Tommaso Landolfi was an Italian author and translator.

Born in Pico

Pico, Italy

Pico is a town and comune in the province of Frosinone, in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is bounded by other communes of San Giovanni Incarico, Campodimele, Pontecorvo, Pastena and Lenola.It is part of the Comunità Montana Monti Ausoni....

, province of Frosinone

Province of Frosinone

The Province of Frosinone is a province in the Lazio region of Italy, with 91 comuni . Its capital is the city of Frosinone. It has an area of 3,244 km², and a total population of 489,042 .The Province was established by Royal Decree on 6 December 1926 with territories belonging to Lazio...

, he wrote numerous grotesque

Grotesque

The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...

 tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction

Speculative fiction

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...

, science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 and realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....

, Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature....

, Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

 and Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal ; , was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.-Early life:...

.

Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is An Autumn Story. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

.

Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.

Selected works

• Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (1937)
• La pietra lunare (1939)
• II mar delle blatte e altre storie (1939)
• Racconto d'autunno (An Autumn Story, 1947)
• Cancroregina (Cancerqueen, 1950)
• Le due zittelle (1952)
• La bière du pêcheur (1953)
• Ombre (1954)
• Rien va (1963)
• Des mois (1967)
• A caso (1975)