The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Page 27
Chapter 2
1. infornata del Decennale: Tenth anniversary of the Fascist Party’s assumption of power, in which the membership was thrown open to all.
2. Podestà: Municipal Chief of Justice and Police during the Fascist era.
3. the Albertine Statute: This ‘Statute’, which King Carlo Alberto conceded to the Kingdom of Sardinia and most of north-west Italy in March 1848, was a kind of early constitution which was to have a lasting impact on the future Italian state. Here the irony, most likely, resides in the fact that this reference by the rabbi would be entirely lost on his Fascist audience.
4. Sansepolcrista: One of those who were Fascists before the 1922 March on Rome.
5. Opera Nazionale Ballila: Fascist youth organization.
Chapter 3
1. Liceo Ginnasio: In the Italian school system, after attending scuole elementari (elementary schools) from roughly the ages of 6 to 11 and scuole medie inferiori (essentially middle schools) from 11 to 14, students then attend a choice of licei (upper schools). Of particular relevance to Bassani’s novel is the liceo classico. This was, and still immutably is, divided in two: the ginnasio for the first two years (primo and secondo superiore), roughly from the ages of 14 to 16, and the liceo proper for three years (terzo, quarto and quinto), from the ages of 16 to 19.
2. Giosuè Carducci: (1835–1907), born in Valdicastello in the Maremma. He was one of the most renowned poets of his age and also Professor of Italian literature at Bologna until his retirement in 1904.
3. O bionda … tramandarono: ‘O blond, O beautiful empress, O trusted one’; ‘Where have you come from? Which past centuries / have bestowed you on us, you so mild and beautiful …’
Chapter 5
1. fille aux cheveux de lin: ‘The girl with flaxen hair’, a poem by Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle (1818–94) from his Chansons écossaises, subsequently adapted for a lyrical piano piece by Claude Debussy.
Part II
Chapter 1
1. fuori corso: Students who have not finished their courses in time but who are at liberty to attend classes until they choose to take their exams.
2. NH: Nobil Huomo, a title.
3. the Venice Littoriali: Littoriali della Cultura: Fascist cultural competitions for students.
4. Partner: In English in the original.
Chapter 2
1. Vittorio Alfieri: (1749–1803), Piedmontese poet and tragedian. He is often considered a precursor of Romanticism: alienated from society, politically rebellious, emotionally charged.
2. GUF: Gruppo Universitario Fascista: Fascist university students’ organization.
3. Bombamano: Hand-grenade. The ‘old heavies’ are a Fascist squad.
4. Sciagura: The word means disaster or misfortune.
Chapter 4
1. ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disìo …’: Dante, Purgatorio, canto viii: ‘It was already the hour when longing returns …’
2. Giovanni Prati’s Edmenegarda: Prati (1814–84), Romantic poet born near Trento, perhaps best remembered for his sonnets and lyrics of the 1870s. Edmenegarda was a successful short prose fiction.
3. Cecil Roth: (1899–1970), born in London, Roth was Reader in Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford from 1939 to 1964 and a prolific writer on Jewish history. His History of the Jews in Venice was published in 1930, and The History of the Jews of Italy in 1946.
Chapter 5
1. hermits of the Thebaid: Hermits who lived in the desert in the Thebaid, a region in the southernmost part of Upper Egypt, between the second and the fifth century CE.
2. But her sympathies … to exotic trees: Up until the 1980 edition, this short paragraph was in a more ample form: ‘Her sympathies, however, were by no means restricted to the exotic trees: they went out to the various species of palms; to the Manila tamarinds, which produced small deformed pods full of honey-flavoured pulp; to the agaves that sprouted “in the manner of menorah candelabra”, which – she explained to me – flower only once, after twenty, twenty-five years, and then die; to the eucalyptuses and the Zelkoviae sinicae, with their slender green trunks speckled with gold – regarding the eucalyptuses, she showed, without ever letting me know why, a peculiar diffidence: as if between her and “them”, in the distant past, something not too pleasant had occurred, something best left undisturbed.’
3. ‘vert paradis des amours enfantines’: From Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Moesta et errabunda’.
4. ‘Che fece … rifiuto’: Dante, Inferno, canto iii: ‘Who out of cowardice made the great refusal …’, commonly interpreted as a reference to Pope Celestine V.
Part III
Chapter 1
1. Machatý’s Nocturne: Gustav Machatý (1901–63), born in Prague. One of his most acclaimed films is Nocturno (1934), known in English as Nocturne.
2. “Poems of an Avant-gardist”: Avanguardista is ambiguous here, and most likely by intention. It may refer to a member of the Youth Fascist organization, the Avanguardia giovanile fascista, or to someone who belongs to an artistic vanguard.
3. “Non mi … sofferenza”: ‘Suffering, don’t leave me yet.’
4. “tutti … a Dio”: ‘All/the females of all/the serene animals/closest to God’ (Umberto Saba).
Chapter 2
1. shaddai: One of the names of God, here inscribed on a pendant.
Chapter 4
1. I died for Beauty – but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room –
He questioned softly ‘Why I failed’?
