Sicilian Stories

Sicilian Stories

Novelle siciliane

A Dual-Language Book

Giovanni Verga

Edited and Translated by

STANLEY APPELBAUM

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Translations, Introduction, and footnotes copyright © 2002 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2002, contains the full Italian text of twelve stories by Giovanni Verga (see Introduction for bibliographic details), reprinted from a standard edition, plus new translations of each by Stanley Appelbaum, who also made the selection, wrote the Introduction, and supplied the footnotes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Verga, Giovanni, 1840–1922.

Sicilian stories/Novelle siciliane : a dual-language book / Giovanni Verga ; edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum.

p. cm.

Stories taken from his Vita dei campi and Novelle rusticane.

Contains the full Italian text with English translation.

ISBN 0-486-41945-2 (pbk.)

1. Verga, Giovanni, 1840–1922—Translations into English. I. Title: Novelle siciliane. II. Appelbaum, Stanley. III. Title.

PQ4734.V5 A22 2001

853′.8—dc21

2001042396

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
41945203
www.doverpublications.com

Contents

Introduction

Nedda / Nedda

From Vita dei campi (Rural Life)

Fantasticheria / Reverie

Jeli il pastore / Jeli the Herdsman

Rosso Malpelo / Nasty Redhead

Cavalleria rusticana / Rustic Chivalry

La Lupa / The She-wolf

L’amante di Gramigna / Gramigna’s Mistress

From Novelle rusticane (Rustic Stories)

Malaria / Pestilential Air

La roba / Possessions

Storia dell’asino di S. Giuseppe / The History of St. Joseph’s Donkey

Pane nero / Dark Bread

Libertà / Liberty

INTRODUCTION

Giovanni Verga: Life and Work

The family background of the man who has been called the greatest Italian short-story writer between Boccaccio and the 20th century was one of well-to-do comfort, with homes both in Catania (on the east coast of Sicily, just south of Mount Etna, it is the island’s second largest city, after Palermo) and in the countryside, where the Vergas possessed estates. Far from being grasping conservatives, however, the Vergas were liberal in politics and aspired toward the unification of Italy long before the actual event, which occurred during Giovanni’s lifetime. (Until he was twenty, Sicily was part of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, or “Two Sicilies.”)

Giovanni Verga was born in 1840, either in Catania (the “big city” of his Sicilian stories) or in Vizzini, a small town in the Iblei hills about thirty miles southwest of Catania, where he vacationed frequently as a child and teenager; Vizzini is the setting, whether named or not, of some of his most famous stories. Verga’s talent for writing was in evidence from his youth; by 1856 he had begun a novel (unpublished) about the American Revolution. His vocation as a writer quickly cut short his law-school days (1858). The year 1860 was of great significance to Sicily (conquest by Garibaldi and annexation to the Kingdom of Piedmont, which championed the unification of Italy) and to Verga personally, who became involved in the publication of periodicals and who published his novel I Carbonari della montagna (The Carbonari1 of the Mountain). From 1860 to 1864 Verga served in the National Guard.

In 1865 Verga first ventured north, to the more cosmopolitan and progressive areas of Italy, spending two months in Florence, which had just become the capital of the country (after Turin, in Piedmont). Besides working on novels, his favorite literary medium, he began trying his hand at plays in that year, though it would be nearly two decades before he really made a name for himself in the theater. From 1869 to 1871 he lived mainly in Florence, where he became part of the foremost literary circles, and continued to write novels and plays. In 1870, the year in which Rome was won for the Italian nation (it became the capital in 1871), Verga published in magazine installments the novel that first won him fame and income, Storia di una capinera (The History of a Blackcap [a species of bird]), about a girl who goes mad after her sweetheart marries her wealthier stepsister.

In 1872 Verga made his important move to Milan, which was to be his main base of operations until 1885 (or even until 1893, according to some chroniclers). At the time, Milan was at the cutting edge of Italian intellectual life, the home of the Second Romantic Movement and of Scapigliatura (“dissolute ways,” a movement in arts and letters that championed realism and naturalism as already practiced in France and elsewhere). In Milan, where he associated with writers of the stature of Arrigo Boito and composers of the stature of Giuseppe Verdi, his output of novels continued. His novels up to 1875 tend to be passionate love stories, often involving artists and writers moving in high society in northern Italy.

The 1874 short story “Nedda,” in which Verga nostalgically returned to Sicilian themes, with an amazing ability to recall the slightest, most telling details of the rural life he had observed as a well-to-do youngster, is universally considered to be the great breakthrough work that set his career in a new, and ultimately its most significant, direction. (Like the other stories included in this Dover volume, it is discussed in greater detail later in this Introduction.) However, he was slow to follow up that lead. His next novel, Eros, published in 1875, was in his earlier Milanese vein (translated into German the following year, it first made him known outside Italy). Before 1875 was over, though, he had begun sketches for a Sicilian novel.

Meanwhile, “Nedda” had made Verga more amenable to short-story writing (he hadn’t favored that form), which was, among other things, a quicker way to earn money than novel writing. Over the next two decades, he wrote dozens of stories for newspapers and magazines, most of which he would periodically gather into volumes, usually retouching or rewriting them. His first such volume, with no Sicilian story, was the 1876 Primavera e altri racconti (Spring, and Other Stories; “Nedda,” though out of place there, was added to the second edition of Primavera in 1877).

Between 1878 and 1880 Verga published in newspapers and magazines the eight Sicilian stories that were collected in the 1880 volume Vita dei campi (Rural Life), six of which are included in this Dover edition (the last two in the 1880 volume were “Guerra di Santi” [War of Saints] and “Pentolaccia”; a story of a different type was arbitrarily included by the publisher in the second edition of 1881, and in later editions the stories were further revised—to their detriment, it is generally thought—and placed in a new, less cogent sequence).

Also in 1880, Verga met again, after a ten-year separation, the writer Giselda Fojanesi, who was by then the wife of the writer Mario Rapisardi, an old school friend of Verga’s who had helped introduce him to Florentine society. This didn’t prevent Verga from beginning a three-year relationship with her (a confirmed bachelor, he was no celibate), which may be reflected in the story “Di là del mare” (Beyond the Sea) that concludes the volume Novelle rusticane (see below).

In 1881 Verga finally published the Sicilian novel he had been working on for at least six years: I Malavoglia (a family name; the book is generally known in English as The House by the Medlar Tree), which many critics consider his masterpiece (see the discussion of the story “Fantasticheria,” below). Luchino Visconti’s Neorealist film of 1948, La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), is based on I Malavoglia.

In 1882, the publication year of another non-Sicilian, “modern,” psychological novel, Verga visited his spiritual mentor Emile Zola at his retreat in Médan (near Versailles), and made a trip to London.

In 1883, Verga published two volumes of short stories, the poor-people-of-Milan collection, Per le vie (On the Streets), and the second Sicilian collection, Novelle rusticane (Rustic Stories).