Deledda Marianna Sirca

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-915568-40-3
Verlag: Dedalus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 236 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus European Classics

Brought up as a servant in the austere household of an uncle, Marianna is now a woman of property. But at thirty, she knows little of life. For others in the town of Nuoro and its surrounding hill farms, Sardinia is a harsh and unforgiving place. When she meets a former companion in service, now forced into banditry to support his family, her calm existence is turned upside down. The defining moment of her life has come. Does Marianna love for Simone Sole triumph over her common sense, social convention and what is expected of her by her family? Grazia Deledda explores the layers of temptation and doubt in a novel of Sardinian life coloured with her own intimate knowledge of its beauties and dangers.

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at 11. She published her first short story when she was 16 and her first novel, Stella D'Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was 19. Leaves Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settles in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she meets the civil servant Palmiro Madesani who she marries in 1900 and they move to Rome. Grazia Deledda writes her best work between 1903-1920 and establishes an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period is set in Sardinia. Publishes Elias Portolu in 1903. La Madre is published in 1920. She wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and received it in a ceremony the following year. She dies in 1936 and is buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Deledda, Grazia

Weitere Mitwirkende

Anderson, Graham

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda are on a bus, exploring the hinterland of Sardinia. It is a February afternoon in 1921. ‘Turning sharp to the right we ran in silence over the moorland-seeming slopes, and saw the town beyond, a little below, at the end of a long declivity, with sudden mountains rising around it. There it lay, as if at the end of the world, mountains rising sombre behind… we slip into the cold high street of Nuoro. I am thinking that this is the home of Grazia Deledda, the novelist, and I see a barber’s shop. Deledda. And thank heaven we are at the end of the journey. It is past four o’clock.’ They check in at an inn, then set off on foot to see the town. ‘We came to the end of the street, where there is a wide, desolate sort of gap… there was a café in this sort of piazza — not a piazza at all, a formless gap… but I knew it would be hopeless to ask for anything but cold drinks or black coffee: which we did not want. So we continued forward, up the slope of the village street. These towns soon come to an end. Already we were wandering into the open… we came to the end of the houses and looked over the road-wall at the hollow, deep, interesting valley below. Away on the other side rose a blue mountain, a steep but stumpy cone. High land reared up, dusky and dark-blue, all around. Somewhere far off the sun was setting with a bit of crimson. It was a wild, unusual landscape, of unusual shape. The hills seemed so untouched, dark-blue, virgin-wild, the hollow cradle of the valley was cultivated like a tapestry away below. And there seemed so little outlying life: nothing. No castles even. In Italy and Sicily castles perching everywhere. In Sardinia none — the remote, ungrappled hills rising darkly, standing outside of life.’ At the time of the Lawrences’ visit, Grazia Deledda, the novelist, was living in Rome. She had married and left her native island in 1900. But she had taken with her nearly thirty years of life among the remote, ungrappled hills, and the evocation of this lonely place, its inhabitants’ way of life, their ancient customs and close-knit families, had become the subject of her prolific output. In all, she wrote over thirty novels, two hundred and fifty short stories and two plays. It was an astonishing transformation for a young woman no one had heard of, from a small town that very few had heard of. She was born in Nuoro in September 1871, the fifth of seven children, to a fairly prosperous family, although her mother spoke no Italian, only the island language, Sard. Deledda herself had a brief elementary schooling lasting just five years, before receiving lessons at home from an Italian tutor. But she had immediately been seized with a passion for reading, and the tutor’s books, along with those from the library of her uncle, a priest, formed the basis of her ongoing education and the inspiration behind her desire to emulate the authors she admired. A story published soon after her move to Rome, The Queen of Darkness (1902), tells the tale of a young woman’s mysterious spiritual sickness, a gradual dissolution of the soul which is only remedied when the young woman, in a flash of understanding, realises that her real purpose in life, her calling, is to become a writer and to describe through her art the people and surroundings which have shaped her identity. Already, as a teenage girl, Deledda had begun to write poems and short stories of her own. She found outlets for their publication in a number of Sardinian magazines and periodicals, for she was a bold and persistent pursuer of local and regional editors. She even wrote to the Rome-based fashion magazine L’ultima moda, who published some of her early works in the late 1880s. Her first novel, Stella d’Oriente, a romance, appeared in 1890; her second, Fior di Sardegna, the following year. Racconti