Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Buzzati, Dino. The Stronghold. Translated by Lawrence Venuti, New York Review Books, 2023.

Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold (original Il deserto dei Tartari, 1940), in Lawrence Venuti’s new translation, rewards a reading that brings into relief the latent ideological tensions beneath its allegorical surface. From a revolutionary communist vantage, the novel may be read not merely as an existential fable of alienation, but as a trenchant critique of militarism, labor alienation, and the reproduction of authoritarian social orders through passive complicity. In what follows, I argue that Venuti’s translation—and Buzzati’s structure of waiting—open a space for class-critical reading, one that underscores how systems of power co-opt and stultify human aspiration.

The regime of waiting as ideological apparatus

At the core of The Stronghold is the figure of Giovanni Drogo, commissioned to a remote fortress (“Fortezza Bastiani”) on the frontier of the “Tatar Desert.” For years, generations even, the fortress’s garrison anticipates an enemy invasion that never seems to concretely appear. Time passes, youth is lost, energies are stifled. The plot is low in event but heavy in symbolic weight. Buzzati’s genius lies in showing how waiting—a passivity masked as vigil—is itself a mechanism of control.

From a Marxist perspective, waiting represents the suspension of agency, the internalization of a promise of future redemption that the existing order never fulfills. The soldiers hope for a grand moment of combat: a revolutionary rupture that might legitimize sacrifice, anchor their lives, and confer meaning. Yet that moment never arrives—or rather, it is always deferred. In such deferral lies the reproduction of an authoritarian militarized society: those who submit to the regime of waiting become complicit in sustaining it.

Venuti’s translation carefully preserves the texture of this waiting. As critics note, his “meticulous translation projects the cinematic landscape” of the fortress and the desert, rendering the uncanny and haunted stillness into English with palpable weight.   The very silence of the desert becomes a political void in which the system rules unchallenged.

Thus, Drogo’s life—spent in anticipatory stasis—is not a heroic vigil but a quietly tragic resignation. That this resignation is ideologically induced makes it a potent allegory for how authoritarian systems lull subordinate classes into self-discipline, conditional hope, and deferred revolution. The fetishization of the awaited enemy (the Tatars) parallels the mythologizing of a future revolutionary moment that never quite arrives.

Militarism, hierarchy, and the reproduction of power

Venuti’s translation makes salient the hierarchical relations and militaristic codes embedded in Buzzati’s text. In his afterword, Venuti recognizes that his translation consciously recovers rank terms and discursive registers omitted or muted in earlier translations (e.g. the address “tenente” vs. “lieutenant,” and “stivali” rendered as “jackboots”), precisely to signal the fascist inflections latent in the narrative world.  

This is more than a stylistic choice: it is a political intervention. The return of military ranks, the insistence on forms of address, and the strategic use of militaristic diction work to expose the fortress not as a timeless allegory but as a historically inflected locus of domination. The fortress is not merely a metaphoric stronghold of the self, but a citadel of coercive social order, modeled on fascist militarism. Venuti thus forces the English reader into encountering not a placeless existential parable but one deeply complicit with authoritarian structures.

From this vantage, Buzzati’s fortress becomes a microcosm of capitalist state apparatus: discipline, hierarchy, surveillance, rumor, and the suppression of dissent all operate within its walls. The soldiers’ daily routines, their attention to orders, to passwords, to chain of command, their internal policing of ambition—these are the mechanisms by which the system reproduces itself. Drogo’s yearning for recognition, his obedience, his fixation on orders—all reflect how subjected individuals internalize forms of authority.

A revolutionary reading must resist reading Drogo merely as tragic but passive, and instead see him as agent-structure dialectic: he is produced by, and yet also complicit in, the fortress system. The illusion of individual heroism masks deeper structural entrapment.

Alienation in the desert: toward a dialectics of landscape and subjectivity

Another dimension that a communist perspective brings into focus is the alienated relation between subject and environment. The Tatar Desert, the wasteland beyond the fortress, is a kind of negative space: absent enemy, uninhabitable void, faceless threat. Yet it exerts gravitational force on the soldiers’ consciousness. They project meaning into it; they watch for signs; they imagine troop movement. The desert becomes the site of deferred struggle, the horizon of utopian (or revolutionary) catastrophe.

