Lies of the night

The last night for four prisoners sentenced to death, this is the subject of Gilardino Boffalino's masterpiece (1920-1996) "Lies of the Night" for which he won the Striga Prize in 1988. The story takes place in a place and time confined to the utmost limits, the place being a cell on a forgotten island, and the time being eight night hours separating them from the scheduled execution after dawn. But what Boffalino does goes beyond merely telling a story. It takes us, while waiting for dawn, back to that old and fundamental question about the meaning of our existence, driving his doubts through the voice of a character he did not choose randomly for this purpose, the character of Consalvo de Ritis. This book evokes the magic of the storytelling of "One Thousand and One Nights" and "The Decameron" together, and is considered the most authentic of Boffalino's novels, containing more richness of narration, depth of characters, and mastery of their psychological portrayal than his other two works. Perhaps no better description exists for Boffalino's remarkable craftsmanship than what is found on the back cover of the book in its original language: "Words in an old hue, woven with pleasure and brilliance by a chronicler awaiting, along with his characters, the sunrise." In late 2019, the wife of the late Lebanese poet Bassam Hajar (1955-2009) discovered a manuscript handwritten by her husband, containing the last thing the deceased was discussing before his passing. We translated this artifact into Arabic from French, but time did not favor her; and since the discovered manuscript was incomplete, "Dar Al-Rafidain" entrusted the task of completing the translation from its original language, Italian, to the Shouri poet Amargi, who sought to reconcile as much as possible between the poetic flow of the late poet and his poetic rhythm, between the lexicon of the deceased and his linguistic dictionary. This book thus became the fruit of two special poetic sensitivities that, through their attentive listening to the heartbeat and rhythms of the text, managed to create an Arab masterpiece no less enchanting than the original in its mother tongue.