The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Fascism, in Italy, was declined linguistically, to the extent of enforcing a ‘pure Italian’ free from foreign words and expressions. Under Fascism a croissant became a cornetto, a bar became a quisibeve (‘here one drinks’) and football, invented by the English, became calcio. Even the pronoun lei (as opposed to voi) was prohibited as a second-person pronoun because it was claimed to be a Spanish grammatical import, and also because it sounded ‘feminine’. In any overview of Italian literature in the twentieth century, the history of the language must come into consideration. The regime sought to standardize and flatten the language, to weed out dialect and other anomalies, above all, to turn it inward. And it was in that very moment that Italy’s writers, at least a considerable number of them, turned defiantly outward. The entire twentieth century can be read as a battle of wills between the wall Fascism sought to erect around Italy and Italian culture, and those – many of the writers represented here very much among them – determined, despite running grave risks, to break it down.

  The forty authors on my list hailed from all parts of Italy, though I acknowledge that my base in Rome and my love for southern Italy contributes a slant. They came from rich families and poor ones. They had all sorts of political leanings and varying degrees of political commitment. Stylistically, they covered the spectrum: Realist, neoRealist, avant-garde, fantastic, Modernist, postmodernist. Some cultivated literary fame; others actively shunned it. Many were celebrated, powerful, influential figures. A few never saw their work published in their lifetime.

  If there is a dominant point of reference, it is the Second World War. The writer Cristina Campo called it ‘the abyss that had split apart the century’;4 indeed, this cataclysmic caesura is what links the vast majority of these authors. Two were in Nazi concentration camps, and another escaped en route to one. At least a dozen were forced to live, for a time, in hiding, either because they were members of the anti-Fascist Resistance, or because they were Jews. The Second World War and its aftermath drastically and irrevocably altered Italian society, penetrating the collective consciousness, traumatizing it, but eventually reinvigorating it culturally and economically. The proliferation of literary magazines after the war, the redoubled and innovative publishing initiatives and the spirit of community and collaboration among writers, means that this time is now regarded as something of a golden age in Italian literary culture. Having said this, and in spite of the myriad personal connections among many of these authors, the anthology contains powerful meditations on alienation, estrangement, states of solitude. The only true common ground for each of these authors is the Italian language, an invention in and of itself, described by Leopardi as ‘piuttosto un complesso di lingue che una sola’ (‘a complex of languages as opposed to a single one’).5 It was imposed upon a linguistically and culturally diverse population, late in the nineteenth century, when the separate regions of Italy were unified in the name of national identity.

  The roots of the modern Italian short story are themselves hybrid: at once deep and shallow, at once foreign and domestic. In assembling this anthology, one indispensible font of information was the anthology dedicated to the Italian short story in the twentieth century edited by Enzo Siciliano (1934–2006), for Mondadori’s i Meridiani series. Siciliano was a writer, critic and journalist from Rome, and he became the editor of the influential literary journal Nuovi Argomenti after the death of its founder, Alberto Moravia. There are in fact two versions of Siciliano’s anthology: a single volume running to nearly fifteen hundred pages without notes (featuring seventy-one authors, published in 1983) and then across three volumes (with a revised introduction and a grand total of two hundred and ninety-eight authors, including himself, published in 2001).

  In his introduction, Siciliano traces the Italian short story back to the Middle Ages, to the anonymously written, thirteenth-century Novellino, containing episodes and characters drawn from the Bible and classical and medieval mythology, to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (likely composed between 1349 and 1351) and to Matteo Bandello, whose sixteenth-century Novelle (he wrote over two hundred of them) may have inspired the plots of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing via French translation. Between Bandello and Boccaccio one must also acknowledge Masuccio Salernitano, whose own Novellino, a collection of fifty posthumously published tales, included one noted for being among the sources for Romeo and Juliet.

  What, the reader may ask, is a novellino? It is a book that gathers together various novelle (the plural of novella), which, in Italian, is not a slim novel, but rather, a word used to describe a short story or a tale. Though Boccaccio titled his great work The Decameron, he explicitly refers to the tales themselves as novelle. Siciliano investigates the difference between the term novella and racconto in Italian, seemingly interchangeable terms, both to be differentiated from romanzo, the word for novel. The word racconto, with its Latin root, is etymologically connected to the English ‘recount’: a telling again. A racconto aims to communicate a story, personally and purposefully, to a listener. Thus raconteur, a French word that has also become English, refers specifically to a human figure, a storyteller, especially a captivating one. The spirit of the racconto implies a dynamic relation, with at least two people involved; though distinct from dialogue, it indicates a form, immediate and typically brief, of exchange. In modern Italian, the verb raccontare is commonly used, in conversation, when people want to narrate something casually but colourfully, imbuing this literary term with ongoing quotidian currency. That Siciliano’s anthology promotes the word racconti in the title (Racconti Italiani del Novecento) is in and of itself making a statement, positing the form along a decidedly modern axis where Guy de Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert and Anton Chekhov serve as coordinates, thereby distinguishing the racconto from the more classically rooted novella.

