Italian · 1943–2012
A Tuscan who found a Portuguese poem on a Paris bookstall in the 1960s, learned the language to read it properly, and spent the rest of his life half in Lisbon. The poem was Fernando Pessoa's Tabacaria. Tabucchi became Pessoa's Italian translator, wrote a professorship's worth of scholarship on him, and produced novels haunted by his method of dividing a self into several people. Pereira Maintains, published in 1994 as Berlusconi first took power, gave the Italian opposition a slogan and its author an unwanted political career as a public conscience. He wrote in Italian and in Portuguese, won the Prix Médicis étranger and the Aristeion, taught at Siena, and died in Lisbon in 2012. Requiem, written entirely in Portuguese, is his own favourite among his books.