After fifteen years of writing in obscurity, Antonio Moresco published his first book in 1993 at the age of 45, followed over the next decade with Giochi dell’eternità, the epic trilogy that would secure his legacy. Despite the significance of the trilogy to Italian letters, and Moresco’s prolificacy, writing a wide range of other texts, very little of his work has so far made it into English. In 2026, Deep Vellum will publish the first part of Giochi dell’eternità, The Beginnings (tr. Max Lawton), having previously published a translation of Moresco’s debut, Clandestinity (tr. Richard Dixon), in 2022. Dixon’s translation of Distant Light is also available from Archipelago Books.
Meanwhile, in France, due to a long collaboration with translator Laurent Lombard and publisher Éditions Verdier, more of Moresco’s work is available. Most recently, Lombard’s translation of Canti di D’Arco was published by Les Éditions du Chemin de Fer. Following an event in Paris to celebrate its publication—at a bookshop named after his novel La Lucina—we got the opportunity to interview Antonio Moresco, exchanging emails in Italian, translated by Cristina Politano.
With thanks to Renaud Buénerd and Antonio Lenzo.
Reading the suite of novels translated by Laurent Lombard (Gli incendiati, La lucina, Fiaba d’amore) and now Canto di D’Arco the reader senses the connection in their motifs and reflections. Do these resonances occur by chance or through a conscious decision to develop a coherent literary realm?
I agree. The titles you mention in particular are united by the coexistence and embrace of life and death. This is especially true in Canto di D’Arco, where the policeman moves from the city of the living to that of the dead and vice versa, making this transition a key element of the plot and its deeper meaning.
The child in Canto di D’Arco closely resembles the one in La lucina, my first book translated in France, as if that child with whom I had identified so strongly did not want to and could not leave my imagination and my work and asked to return in an even more extreme form, becoming the little Judas, the little Virgil who accompanies this desperate policeman who does not give up in the dark forest of human life. Fiaba d’amore and Gli incendiati are also novels that resonate with each other and reflect my vision of life and the world through the invention of characters and emblems, giving unity to my literary universe.
With such demands inherent in the scope and scale of your literary universe, I’m curious what your relationship with, or expectation of, your readers is?
It’s difficult to answer that question. Let’s say that I expect a lot from readers and I expect nothing. I expect a lot in terms of extreme encounter, of communion. But at the same time, I expect nothing, because I’m not looking for a reader to deceive. Readers are like me: free, creative. That’s precisely why I’m interested in a strong relationship with them.
Your oeuvre includes, of course, the monumental Giochi dell’eternità trilogy. In terms of your process, was the trilogy mapped out from its inception or did the structure emerge through the act of writing?
Giochi dell’eternità, an enormous novel in three large parts (Gli esordi, Canti del caos, Gli increati), is the main work of my life as a writer, and it took me 35 years to write it. In France, only the first volume has been published so far, so its overall design and direction are not yet clear. It is being translated in its entirety in the United States and Spain, and in September 2026, the publisher Feltrinelli will finally publish it in a single edition and box set. But, to answer your question: no, it was indeed intuited from the beginning in a unique moment of inspiration, but then I had to conquer it and invent it piece by piece over decades of my life, through continuous narrative breakthroughs and inventions that were an adventure for me too, both artistically and in terms of knowledge, and which ultimately took me to a place I never thought I would reach.
Did the completion of Giochi dell’eternità change your understanding of the relationship between life and death?
For some time now, life and death have been present and embraced in my books. In the last part of Giochi dell’eternità (Gli increati), an earthquake occurs, also in terms of knowledge, and a dimension appears that runs through the entire work—even in reverse—and allows it to be read in a completely different way, which is its abyss and its peak: increation (l’increazione).
In your approach to the composition of a sentence, how do you weigh the relative simplicity of your syntax against the grand architecture of a long and complex trilogy? What for you is the fundamental compositional unit in the construction of a novel?
I love simple, elementary forms; I do not seek linguistic complexity for its own sake, because in order to see deep into the sea, the water must be clear, not clouded by foam. However, as I progressed (and Canti del caos is the extreme example of this), I had to put the language through suffering and torment so that it could express even the inexpressible. I do not know if compositional unity exists. For me, compositional unity is the radical nakedness of the word, of the voice, of song.