  Fleeting by nature, short stories, in spite of their concision and concentration, are infinitely elastic, expansive, probing, elusive – suggesting that the genre itself is essentially unstable, hybrid, even subversive in nature. In discussing Moravia’s Roman Tales, called Racconti romani, and a cornerstone of the twentieth-century Italian short-story tradition, Siciliano cites Moravia’s illuminating observation that a racconto is something born from intuizione, intuition. I agree. In some sense it is the novel, in Italy, which is the interloper, the imported genre. Alessandro Manzoni and Giovanni Verga looked to France and to England for models, Grazia Deledda to the Russians, Italo Svevo to the central European tradition. The novel, according to Moravia, derives from reason, and is imbued with structure, elements that short stories routinely undermine and resist. Indigenous to Italy, racconti have thrived for centuries, and they constitute a continuum, cross-pollinating with the world’s literature in ways that the longer Italian form has not.

  Siciliano’s volumes were indispensable to me, travelling back and forth across the Atlantic, those navy-blue bricks with their sewn-in ribbons to mark one’s place lined up on my desk, and I recommend them to those who read Italian and wish to broaden their perception of the short form in Italy. Even for those who don’t read Italian, the index alone, listing all the authors’ names, is the first place I would direct those in search of suggested further reading. To leaf through them is to glimpse the thrilling sweep of the ocean from above, as opposed to navigating the more manageable but partially uncharted bay I have demarcated.

  Every language is a walled entity. English is a particularly fortified one. To step outside the Anglophone world is to grow aware of the near-total domination of the English language when it comes to what is being read and celebrated as literature today. It is a domination that few, at least on the English-speaking side of the border, stop to question. I am aware that my orientation at the moment – to look outside English, and to put forth for consideration what is now overlooked even in Italy – separates me from the literary mainstream both in the Italian- and English-language context. In Italy, I note the overwhelming number of English-language authors pro
minently displayed in bookshops, and reviewed, each week, in newspapers and magazines; the number of prizes and residencies and festivals designed to host and honour English-language authors in Italy. I myself have been the grateful recipient of such invitations, prizes and residencies. And yet the discrepancy is clear. The fact remains that Italian writers, for good and for ill, for well over a century now, have looked outside their own literature for inspiration, and the tradition of translation out of English, at least on behalf of Italian publishers, is critical, not peripheral, to the literary landscape.

  Of these forty stories, sixteen have not been translated into English until now, and nine have been retranslated intentionally for this anthology. The vast majority, I imagine, will be fresh discoveries for English readers. And of these forty authors, a great many have been ignored and thus practically forgotten in Italy as well. Most of the magazines in which they originally appeared no longer exist. There was a period, particularly after the Second World War, when small literary journals, many of them founded by the authors in this anthology, flourished in Italy. Some were short-lived but editorially clamorous. Each represented a hope, a different direction, a new cultural climate or point of view. They put short stories at the forefront. Their presence corresponded to a period of extraordinary literary ferment, and their editors prided themselves on promoting new, innovative, heterodox voices. They were proof of how individually published short stories, free from the economic machinery of book publishing, are by definition autonomous texts: a source of resistance, a means for creative risk and experimentation. Fortunately, there are still talented young writers in Italy who embrace the short form, and once in a while, in Italy as in other places, a short-story collection creeps on to the shortlist for a major literary prize. Another promising sign is Racconti Edizioni, a Roman publishing house founded in 2016, dedicated exclusively to publishing short-story collections.

  Until recently, schools of creative writing were unheard of in Italy. They are beginning to grow in numbers, though they remain independent from academic institutions. The term scrittura creativa (creative writing) and the borrowed term ‘storytelling’ have entered the vocabulary, but their meanings are still largely shrouded in mystery, regarded, rightly, as foreign phenomena. What has happened in the United States and, to a lesser degree, also in Great Britain – the reign of the Master of Fine Arts and the calculated marriage between art and academy – has not yet been sanctioned in Italy, and as a result, most Italian writers still have, by and large, a different centre of gravity, either as journalists or scholars or editors, or, in some cases, all of the above. The separation between writers and publishers is less rigid in Italy, and the editorial milieu, more intimate, less corporate than its American counterpart, is an engrossing story in and of itself. Tracing its evolution and dynamics is fundamental to understanding how and why so many short stories were written in Italy in the course of the previous century, and in such a rich array of styles. The Chronology at the end of this volume operates on two tracks: providing background on the historical and political events that accompanied these authors’ lives, while paying attention to the country’s publishing history as well.

  As I was nearing the completion of this project, Italy was in the process of electing a new government, with xenophobic parties gaining electoral sway. NeoFascist violence towards immigrants has been on the rise, and the government still denies birthright citizenship to Italians with foreign-born parents. In spite of this distressing reality, Italy has become a second home to me, and Italians have, on the whole, welcomed my efforts to explore their literature and experiment with their language with an outsider’s sensibility. In spite of those who aim to control borders, deny passage and to restrict Italy to ‘Italians first’ (‘Prima gli italiani’), Italy’s identity – including the very definition of ‘Italian’ as it applies to the current population – is radically changing, and its literature, always an open system, further enriched by these changes, continues to diversify.

