desert; and somewhere out there is the
enemy, whose attack is imminent.
This is the enemy that Lieutenant Drogo has been sent to draw out of his
lair. This is the enemy over which Drogo is confident he and his fellows
will score a definitive defeat, sending them home as heroes. And yet
time passes and where is the enemy?
As the soldiers in the fortress await the foretold day of reckoning,
they succumb to inertia, and though deaths occurs, it is not from
bravery. Decades pass. A lifetime passes. Drogo, however, still has his
lonely vigil to keep.
Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century,
renowned for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light, as well as for
his fantastical imagination. The Stronghold, previously translated as
The Tartar Steppe, is his most celebrated work, a book that has been
read as a veiled attack on Mussolini's fascist militarism, a prophetic
allegory of the Cold War, and as an existentialist fable.
Lawrence Venuti's new translation reverts to the title that Buzzati
originally intended to give his book, and seeks to bring out the human
and the historical dimensions of a story of proven power and poignance.
