Night lies

The last night of four prisoners sentenced to death is the subject of Gesualdo Bufalino''s (1920-1996) masterpiece Night Lies, for which he won the 1988 Strega Prize. A story set in a space and time that is extremely restricted: the place is a dungeon on a forgotten island, and the time is eight. Night hours separate them from the scheduled execution shortly after dawn. But Bufalino does more than just tell a story. While waiting for dawn, he brings us back to that ancient and fundamental question about the meaning of our existence, presenting his doubts through the mouth of a character whom he did not randomly choose for this purpose, the character of Consalvo de Retis. This book brings to mind the magic of the narratives of "A Thousand and One Nights" and "The Decameron" together, and it is considered the most authentic of Bufalino''s novels, as it contains more richness of narrative, depth of characters, and mastery of their psychological drawing than in his other two novels. Perhaps we will not find a better description of Bufalino''s wonderful craftsmanship than what we find on the back cover of the book in its original language: "Words in an ancient tone, intertwined with pleasure and pain by a sleepy pen waiting, in the company of his characters, for the rising of the sun." In late 2019, the wife of the late Lebanese poet Bassam Hajjar (1955-2009) discovered a draft in her husband''s handwriting, which included the last things the deceased had been devoted to before his passing. He transferred this work to Arabic from French, but the days did not help him; Since the discovered manuscript was incomplete, "Dar al-Rafidain" entrusted the task of completing the translation from its original language, Italian, to the Syrian poet Amarji, who investigated as much as possible to reconcile the late poet''s poetic flow and his linguistic dictionary and his linguistic dictionary. This book was the result of the combination of two poetic sensibilities Yatin Two special people were able, by carefully listening to the pulse and rhythms of the text, to create an Arabic masterpiece that is no less magical than the masterpiece in its mother tongue.