An advisor to Italian publishing houses, a translator of Freud and Jung, a friend of Montale and Calvino, Roberto Bazlen was nothing if not a literary man, but kept his writings to himself.

Here, translated into English for the first time, the reader will discover Bazlen’s private oeuvre: an unfinished novel, The Sea Captain, which bears comparison with the fiction of Kafka and Beckett; a selection of entries from his notebooks dealing with topics as various as whether or not there is an “animal Jahweh” and the aesthetic limitations of the cinema; a trio of essays on his native city of Trieste; and a sampling of his editorial letters. Notes Without a Text is an introduction to the work of one of the unknown masters of twentieth-century European literature.