Buzzati’s prose, mediated in Venuti’s translation, gives the desert both uncanny presence and ideological opacity. As Sarah Gear observes, Venuti’s translation evokes nature as both beautiful and menacing: “the Fortezza’s magic is conjured and sustained by Buzzati’s luscious imagery.”   The shifting of perspective between the tactile (rocks, mists, ramparts) and the hallucinatory (silhouetted peaks, vast mists) captures how the terrain itself becomes internalized. Rather than a neutral backdrop, the desert is part of the ideological machinery.

From the revolutionary lens, then, this alienation is twofold: the soldier is alienated from other human life (family, community outside); and alienated from the land he surveils. The desert is abstracted, depersonalized, waiting for an enemy who may never exist. Drogo’s consciousness is colonized by this waiting. The landscape is not his to inhabit but to vigil over. That the border remains inert underscores the futility of militarized guardianship of abstraction.

Yet in this alienation lies potential contradiction. The fact that the desert is never breached, and that time constrains the possibility of action, could generate crisis. The silence, the deferred horizon, may be read as potential negative space for rupture. The absence of event is itself a fissure in the system’s legitimacy—but only if awakened.

Venuti’s translation as political intervention

One of the most compelling dimensions of The Stronghold is the political self-awareness of Venuti’s translation project. Venuti has long advocated for “foreignizing” translation—making the translator visible, resisting the erasure of alterity, and resisting domestication.   His translation of Buzzati is an instance of that theory in practice. In his afterword, Venuti argues that The Stronghold should be read not simply as a universal existential parable, but precisely as a text with a “political unconscious” rooted in the experience of fascist Italy.  

The decisions he makes—to restore rank terms, to use “jackboots” to evoke fascist militarism instead of generic “boots,” to resist the smoothing over of the source’s ideological texture—are deliberate acts of ideological mediation. In doing so, Venuti does not present himself as a transparent conduit, but as an interpreter who contests earlier readings (notably Hood’s The Tartar Steppe) and re-anchors the novel in its political-historical moment.  

Such an epistemic intervention aligns with the revolutionary translator’s ethos: to reveal hidden power structures, to break illusions, and to provoke interpretive struggle in the reader. In that sense, the text becomes a site of struggle—not only between Drogo and the fortress, but between reader, translator, and social order.

Limits and potentials: toward a militant reading

No reading is without its caveats. One might argue that The Stronghold’s allegorical openness resists a purely historical or class-based reading. Buzzati’s refusal to name the enemy, his temporal indeterminacy, his atmospheric surrealism, may temper overly rigid ideological readings. Indeed, critics warn against reducing the text to a “veiled anti-totalitarian tract.”  

However, from a militant standpoint the very ambiguity is productive. The indeterminacy forces a confrontation: one must choose interpretive terms. The text invites regeneration via struggle, not passive adulation. Moreover, the sustained internal tension—the pull between existential anxiety and political critique—is precisely the kind of dialectical interplay that a revolutionary reading should embrace, rather than flatten.

Furthermore, one may critique that the individual subjectivity of Drogo remains overdetermined; the novel does not fully elaborate collective organizing, class struggle, or material conditions beyond the fortress. The revolutionary reader must supplement: reading not only the fortress but also the society that produces and supports it. The novel becomes a mirror: the fortress is a metaphor, but the structures of capital, colonialism, and state violence remain off stage. The activist critic must draw those in.

Nonetheless, The Stronghold, in Venuti’s translation, becomes a more potent text for radical reading than earlier versions. It invites us to see militarism, ideological deferral, and alienation in new clarity. It rewards a reading that does not resign to passive waiting but calls for human agency, collective awakening, and conscious rupture.

Conclusion

Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Buzzati’s The Stronghold is not a neutral act of linguistic mediation, but a politically self-conscious intervention that reinscribes the novel’s historical stakes. From a revolutionary communist perspective, the novel becomes a profound meditation on how militarism, waiting, hierarchy, and ideological alienation reproduce oppressive systems. Venuti’s deliberate choices amplify the political unconscious of the text, resisting the domestication of meaning and compelling readers to confront the social logics behind Drogo’s tragedy.

In teaching or research contexts, this translation is invaluable: it offers a renewed platform for class-critical, Marxist, or revolutionary readings of an existential classic. It enables us to see The Stronghold not as an escapist parable of inaction, but as a provocation: how do we resist the regime of deferred revolution? How do we turn waiting into struggle? Venuti’s version gives us that question with sharpened edges.