‘For Beauty’, I replied –
‘And I – for Truth – Themself are One –
We Brethren, are’, He said –
And so, as Kinsmen, met at Night –
We talked between the Rooms –
Until the Moss had reached our lips –
And covered up – our names –
2. the Invasion of the Hyksos: The Hyksos (from an Egyptian phrase meaning ‘rulers of foreign lands’) are generally thought to be the Semitic or Asiatic Fifteenth Dynasty rulers of Lower and Middle Egypt (1674–1548 BCE), a succession of six kings. Their appearance has been described as an invasion by foreign barbarians with superior weapons.
Chapter 6
1. Lenbach: Franz von Lenbach (1836–1904), Bavarian painter and portraitist who travelled and painted in Italy.
2. the Historic Right: ‘Destra storica’, a moderate, liberal alliance which governed Italy between 1861 and 1876 and which created the basis of the new state.
3. ‘l’irto vinattier di Stradella’: This phrase (‘Stradella’s bristly wine seller’) is from Carducci’s poem ‘Roma’ in his Odi barbare, (The Barbarian Odes, 1877, 1882 and 1889). Bassani has abbreviated the phrase which is actually: ‘l’irto spettrale vinattier di Stradella’.
Chapter 7
1. Caprét … Padre: ‘The little goat the Father bought’.
Part IV
Chapter 3
1. Maudit soit … I’honnêteté: From the poem ‘Femmes Damnés: Delphine et Hippolyte’ by Charles Baudelaire:
May that clueless dreamer be for ever cursed,
who, stupidly obsessed with arid problems,
first thought that anything to do with fairness
might be involved with matters of the heart.
2. Israel Zangwill: (1864–1926), Jewish writer born in London whose most famous novel was Children of the Ghetto (1892). As well as being a successful novelist and dramatist, he was a pacifist, a supporter of women’s suffrage and a political activist, strenuously involved in the Zionist aspiration to find a Jewish homeland.
3. ‘You are fishing for compliments’: In English in the original.
Chapter 4
1. Don Abbondio: One of the principal characters in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.
Chapter 5
1. Cena delle beffe: The Feast of the Jesters play was written by Sem Benelli in 1909
and subsequently made into an opera and a film.
Chapter 7
1. ‘Non chiederci … da ogni lato’: The first line of a famous early poem by Eugenio Montale: ‘Don’t ask from us the word squared off on every side’. The next reference to the poem is its last line: (All that we can tell you today) ‘is what we are not, what we don’t want.’
2. ‘Lament for … Mejías’: ‘Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ by Federico García Lorca, an elegy for his friend, the bullfighter, fatally gored in the bullring at Manzanares.
Epilogue
1. CSIR: Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia: Italian expeditionary troops sent to Russia in 1941.
2. ‘le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’: ‘The virginal, evergreen, beautiful today’: the opening line of the second of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Plusieurs sonnets’.
THE BEGINNING
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First published as Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini in Turin 1962
Published in Penguin Classics with an Introduction 2007
Introduction copyright © Jamie McKendrick, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-34772-0
PART1: CHAPTER 2
fn1Ferrara Jewish dialect: bigoted; plural halti.
PART1: CHAPTER 4
fn1Ferrarese dialect: literally, ‘black (or benighted) Gentiles’.
fn2Congregation of a minimum of ten adult males.
fn3Prayer shawl; plural: tallitot.
fn4Mixture of Spanish and Venetian dialect: ‘What are you up to? Come on, Giulio, get up, will you! And make the boy stand up as well.’
fn5Ferrara Jewish dialect: bigotry.
fn6Hebrew: Blessing.
fn7Hebrew: God bless and keep you …
PART II: CHPATER I
fn1Venetian dialect: small, young.
fn2Hebrew: handmaid.
fn3Hebrew: sage or teacher.
fn4Hebrew: ehal: Ark; parochet: curtain before the Ark.
PART II: CHAPTER 4
fn1Milanese dialect: ‘What a big place Milan is!’
PART II: CHAPTER 5
fn1Ferrarese dialect: roughly speaking, matriarch.
PART III: CHAPTER 1
fn1Ferraresa Jewish dialect: a Jewish woman.
PART III: CHAPTER 3
fn1Yiddish: ritually slaughter.
PART IV: CHAPTER 1
fn1Ferrarese dialect with Veneto inflection: ‘Don’t ask me!’
PART IV: CHAPTER 2
fn1Ferrarese dialect: flaming.
PART IV: CHAPTER 4
fn1Ferrarese dialect: gang.
PART IV: CHAPTER 7
fn1Good on you, Baldissar! Well done at last, you midget!
It was about time too you’d come to see me:
d’you realize, you mad pig, it’s nearly
a month you’ve not been here to fuck me?
Ah, Jesus! Jesus! How cold these hands have got!
fn2No, Ghittina: I’m incapable
of betraying you: no, of that you can be sure.
You oughtn’t to lump me together
with rascals and disreputables.
fn3Soldiers, fleeing from Lombardy …
fn4Think and toil, watch and listen,
the longer you live the more you learn;
me, should I be born one more time,
I’d be born a doorwoman’s cat!
For example, in Rugabella,
if I were born as Signor Pinin’s cat …
… [there’d be] bags of heart scraps,
mince and liver, the master’s cap
to sleep on top of …
PART IV: CHAPTER 8
fn1At last the dawn, so long looked out for,
herself appears between the shutter’s slats …
PART IV: CHAPTER 9
fn1Ferrarese dialect: ‘Where on earth have the two of you been out making trouble?’
fn2Ferrarese dialect: ‘Black business.’