Action is no longer meaningful. The theatre of the absurd begins with Paleari’s puppet theatre that has a hole in the sky.
One might deduce from all this that Pirandello is responsible for everything that is most bleak about the modern stage. How then do we account for the strange sense of exhilaration that his plays so often convey? Perhaps the secret lies in that very lack of conclusion, in the uncertainty of identity, in the fact that so many of his characters live in their own fictions rather than in truths. The absurdity of the world grants man the freedom to fill the void with his own inventions. The villa in The Mountain Giants may be labelled as unlucky (La Scalogna), but it contains ‘a wealth beyond counting, a ferment of dreams’ (MG, p. 153). And this, as Cotrone goes on to explain, is because ‘The things around us speak and make sense only in those arbitrary forms that we chance to give them in our despair’.
THESE translations are based on the four-volume edition of the plays, Maschere nude (1986–2007) edited by Alessandro D’Amico for the Complete Works of Pirandello (Opere di Luigi Pirandello) under the general editorship of Giovanni Macchia. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore and Enrico IV are in volume ii and I giganti della montagna in volume iv.
The aim of this book is to provide an accurate, readable, and eventually actable translation of three plays by Pirandello. It is not an adaptation or what is commonly called ‘an acting version’. The settings have not been updated to the twenty-first century and the idiom chosen is not so contemporary as to let us forget that Pirandello was a contemporary of Bernard Shaw. The extensive stage directions, sometimes abridged in previous translations, are here given in full because they frequently assume a narrative function, commenting on the action or providing insight into the psychology of the characters. We are reminded that for Pirandello a play is not only a performance for spectators but also a text for readers.
Act divisions are indicated only for Henry IV. That the intervals in Six Characters do not amount to act divisions is expressly stated by Pirandello himself. As for the unfinished Mountain Giants, the whole situation is confused by the fact that we have three numbered sections plus an account by Stefano Pirandello of a fourth ‘moment’ that would have constituted the third act. Under the circumstances, most editors have rightly been reluctant to label the completed sections as acts.
An asterisk in the text indicates an explanatory note at the end of the book.
For the titles ‘Marchese’ and ‘Marchesa’ in Henry IV I have preferred to keep the Italian terms rather than using the French-sounding ‘Marquis’ and ‘Marquise’. For the historical figure of Matilda of Tuscany, however, I have used ‘Countess’ which is how she appears in most English and Italian histories of the period.
Punctuation is the one area where I have felt obliged to take some considerable liberties with the original text. The problem lies in Pirandello’s repeated use of dashes, dots of suspension, and, above all, exclamation marks where there seems little to indicate a particularly agitated or emphatic utterance. One finds the same practice in Strindberg and in the German expressionists, but to reproduce it consistently in English would surely be counter-productive.
My thanks go to Simona Cain Polli, Jennifer Lorch, and Marco Sabbatini for their help and encouragement and to my editor Judith Luna for the scrupulous attention she has given to this volume. I am also grateful to Pedro Carol for keeping my files in order and to the unfailingly courteous librarians of the Bibliothèque universitaire de Genève for their assistance with inter-library loans. My greatest debt is to John C. Barnes whose meticulous and sensitive scrutiny of this translation has made it more accurate and more readable than it would otherwise have been: he has, however, always left the final decision to me and is in no way responsible for the remaining infelicities.
IN keeping with the general policy of Oxford World’s Classics, this bibliography is restricted to works in English. These, fortunately, offer an abundance of perceptive comment on Pirandello and especially on the plays. Previous translations of the plays are too numerous to be listed here, but there is no complete English edition of Pirandello’s theatre. The four-volume set of Collected Plays edited by Robert Rietti for Calder (1987–95) is the most substantial compilation to date, but omitted much of the later work for copyright reasons: it is now being re-edited and completed for Alma Classics. Pirandello’s abundant production of short stories is still under-represented in translation.
Biography and Autobiography
Giudice, Gaspare, Pirandello: A Biography, trans. [and abridged] Alistair Hamilton (London, 1975).
Pirandello’s Love Letters to Marta Abba, trans. and ed. Benito Ortolani (Princeton, 1994).
Fiction
One, No One, One Hundred Thousand, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1990).
The Late Mattia Pascal, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1964).
The Old and the Young, trans.
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