Eleven Short Stories. Luigi Pirandello

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      The flooding of his father’s Sicilian sulphur mine in 1903 had far-reaching repercussions. Not only was Pirandello’s income from home permanently cut off (so that he had to undertake extra tutoring and to rely even more heavily on income from authorship), but in addition his wife, whose dowry had been invested in the mine, suffered a nervous breakdown. In six months she recovered from the paresis in her legs, but her mind was never again completely balanced, and she embittered Pirandello’s life with her morbid jealousy, even suspecting him of incest with their daughter. She had to be institutionalized in 1919; she lived until 1959. The author later found a steady companion in the actress Marta Abba. By 1917 his work for the stage became paramount, and his 1921¹ play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) made him world-famous. He later directed his own troupe (with Abba as leading lady) and undertook global tours. He was also involved to varying degrees with film versions of his stories and plays.

      In 1924, to his own public fanfare, he joined the Fascist party; he became a member of Mussolini’s Italian Academy and supported the regime even in some of its most unsavory adventures (such as the invasion of Ethiopia). This adherence has been explained as the wish of a political naïf to associate himself with a movement that would regenerate Italian society, and much emphasis has also been placed on Pirandello’s fundamental reclusiveness, on some writings of his that can be construed as anti-Fascist and on certain measures taken against him by the government. But he died in the odor of Fascist sanctity and never rebelled openly. Truly, Pirandello himself was a “Pirandello character.”

      THE SHORT STORIES AND THE PLAN OF THE PRESENT VOLUME

      The short-story genre has a glorious history in Italy, beginning with the thirteenth-century collection Il Novellino and continuing through Boccaccio’s Decameron in the fourteenth century and those sixteenth-century writers who gave Shakespeare the plots for such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Othello. After a falling off in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the genre was vigorously revived in the nineteenth. Pirandello’s immediate masters were the abovementioned Capuana and the Sicilian Giovanni Verga, the foremost writer of the late nineteenth-century naturalist school (author of the story and play Cavalleria rusticana).

      Pirandello wrote short stories from his teens until his death. There are over 230 known. As was the custom, almost all were originally published in newspapers and magazines; from 1896 on, many first appeared in the prestigious literary journal Il Marzocco, published in Florence (the “marzocco” is the Florentine heraldic lion); from 1909 on, most were first printed in Italy’s leading newspaper, the Corriere della Sera (Evening Courier) of Milan. From time to time Pirandello would collect a group of stories into a volume. In 1918 he began regrouping his plays into volumes under the general title Maschere nude (Naked Masks), and in 1922 he started to do the same with the stories. The new story groupings were neither chronological nor thematic. Since he called the entire corpus of stories Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year), he probably wished to end up with some 365 of them. The fourteen volumes of Novelle per un anno that he lived to publish (twenty-four were projected), plus the fifteenth, which appeared posthumously in 1937, contain 211 stories in all. At least 26 other stories already published elsewhere had not (or not yet) been included in the new collection.

      Pirandello’s short-story oeuvre was a quarry for his later writings, an ongoing documentation of human types and situations, a gallery of eccentrics who might later reappear in different guises, just as the stories and plots themselves might later be given a substantially new look.

      Pirandello was a constant reviser; he rarely ever republished a work of any type without subjecting it to light or heavy changes. In the case of the short stories, the revision could range from the substitution of a couple of words, or insignificant changes in spelling, punctuation and the like, to important additions and deletions or a thorough stylistic reworking.

      The eleven stories in the present volume, presented in chronological order of first publication, range in time from the earliest known story published by Pirandello—“Capannetta” (Little Hut) of 1884—to the 1917 story “La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero” (Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law), the basis of his first major play (of the same year), Così è (se vi pare) (Right You Are, If You Think You Are). They include both Sicilian and Roman subject matter, and reflect most of Pirandello’s basic themes and concerns. In each case, the text is that of the original periodical publication; the stories chosen were not substantially altered in later revisions. Although a text based on an author’s “definitive wishes” or “final testament” has obvious advantages, the present approach has the merit of documenting more accurately Pirandello’s growth as a stylist, of presenting the works as they were first given to the world and first gained fame for their author, and—in the case of those stories which were later dramatized—of indicating the original basis for the plays.

      By 1965 (the date of the only such tabulation), 75 of Pirandello’s short stories had been translated into English in various all-Pirandello anthology volumes, and another handful had appeared in English singly, in various journals and other volumes. Some of the earlier translations are quite free, and here and there one finds inaccuracies, sometimes understandable when the Italian is difficult or lends itself to ambiguities, sometimes inexcusable.

      The goal of the present translation was to be as complete and literal as possible without sacrificing proper, idiomatic English; to offer an equivalent in English for every element in the Italian, although frequently it could not be a word-for-word equivalent; and not to shirk any difficulties by merely omitting them.² Since Pirandello is a very idiomatic writer, touches on many specialized topics and sometimes uses rare or dialectal words not to be found in even the largest dictionaries, it would be presumptuous to claim complete accuracy for the present translation—but the will was there. Occasional footnotes point to particular linguistic problems or other special features in the text.

      REMARKS ON THE INDIVIDUAL STORIES SELECTED

      “Capannetta: Bozzetto siciliano” (Little Hut: Sicilian Sketch) is the earliest known story by Pirandello, published on June 1, 1884 (when he was seventeen and a student in Palermo), in La Gazzetta del Popolo della Domenica (People’s Sunday Gazette), Turin. Never included by Pirandello in a collected volume, it eluded literary historians until its rediscovery in 1959.

      Truly a mere sketch, and heavily indebted to Verga³ for its picture of rural passions, the story nevertheless prefigures the mature Pirandello, with its lively dialogue, the thematic elements of overbearing father and oppressed woman and child, and its firm rooting in the author’s native landscape. Pirandello’s literary beginnings as a poet are clearly in evidence.

      “Lumie di Sicilia” (Citrons from Sicily) was first published in Il Marzocco, Florence, in the issues of May 20 and 27, 1900. It was later included in the volume Quando ero matto … (When I Was Crazy …), 1902 (reprinted 1919), and in the tenth volume of Novelle per un anno, 1926. Pirandello’s one-act play version (same title) was first produced in 1910. The title of the story and play usually appears in English as “Limes from Sicily” or “Sicilian Limes,” but the story has also been called “Sicilian Tangerines.”

      The citrons symbolize the hometown purity that has been lost in the quest for fame and honor. The claustrophobic nature of the plain little room to which Micuccio is confined, with just a distant glimpse of the world of “beautiful people,” is also symbolic, and already points to the single-set dramatization. The story version, however, is preferable to the play, in which, for purposes of exposition, the shy Micuccio must reveal the entire background of the plot to the unsympathetic servants. The ending of the story is also more telling than that of the play, which irresistibly calls to mind the nineteenth-century melodramatics of Camille.

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