Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies - A Life

This book has been with me a long while. Besides writing it at home, I composed it, in notebooks and in my thoughts, at the homes that dear friends put at my disposal. I thank these friends. It’s superfluous to name them here: they know.

Thank you to Valentina Parlato who, with great precision and intelligence, typed out my handwritten notebooks and the parts I knew by memory that made up this book before it was a book.

A.T.

For the most part, English words that appear in italics were in English in the original novel.

There are a few poems that the narrator quotes which were translated into Italian; I have, at times, included others’ English translations of these:

this page: Heinrich Heine, “Die Lorelie,” trans. A.S. Kline

this page: C.P. Cavafy, “Long Ago,” trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

this page: C.P. Cavafy, “Voices,” trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Translator’s Acknowledgments

The translation of this novel was supported through residencies at the Banff International Centre for the Arts in Canada and the Casa delle traduzioni in Rome. Research for the translation was greatly aided through funding from the University of North Dakota and through a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from the PEN America Center. I wish to thank Dr. Louise Rozier for her careful reading and insights about this novel and Dr. Charles Klopp for answering my many questions. I also wish to thank Jill Schoolman, publisher of Archipelago Books, for her devotion to Tabucchi, to literature in translation, and to translators. I dedicate this translation to the memory of my mother, Nancy Harris.