‘You know nothing about what goes on in the world! If there’s a demonstration, and people are shouting long live so and so, or down with so and so, you don’t know what to say. You’ve no idea what’s needed!’
And Malerba’s response was always to nod his head. What was needed now was water for sowing. And next winter the barn would be needing a new roof.
AFTERWORD
Historical background
Giovanni Verga, despite being Italy’s greatest novelist remains almost unknown in the UK. At least his major novels and short story collections are now available to the English reader and the day must come when Verga gets the critical attention he deserves and a readership in this country as large as Thomas Hardy or Zola. Despite the success in recent years of some Italian writers, such as Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, there is little interest in Italian Literature in this country. The days when Italian Literature was accorded the stature of Latin and Greek, as the third classical language are long since gone. Elizabeth I, the most accomplished of English monarchs spoke and wrote Italian fluently, poets such as Milton wrote poems in Italian.
It was Italian that emerged as Europe’s first great national culture, when Latin was replaced by the vernacular in Europe. The Florentine writers, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio prepared the way for the flowering of the Renaissance, and Ariosto, Macchiavelli, Castiglione and Tasso. The excellence of the Renaissance gave way to the second rate, as the Italian City States declined, with Italy becoming a battle-ground for the French and Spanish. It was the victory of Spain, and their championing of the Counter-Reformation, which made ideas dangerous and literature empty. Italian Literature has yet to recover from the effects of this body blow to its culture. The few writers of excellence it has produced since the Renaissance gaining scant attention outside the confines of the Italian peninsula. Leopardi, Manzoni and Pirandello are known, if not read, while Verga, whose novel I Malavoglia, was translated into English for the first time in the 1890s is a stranger to most of the bookshelves of the British Isles.
The world Verga writes of has perhaps more interest for us today than ever, as industrialization and modern technology have swept aside the poverty and neglect of centuries in Sicily. Sicily was one of the poorest of the Italian States in 1840. It was ruled from Naples by the Bourbons, and had little in common with the advances of the Industrial Revolution as its feudal agrarian life continued much the same way it had for centuries. There was little wealth to be shared, so the upper classes exploited the lower classes without compassion.
The Bourbons like the other ruling families in Italy were far from secure. The moderate reforms of the Enlightenment and the advent of Napoleon had created aspirations which the Restoration did little to satisfy. Constitutional government, economic and social reforms were striven for but found little favour with the Italian monarchs. Insecure after their deposition by Napoleon they took refuge in absolutism and repression. Uprising and rebellions culminated in a year of revolutions in the Italian States, which brought back Giuseppe Garibaldi from South America to lead the heroic defence of the newly created Roman Republic. The revolutions of 1848 to 1849 failed but inspired the mood for change. The independent Kingdom of Piedmont in Northern Italy became the focus for the Italian Independence Movement, which aimed for a united Italy under the Piedmont King Victor Emanuel.
By 1859, with French help, the Piedmontese felt strong enough to wage war against the Austrians in Northern Italy. The early successes were brought to a halt, when the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, reached a treaty with Austria ending the war. Public opinion was outraged in Italy, and the government failed to return the conquered territories. There were ideas for extending the war to further parts of Italy, the most unlikely of these was to take the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Garibaldi’s volunteer force of one thousand set off in May 1860, poorly equipped, to Sicily. By his own example and inspiration, popular support and amazingly poor resistance by the vastly superior Bourbon troops, Garibaldi conquered the island in just a few months. Later he crossed the Straits of Messina and completed the rout of the Bourbons, before the command of the war was taken from him by Victor Emanuel.
With the annexation of Venice in 1866 and Rome in 1870 Italy was united under the rule of Piedmont. The capital of Italy changed from Turin to Florence in 1864 and to Rome in 1871, but despite its approach south the new state was very distant and inexplicable to the Sicilians, many of whom would have been happy to have had the Bourbons back. Higher taxes, compulsory conscription and rule from Rome, with little change in their standard of living led to revolts in Sicily. The Sicilians wanted to be ruled by the charismatic Garibaldi, referred to by some as the second Christ, and not by the uncomprehending northern dynasty of Savoy.
Verga in context
There was not much of a prose tradition for Verga to follow. Foscolo had written the first Italian novel, the ‘pathetic’ Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, an epistolary novel in the manner of Goethe’s Werther. A generation later Manzoni published I Promessi Sposi, a novel which had for the time, realism, psychological penetration and a wide list of characters, and for its heroes, two peasants. The novel was immediately successful and was rewritten by Manzoni in a new literary language based on modern Florentine, which became a model for later writers to follow. Most Italian critics consider this to be the finest novel of the century, but many readers find the overt moralizing and rose-coloured view of his peasant heroes get in the way of the narrative gifts of Manzoni.
There is nothing in Italian Literature to compare with I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), published in 1881, in which Verga had turned realism into high art. In language distorted to echo the dialect of the fishermen, and metaphors limited to those of the sea, Verga tells the story of the Malavoglia family, with very little narrative and with the action coming through the character’s own words. What started out as a document of social realism ends as an epic tale of human endeavour, and the triumph of the spirit.
It was to be the first of a cycle, I Vinti, the defeated, in which Verga would progress through society, examining how ambition and a desire for something more would cause the downfall of the vinti. In I Malavoglia it is Ntoni who is the vinto, as he aspires after the greater world of the city and its pleasures, bringing about the downfall of his family, as the harsh struggle for existence left no room for any aspirations. In Mastro Don Gesualdo it is the self-made man Gesualdo’s attempt to rise socially that brings him unhappiness. Apart from a few pages of the Duchessa di Leyra this was as far as Verga got in his cycle. It is on these two novels and his short stories that Verga’s fame rests.
