A Thousand and One Nights’ exalted position in the Pindaric World of Dino Buzzati: "The Dog That Has Seen God" as a Sufi Tale

On the back cover of the first Italian edition of A Thousand and One Nights (fl.IX-XVI) translated from Arabic [Gabrieli1955], the brilliant Italian writer, journalist and painter Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) stated: “This is the Bible of the tale. A timeless monument as the mountains". Years before Buzzati, as a journalist for the newspaper “Corriere della Sera”, driven by his love of mountains, Egyptology and the desert, had already followed the experiences of orientalist Giuseppe Tucci in Tibet (1933), later drawing upon them in writing the Desert of the Tartars (1940). In this novel the fabulous tones of the Nights are merged into the Sahara/Sahel’s landscapes – full of symbolism/ hermits/marauders – in which imagination is the only means of escaping from the evil of the WWII [Citati1996]. Besides the themes above, I argue that the frame structure of Buzzati’s short stories allow us to explore the author’s linkages with the Nights – which is also cleverly referenced in certain works, such as the The Mystery Boutique (La Boutique del Mistero1968) and We regret to (Siamo spiacenti di1975). As widely acknowledged and debated, the influence of the Nights and Kalīla wa Dimna (fl.VIII) in Italian medieval short-story writing has its roots in Boccaccio’s Filoloco (fl.XIV) and in the anonymous anthology Il Novellino (fl.XV), among the most famous examples. It is however in 1721 - with the introduction of the Arabic text in Italy - that love for the folk-inspired short-story began to be interspersed with a vivid exoticism, leading to a more transfigured/original re-writing during the 20th century. This is seen in Buzzati’s works/paintings amongst others [Lapucci2008]. My proposed contribution to the volume Islam in the World Literary Imaginations, aims to investigate the little-observed reading of Orientalism and the fascination with Islamic Sufi mysticism proposed by Buzzati within his short tales, driven by his strong affection for Oriental short-stories anthologies. In particular, I will focus on the story "The dog who has seen God" [1968], in which the adab’s delight, the author's interest in the lives of anchorites [1971] and the constant search for harmony with the universe [1933] is placed within Sufi mysticism’s imaginary, also a strong feature of Buzzati’s beloved Nights [Al-Itbaui2015]. The figure of the poor mutaṣawwuf with the dog which prodigiously becomes the narrative transfiguration of the presence of God in the humblest creatures, not only figured into several studies focused on mysticism [al-Miḥwalī fl.X; Hofer2016; Nurbakhsh1989] but is also part of Buzzati’s tale. Within this text, Dino/Dinubis, just as he will later will do in his fable Sheherazad [1975], kills the stereotypical denouement of a classic tale by allowing it to transform into a new one and a thousand others; in doing so, he also cleverly reveals that the deconstrupted/reconstructed Orient always “lives” in Europe even when not explicitly quoted [Moretti1994]. Buzzati’s narrative experimentation is aptly explicated in Piemontese’s commentary at the reception for Nights in Italy [1996]: «It is difficult to find completely watertight cultures. Some thin threads bind them to each other in the terrific mystery of imagination».