Zeno's Conscience


 

ZENO’S CONSCIENCE

Italo Svevo

 

A Novel

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY William Weaver

Translation copyright © 2001

Originally published in 1923

ISBN 0-375-41330-8



CONTENTS:

Preface by Elizabeth Hardwick


Translator’s Introduction


Map of Zeno’s Trieste


ZENO’S CONSCIENCE

Preface


Preamble


Smoke


My Father’s Death


The Story of My Marraige


Wife and Mistress


The Story of a Business Partnership


Psychoanalysis


PREFACE


Sometimes the eye falls upon a dusty volume on the shelves, a book read more than once but not for some years. And there it was: Zeno’s Conscience, by Italo Svevo, published in Italian in 1923 and in English in 1930.* In 1923, Svevo (1861—1928) was sixty-two years old, but Zeno’s Conscience was not his first book. There were others, each published at his own expense, including the brilliant Senilità (As a Man Grows Older), published in 1898, when Svevo was thirty-seven. The gap would indicate disappointment or despair or perhaps a sensible financial calculation since Svevo was a burgher, a somewhat idle man of business, familiar with the bourse: a merchant of submarine paint.

Everything about Svevo was somehow split in two, his psyche and his very existence. His true name was Ettore Schmitz. As for his parentage, his father was a German Jewish businessman, a merchant of glassware; his mother was an Italian Jew. He was born in Austrian Trieste, now a part of Italy, educated in Würzberg, Bavaria. A cosmopolitan if he wished to make the claim, and yet so peculiar were his gifts that it seems altogether appropriate that he should have been a citizen of a disputed territory, Trieste.

The businessman had often to go to England, and thus he came to feel the need of a tutor in the language. It was 1907, and who should be in Trieste, down on his luck, fluent in English and other tongues? It was James Joyce. Reference books tell us that Joyce gave his pupil parts of Dubliners, unpublished, to read and that the pupil produced his own writing as if they were sharing glasses of ale, which no doubt they were.

Joyce read Senilità in 1907 and, according to Renato Poggioli’s introduction to the New Directions edition of the Beryl de Zoete translation, Confessions of Zeno, later brought Svevo to the attention of literary Paris, with the result that Valéry Larbaud translated part of Zeno’s Conscience for publication in Le Navire d’Argent, an important magazine. Although the novel gave him some recognition in his home country, Svevo’s diction did not always please the linguists and preservers of the Italian language. In English it reads in a straightforward manner, without locutions of dialect or regionalism, so perhaps it was the fatal German-Italian shifting landscape of Trieste that offended in Rome and Milan.

Reno’s Conscience is a curious book indeed, if in its straying way a family novel. Zeno, as the first-person narrator, is not a Stoic. He is a hypochondriac, a solipsist, a lover soon unfaithful, a sly fellow who pretends to be writing down his confessions at the urging of his psychoanalyst. None of his doctors—many appear—comes off very well, nor does the analysis. First-person narration—here, as elsewhere in fiction—is always a special dispensation. No matter that the narrator be described as timid, clumsy, a loser, on the page the “I” will be supreme. The details of his inadequacy, measliness, and folly are asserted by a master of words. A first-person narrator is never modest.

The opening chapter bears the title “Smoke.” And here we find Zeno writing: “ ‘Today, 2 February 1886, I am transferring from the school of law to the faculty of chemistry. Last cigarette!!’ ” The following chapter has the title “My Father’s Death.” It begins:


“ ‘15.4.1890 - My father dies. L.C For those who do not know, those last two letters do not stand for Lower Case, but for Last Cigarette.” The tone of the mind of the narrator is revealed in its perplexity by these brief asides. Zeno is in a condition of genuine mourning for the overwhelming patriarch who will take his time dying, asserting his right to a dramatic lingering as these formidable old men do, at least in fiction. Svevo does not omit the way they have of casting a dying curse of sorts on a wayward son. The father in his last moments is trying to rise from his bed and Zeno is, on the doctor’s orders, trying to hold him down. “With a supreme effort he managed to stand on his feet. He raised his hand high, as if he had learned he could endow it with no other strength beyond its mere weight, and let it fall against my cheek. Then he slipped to the bed and, from there, to the floor. Dead!”


“The Story of My Marriage” follows, and a sly, devilish mix-up of intention and consequence the courtship will be. Here the novel enters the Malfenti family, which will provide a panoramic picture of business and its wildly fluctuating seasons in Trieste. In the Malfenti family there are four daughters, each of whose name begins with A: Ada, Augusta, Alberta, and Anna, the last child.