Sparrow and other stories
Sparrow, or to give the novella its Italian name La Storia di una Capinera, was published in 1871, having appeared the year before in instalments in a magazine. It was Verga’s fourth published work of fiction and the first he had been paid for: one hundred lire from the Milanese publisher A. Lumpgnani. Verga was thirty-one.
Sparrow is a seminal work for Verga. He had begun writing his novels of passion set in the city in 1866 with Una Peccatrice and continued in this vein for the next ten years with Tigre Reale and Eros. This is Verga more in the style that D’Annunzio was to make famous later in the century than the Verga who became Italy’s greatest ever novelist. It is Sparrow which shows a different side to the young bohemian novelist. A long novella set in Sicily in the world he grew up in with the action taking place in the countryside outside Catania and in a convent inside Catania.
Verga’s mother Donna Caterina had been educated by nuns. Two of his aunts had taken the veil and a third, after time in a convent, remained, unmarried in the Verga household. The convent in which his mother had been raised was directly opposite the family house in Catania and here the family attended mass, hearing but not seeing the singing postulants and nuns. The reality of girls with no dowries being sent to the convent was still commonplace in Sicily despite the legislation of 1867, which tried to curb this practice.<
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It is an enclosed world, cut off from the reality of the rest of Italy and the characters are left to speak for themselves. We learn of an unconsummated love between the young novice let out of the convent owing to the plague and one of her neighbours, who is intended as a husband for her younger half-sister. It is a love of gestures, glances and barely expressed feelings, which destroys the serenity of the novice’s existence and her acceptance of her vocation as a nun. This passion which can’t lead anywhere, takes possession of her soul and eventually leads to her insanity. She is as much a victim as the fishermen of the Malavoglia family in I Malavoglia. Fate cannot be denied and the desire for more than life has to give, causes disaster. Sparrow like the major work of Verga touches the heart without moralising and sentimentalising. The reader feels anger and a strong sense of injustice for the young girl’s plight but the characters in the novel accept what happens as just the way life is. So too did the young novice and would have quite happily become a nun except for the plague which allowed her contact with something outside her world: the love for a man.
In Verga, not to accept one’s lot, however harsh, leads to disaster. The world beyond the enclosed communities of rural Sicily or even of Catania does not offer a solution to life’s problems, merely a dissatisfaction with one’s life and one’s inability to have a better life. This powerful driving force behind Verga’s major work begins in Sparrow.
While the women of the Verga family might have supplied the details about life in a convent in Catania an event in Verga’s adolescence was the emotional source for Sparrow. While at their country property in Vizzini, south-west of Catania to escape the cholera the fifteen year old Verga encountered the daughter of a neighbouring family, still in her convent dress, pale-skinned, dark-haired and beautiful. After several months of adoring her from afar he was able to put his arm round her waist at a dance, an exciting almost mystical experience for the young Verga. When the cholera abated the girl returned to her convent to become a nun. Later while visiting his aunt at the same convent Verga caught a glimpse of the young girl. It is this event, however apocryphal it might be, which makes Sparrow such an emotionally powerful and compelling work.
The appearance of the short story Nedda at the end of Verga’s period of bohemian novels marks the move away to Sicilian settings and themes and the world of fishermen and peasants. This is something new in Italian literature as Verga was not offering the Italian reading public books about themselves or their social superiors but about the lowest stratum of society living in the back and beyond. The style too was different. There was no authorial comment and you really believed that the characters were on a stage performing the drama of their own lives in their own words. The art, which was there in abundance, was concealed. What makes Verga’s short stories so appealing is the battle to survive, against the elements, whether the turbulence of the sea, the overpowering sun destroying the crops or the God-given catastrophes like cholera or the problems created by the encroachment of the outside world into their lives, with higher taxes, military service and war. Verga’s stories take on an epic character, becoming Gargantuan struggles and the stuff of Greek tragedies.
In his short stories very often just a few pages long Verga evokes an atmosphere and a mood which creates a very vivid drama which has a beginning, middle and end. In his few pages Verga packs in more than other writers manage in a full-length novel. In Temptation we have the story of an excursion for three young men which because of a chance encounter with a young peasant girl en route to the city to seek work ends in disaster as they give in to the temptation to flirt. The flirting gets out of hand and they end by raping the young girl and to hide their crime, murder her. We experience everything through their eyes, there is no moralising, no condemnation by the author and though the reader shares the horror of their action there is still an element of sympathy for them and the wish that they had resisted temptation.
In The Schoolmaster we have the story of a middle-aged brother and sister sharing a modest existence but which is transcended by their aspirations for love. It is painful to read this story of how life passed them by and the only love allowed to them was in their imagination. Both brother and sister are gently mocked for their pretensions, not by the author but by their own actions, however the details of their daily life and their love for each other endear them to the reader and the failure of their humdrum lives has an epic, tragic quality.
COPYRIGHT
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
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Publishing History
Sparrow first published by Dedalus in 1994
Republished with Temptation & Other Stories in 2002
First Dedalus ebook edition in 2013
Translation copyright © Christine Donougher 1994/2002
Printed in Finland by W. S. Bookwell
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A C.I.P. Listing for this book is available on request.
Sparrow (and other stories) Page 17