sardi and Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna, both in 1894, were early examples of her life-long interest in collecting and preserving the folk tales and customs of her island. It was in 1896 that the distinguished writer and critic Luigi Campuana wrote a long and detailed appreciation of her novel La via del male (The Way of Evil) and enabled Deledda to consider herself ready for a wider stage. Nuorese life may have been the subject of her fictions, but the constraints of its reality were becoming burdensome. It was not thought fitting that a young woman, at that period and in that society, should wish to take up a literary career at all, still less use her fellow citizens and the poor and struggling rural peasants as her material. Needing to find a way out, she was introduced, on a visit to Cagliari in 1899, to a handsome and kindly member of the island’s civil service, Palmiro Madesani, and in a matter of months they were married. Madesani’s transfer to the Finance Ministry in Rome, arranged in part through Deledda’s powers of persuasion, enabled the couple to make the move in March 1900. In December of that year, their first son, Sardus, was born; and in 1904 their second, Francesco. The new environment swiftly brought Deledda wider recognition. Her 1900 novel, Elias Portolu — and particularly its French translation in the prestigious Paris journal La revue des deux mondes in 1903 — became her first true success. Its subject, the inappropriate relationship that forms between Elias, an ex-convict, and his brother’s fiancée, the muddled and indecisive debate in Elias’ mind, his eventual retreat into the priesthood, his mixed feeling after the deaths of the other two, the awareness of rules observed but lives left unfulfilled — all these were to become significant themes in Deledda’s later works. She published a new book almost every year. Notable novels included Cenere (Ashes, 1904), L’ombra del passato (The Shadow of the Past, 1907), L’edera (The Ivy, 1908) and Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind, 1913). Marianna Sirca came out in 1915, at what might be considered the mid-point of her mature career. La madre (The Mother, 1920) has come to be regarded as one of her most intense and representative pieces, the story of a young priest, his poor but ambitious mother, and the young woman with whom he falls in love. Grazia Deledda was now 49, and although she could not have known it, the 35-year-old DH Lawrence was well aware of her presence on the literary scene, as witnessed in the excerpt above from his travel book Sea and Sardinia (US, 1921; UK, 1923). Further works continued to pour from her pen: three in 1921 alone, one in 1922, two more in 1923, notably Silvio Pellico. La fuga in Egitto (The Flight Into Egypt, 1925) was the most recent novel she had published when the news came that the committee in Stockholm had awarded her the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature. She collected it at a ceremony in Sweden the following year, managing only the briefest of speeches. Although a warm and relaxed woman in familiar company, her basically reserved nature made public appearances a trial. Her ambition was certainly fierce, but she was wary of the unknown and preferred to live quietly, away from the spotlight. Episodes of ill health had begun to occur at about this time. Breast cancer was eventually diagnosed and a successful operation performed. She continued to write, industrious and disciplined. Many of her later books were lighter and more optimistic in tone: the collection of stories, fables and girlhood reminiscences of Il dono di natale (The Christmas Present, 1930), the novels Il paese del vento (The Land of the Wind, 1931) and Sole d’estate (Summer Sun, 1933) being examples. Her health, however deteriorated in the following years, and she died, in Rome, in August 1936, a few weeks short of her 65th birthday. Marianna Sirca, her novel of 1915, is both typical and unusual. Its setting, once again, is Nuoro and the surrounding sheep pastures and cork-oak forests. Poverty and relative affluence live side by side. Born in a humble situation, Marianna is placed when still a child in the household of her uncle, a priest and owner of a comfortable house in the town. Her father, Berte Sirca, an efficient farmer but in other respects a weak man, hopes his only daughter will enjoy a better life than he can provide for her on their tanca up in the hills. And indeed, on the priestly uncle’s death, Marianna inherits everything, the farm holdings as well as the house. But she has become la padrona at a cost. Her youth has been lost, spent effectively in service to the uncle. The elderly servant Fidela is her only companion in the Nuoro house. Her older cousin Sebastiano, a sometimes mocking, sometimes wistful admirer, makes her uncomfortable. She is already thirty, yet feels she has never truly lived. The unexpected reappearance of a young man who was once a servant alongside her in the priest’s house completely upsets her uneventful life of obedience to the wishes of others. This man, after many failed attempts to get on in life, has run away to become a bandit. It may be hard to imagine that outlaws still existed at the turn of the twentieth century, but the remoteness of Sardinia from the mainland and its modern ways, the long tradition of rugged self-survival, of family feuds settled by violence, of lives — criminal or merely escapist — being lived outside the community, still persisted. Simone Solo, as it turns out, is a sadly ineffectual bandit. He commits small robberies but is insufficiently ruthless to spill Christian blood. Inside him...