  Language is the substance of literature, but language also locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity. Translation, in the end, is the key. This volume, which honours so many writer-translators, is as much a tribute to the Italian short story as it is validation of the need – aesthetic, political, ethical – for translation itself. I am enormously grateful to the team that has worked to bring the works of these writers into English for the first time, or to retranslate stories with greater accuracy and intuition. In the process of editing their contributions I have deepened my own awareness and respect for what it means to transport literature from one language to another, and I have redoubled my commitment to doing so. Only works in translation can broaden the literary horizon, open doors, break down the wall.

  I have ordered these stories in reverse alphabetical order, by author’s last name. It is an arbitrary sequence, but it is also serendipitous that Elio Vittorini appears first. In 1942, Vittorini published Americana, an anthology of thirty-three largely unknown American authors – among them, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Willa Cather. But this was no mere gathering of authors; it was a massive, collective translation enterprise, featuring contributions by some of the most important Italian writers of the time, including Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese and the Nobel Laureate poet Eugenio Montale. The objective of Americana was to introduce iconic American voices to Italian readers. For America, too, was a fabulous projection in the minds of many Italians of that generation: a legendary place that stood for youth, rebellion, freedom and the future. But this projection, at least Vittorini’s version of it, was no escapist disconnect from reality, but rather, a form of both creative and political dissidence, a heroic, courageous connection, by means of literature, to a new world.

  The first edition of Americana, to be published by Bompiani, was banned by Mussolini’s regime. It passed the censors only after Vittorini removed his critical commentaries on the individual authors, and Emilio Cecchi, a critic in good graces with the Fascist government, wrote an introduction. To leaf through the book today – it runs to over one thousand pages long – is to traverse a bridge that feels nothing short of revolutionary. Vittorini was my guiding light as I assembled this book. I followed his example in writing the brief author biographies – intended as partial sketches and not definitive renderings – that preface each story, and it is in homage to him and to that landmark work – to the spirit of saluting distant literary comrades, of looking beyond borders and of transforming the unknown into the familiar – that I offer the present contribution.

  Rome, 2018

  NOTES

  1. From the preface to La ricerca delle radici, in Primo Levi, Opere complete, vol. I, ed. Marco Belpoliti (Torino: Einaudi, 2017). Published in English as The Search For Roots: A Personal Anthology, ed. and trans. Peter Forbes (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002). Originally commissioned and published by Einaudi in 1981, the anthology – a miscellany of formative readings particularly dear to Levi – consisted of thirty texts chosen, excerpted, introduced and, in five cases, translated by the author. Among the selections were works by Charles Darwin, Marco Polo and Paul Celan. (The reference within the citation itself is to Jorge Luis Borges’ A Personal Anthology, a compilation of Borges’ works edited by himself, first published in Spanish in 1961 and translated and published in Italian in 1962.)

  2. Leopardi’s poem is based on the Batrachomyomachia, a parody of Homer’s Iliad which has been translated from Ancient Greek into English as The Battle of Frogs and Mice. Leopardi translated the Batrachomyomachia and conceived of the Paralipomeni as a continuation of that work. Leopardi’s title for the latter work literally means ‘omissions’ (to the Batrachomyomachia).

  3. The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, trans. Jane Soamers (London: The Hogarth Press, 1933), p. 14.

  4. The citation comes from ‘La noce d’oro’ (‘The Golden Nut’), the story by Cristina Campo which is included in this anthology. In Italian it reads, ‘l’abisso che avrebbe spezzato
un secolo’.

  5. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi, ed. Michael Caesar and Franco Ditino, trans. Kathleen Baldwin et al. (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 202 [321], 13 Nov. 1820.

  Elio Vittorini

  1908–66

  The tiny Sicilian island of Ortigia, where Vittorini was born, is connected by an isthmus to Siracusa, home of an Ancient Greek theatre. A railway worker’s son, Vittorini left Sicily when he was nineteen years old to work on a construction site in the region of Venezia-Giulia. He was a proofreader for a newspaper in Florence, and it was there, thanks to a co-worker, that he learned English during his breaks, by translating, word for word, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. At the foreign books division of Mondadori, he was commissioned to translate a book by D. H. Lawrence, and he also translated Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, William Saroyan and John Steinbeck. His passion for translation would culminate in assembling the epic anthology Americana (see Introduction). But as one of the prime movers at Einaudi, Vittorini was also part of the ingenious editorial collective that galvanized Italian literature after the Second World War. His first book, Piccola borghesia (Petty Bourgeoisie), published in 1931, contained stories that had appeared in the anti-Fascist journal Solaria, criticized at the time for featuring the works of Jewish writers. His first major novel, Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversations in Sicily), reflects the cadences of the English language which he’d read, translated, absorbed and reconstituted into Italian. The American edition contains a glowing preface by Ernest Hemingway. This story, elusive, unadorned and understated, is a parable combining quotidian and supernatural elements. It showcases Vittorini’s penchant for dialogue, and places the acts of writing and naming at its very centre.