A young lieutenant is sent on his first posting to a remote fortress on the edge of an unknown empire. The outpost faces a vast desert to the north. Although no enemy has been spotted in decades, it is from this emptiness of bleak rock and dead sand that the invading forces will emerge. Day and night sentries peer from the battlements; an iron discipline prevails. The seasons come and go, months turn into years. Now and then a dark speck or a flicker of light shows on the far horizon. The lieutenant feels his hopes reawaken. Perhaps the invaders are finally mustering their troops. Perhaps the long-awaited battle will take place. Only that clash of arms, so long hoped for and so long feared, can justify his life. But the smudges on the horizon are too distant for his telescope; they fade out and his hopes vanish with them.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” John Milton wrote. But for Milton waiting was a supreme act of faith. In Dino Buzzati’s great novel “The Tartar Steppe” (David R. Godine, 198 pages, $17.95), translated by Stuart C. Hood, waiting is both a torment and an addiction. Not only Giovanni Drogo, the young lieutenant, but all the soldiers of Fort Bastiani, long for the legendary Tartars to appear. At first they are spurred by the hope of glory in battle but as the years of waiting draw on, the very purpose of their lives is thrown into question. Their fates are defined by an enemy who remains teasingly invisible.

Buzzati (1906–1972), though little known here, was one of the finest and most original Italian writers of the last century. Because he dealt in fantastic themes, and always delivered in dry style, he has been compared to Kafka and Borges as well as to Italo Calvino whom he influenced. The comparison is understandable — Buzzati certainly belongs in that company — but it is misleading. For one thing, Buzzati was amazingly prolific; in addition to his five novels, he wrote hundreds of short stories and countless articles and reviews for the newspaper Corriere della Sera whose staff he joined in 1922. But in fact, Buzzati was what Italians call a grafomane, an obsessive scribbler; he couldn’t stop writing. After jotting all day in the newspaper offices, he would continue in the evening, whipping out his notebook in the midst of dinner parties to lose himself in words.

In addition, Buzzati was a brilliant artist. His droll fable “The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily” (HarperCollins, 192 pages, $5.99), with an introduction by Lemony Snicket, who calls it “one of the noblest books I know,” is as magical for Buzzati’s own illustrations, as for his bearlike pounces between prose and verse. Like “The Little Prince,” this is one of those “children’s classics” adults can love too.

In his marvellous short stories, perhaps his greatest achievement, Buzzati took on all shapes, all skins, however alien; one of the most moving is told from the viewpoint of an aging wild boar. Buzzati believed that the mysterious can best be evoked by journalistic means; some of his boldest strokes read like news reports. But his dispatches, though compulsively readable, are not consoling. At one moment his hapless lieutenant muses:

We think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we see that we are completely alone.

“The Tartar Steppe,” which was first published in 1945, has been seen as a satire on military life. Certainly the futility of barracks life has seldom been so precisely conveyed. We watch Lieutenant Drogo age and change against a clanging backdrop of sentry patrols, maneuvers, and protocols, which become ever more pointless as the years pass, and yet there’s a strange comfort in the discipline. The fixed routines give structure to lives suspended in waiting. Outside, to the north, there is only “the desolate steppe, which had mystery but no meaning.”

Buzzati’s take on military matters is ambiguous. He makes much of the elaborate system of passwords at the fort — a system that leads to one officer’s death — or the coded music of bugle calls, as well as the way in which time itself is stratified and subdivided, day after day, year after year. But if this is satire, it’s a satire on us all, conscripted to the fortress of our expectations, hoping by secret signals and the solace of routine to push time back from the battlements, even as they crumble. The fort, as Lieutenant Drogo realizes, is “a world without splendour unless it were that of its rigid laws.”

This makes “The Tartar Steppe” sound like an allegory — it both is and isn’t. We see Giovanni Drogo pass before us in unmistakable detail; we pity him a little, we shake our heads at his foolishness, only to realize that it’s a foolishness neither he, nor we, can escape. Buzzati was an allegorist who coded his message with facts. We’re all waiting for the Tartars to give meaning to our lives.

eormsby@nysun.com