For me, compositional unity is the radical nakedness of the word, of the voice, of song.
You write beautiful about the experience of silence, but what role does music play in the realm of your writing? In Canto di D’Arco you evoke Maria Callas in a scene which seems to offer a moment of relief and respite. What is her significance to you and your work?
Music has been hugely important in my life, both as a man and as a writer, and it is no coincidence that some of my books contain the word “song” in their titles, because I need and want to take words to the level of song, to free them from their purely descriptive and connotative connections, to bring them out of themselves and turn them into song. As for Maria Callas, her indomitable voice burst into my life at some crucial moments, so I have a great love for her.
In discussing Canto di D’Arco, and the novels that preceded it, you spoke about dissolving or destroying binaries, those between life and death, past and present, and high and low literatures.
I wanted to. I tried not to stay inside the conceptual cages in which humans (and often literature too) have locked themselves up and imprisoned themselves. I tried to make fluid, risky and open what was perhaps controlled and reassuring, but also inert and dead; to give, in my life, that gamble that humans have called literature a chance.
Does this impulse carry a spiritual or social dimension, or did it develop from the pursuit of a purely literary freedom?
I believe that the two things—somewhere within ourselves and within the world—are inseparable.
Having been politically committed in your youth, do you consider yourself a political writer now?
Not strictly speaking, because I have also experienced what Leopardi calls “the slaughter of illusions” in my life. However, like the tragic hero of Canto di D’Arco, I have not surrendered to the death drive that seems to have taken hold of humanity. I am not a peaceful man or a peaceful writer.
You’ve spoken of your sense that evil is not only social or sociological but deeply rooted in humanity—is that not a hopeless perspective on our ability to agitate for a more just and equitable society?
On the contrary. Not hiding the dramatic nature of the situation is the first step. As in medicine, the diagnosis must be correct in order to consider the appropriate treatment. And given the seriousness of our situation, the treatment is not minor superficial changes, but a radical change, a metamorphosis.
What is literature’s roll in bringing about this metamorphosis? Does it have one?
In my imagination, the naked word is capable of splitting life in two and bringing about a metamorphosis. It has happened many times in the past, with certain mythical, religious and fairy-tale writings … And it has also happened to me in my own life, with the voices of certain poets, writers, thinkers who have reached me across space and time and changed the course of my life.
In my imagination, the naked word is capable of splitting life in two and bringing about a metamorphosis.
Returning to Canto di D’Arco and the dissolution of boundaries: what is your relation to the fantastique? La lucina struck me as existing in lineage with, for example, Pedro Páramo, but the term “magical realism” as applied to so much of the Latin Boom writing he inspired seems out of place in works which seem so European. In (or against!) which traditions do you see yourself writing?
Although I appreciate many of those works, I do not feel that I am in line with so-called “magical realism”, with its touch of fictitious and arcadian wonder. I believe, I claim not only to construct a magic mirror, but to break through the mirror in which so-called reality is imprisoned. I especially love writers who do this, I love Italian writers such as Dante and Leopardi, French writers such as Balzac and many others, Russian and American writers of the nineteenth century, writers such as Cervantes and Kafka.
We can say the writers you mention are from the world of “high literature”, do you have any favourites or any particular influences from the writers of “low literature”?
So-called ‘low literature’ was very important to me, because I had a dramatic relationship with school and did not go to university. So I went ahead freely, groping my way, reading all kinds of writers, without judgemental patterns, categories or hierarchies, experimenting to the maximum, taking the good wherever I found it, even among what does not fall within the so-called “high literature”, but where we sometimes encounter great surprises, even in terms of knowledge, such as science fiction, detective stories …
What is it about the fable, as we can see in Fiaba d’amore for example, that so appeals to you?
Fairy tales, like myths, are a powerful source that underpins our imagination and our structures of knowledge and judgement. Fairy tales are not the sweetened, comforting little things that people would like them to be. Fairy tales are truthful, radical, sometimes terrible; they do not hide the pervasive presence of evil in the world, but they also give us the strength to face it. I too have written fairy tales, and some of my novels (perhaps all of them) have a fairy-tale-like structure.
If I understood well, Canto di D’Arco was originally titled L’addio (The Farewell) given it was intended to be your final work—what changed?
That’s right. When I published only the first part of Canto di D’Arco, I titled it L’addio, because I was overwhelmed with grief and thought I would never write anything else after that, that this story, so intimate and pushed to the narrative limit, would be my dramatic farewell. Then … I don’t know what happened. I was reawakened with a jolt, and so I threw myself back into the whirlpool, wrote the other two parts and brought the novel to its conclusion or its climax.
What is your relationship now to your early works, such as Clandestinità, one of the few available English translations?
Before Esordi, I published Clandestinità and La cipolla. They are two somewhat autistic books, autistic and explosive. I think they are good books and highly original, but compared to Esordi, I still feel they are a bit 20th century. Or rather, with one foot in the 20th century and one foot beyond. Whereas Esordi has both feet beyond. And so does Canti del caos and everything that came after.
Going “beyond the 20th century”, is that achieved by breaking free of the “conceptual cages” you mentioned earlier? If not, what marks the break with the literature of that time?
I rebelled against the idea of literature that took hold in this part of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. The terminal, self-referential, self-cannibalistic idea that everything had already been written, etc., etc. A labyrinthine and melancholic conception that nevertheless claimed to defend us from the violence and chaos of life and the world, a sort of soft nihilism devoid of any truthful impact. For me, literature (like life) is always in dramatic beginning, it is not melancholic and closed in on itself, but tragic and open.
For me, literature (like life) is always in dramatic beginning, it is not melancholic and closed in on itself, but tragic and open.
You were first published relatively late, following a period of 15 years of writing in obscurity. During that period, who were the writers that sustained you—influencing you, offering a model or simply providing solace?
During those 15 years, I had no support or comfort from other writers, because I didn’t know anyone in that world. Only once a month, when I went to Mantua to visit my mother, did I see my friend Ivano Ferrari, a poet of great strength who died recently and has not yet been published in France. I found help and comfort in the writers and poets of the past, whom I encountered through books, as if they were brothers.
I have heard you speak in interviews about Pasolini’s importance to you.
I have a complicated relationship with Pasolini. I admire his freedom and elusiveness, but at the same time I feel he shares in the negative anthropocentric utopias that were in vogue in European culture at the end of the 20th century. He was keenly aware of anthropological and cultural changes, but he missed the most radical planetary and species changes. However, I have great regard and respect for him and his artistic and human endeavours. He was a writer, poet and filmmaker who left a strong, exemplary mark through various mediums, leaving behind precious crumbs, like the two children in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel.
In his reflections on silence in the first section of Gli esordi, the narrator describes briefly catching “the warp and woof of thousands and thousands of alternate or parallel languages […] floating there, defused in space.” It is not lost on me that I have read your work in French (thanks to Laurent Lombard), thought about it in English and we are now communicating in Italian (thanks to Cristina) … What is your relationship with your translators around the world? What is your sense of how your work has been received outside Italy?
I owe a great deal to my translators, most of whom were already familiar with my work and approached me directly to ask if they could translate it, starting with Laurent. The same thing happened with other languages.
As for my work, it has generally been better received and with a more open mind abroad than in Italy, where for many years I suffered first editorial rejections and then, on several occasions, misunderstanding, criticism, hostility and ostracism from the majority of the cultural world. Fortunately, however, there were also writers, literary scholars and readers, especially young people, who welcomed me and prevented me from being erased.
The Beginnings, tr. Max Lawton, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. You can pre-order a copy here.
Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua in 1947 and lives in Milan. Having had a troubled youth, marked by educational difficulties and tense relationships with institutional authorities, he abandoned his studies to engage in political direct action. Self-taught and nourished by his love of literature, he published his first book age 45. Now considered one of the founders of modern Italian literature, he is the author of over 30 books, including the career-defining Giochi dell’eternità trilogy, comprised of Gli esordi, Canti del caos and Gli increati.
Tobias Ryan lives in Paris. A novel, GLANTZ, was recently published by Equus Press. More of his writing and translations can be found @ Attic Scraps.
minor literature[s] 