The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg
THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF NATALIA GINZBURG
The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg
Translated by
Paul Lewis
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9920-4
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.
Toronto Italian Studies
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ginzburg, Natalia
The complete short stories of Natalia Ginzburg / translated by Paul Lewis.
(Toronto Italian studies series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9920-4
1. Ginzburg, Natalia – Translations into English.
I. Lewis, Paul, 1981– II. Title. III. Series: Toronto Italian studies
PQ4817.I5A2 2011 853′.912 C2010-906444-5
Un’assenza, Casa al mare, Mio Marito, and La Madre are translated with the permission of the originating publisher, Giulio Einaudi Editore.
This book has been published with the assistance of grants from the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto and the European Jewish Publication Society. The European Jewish Publication Society gives grants to support the publication of books relevant to Jewish literature, history, religion, philosophy, politics, and culture.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
An Absence (Un’assenza)
Giulietta (Giulietta)
The Children (I bambini)
The House by the Sea (Casa al mare)
My Husband (Mio marito)
German Soldiers Pass through Erra (Passagio di tedeschi a Erra)
The Mother (La madre)
The Marshal (Il maresciallo)
Acknowledgments
I wish to extend my thanks to Alan Bullock, Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds, for his kind permission to quote extensively from his seminal work Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World (Berg Publishing, 1991) in the introduction which accompanies the translated stories contained in this book. Thanks also go to A. & C. Black Publishers Ltd (on behalf of Berg) for their permission to reproduce passages from Professor Bullock’s work.
Where I have quoted from published translations of Ginzburg’s essays in the introduction this is indicated by way of an endnote. Otherwise all the translations contained in the introduction and the translation of the stories themselves are of my own undertaking.
I am grateful to Jen Wienstein, Faculty Lecturer at McGill University, and Alan Bullock, Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds, for their help and encouragement throughout this project. I would also like to thank Dr Elena Lombardi of the Department of Italian at the University of Bristol and Jennifer Lorch, formerly of the Department of Italian at the University of Warwick, for their helpful suggestions in relation to the translated stories contained in this book. My thanks also go to Ron Schoeffel of the University of Toronto Press for doing so much to help coordinate this project, and finally the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Toronto and the European Jewish Publication Society for helping to commission this work.
THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF NATALIA GINZBURG
Introduction
Natalia Ginzburg is today recognized as one of the foremost women writers to emerge from twentieth-century Italian literature. Born in 1916 in Palermo under the maiden name of Levi, she was the youngest of five children brought up in a mixed marriage – her father being Jewish and her mother a Catholic. When Ginzburg was aged just three the Levi family left Sicily to resettle in the north of Italy after her father took up a professorship at the University of Turin. Ginzburg’s first piece of published work, the short story Un’assenza (‘An Absence’) was written at the age of seventeen and was published in the Florentine periodical Solaria in 1933. Her final publication, the short play Il Cormorano (‘The Cormorant’), was written at the age of seventy-five in 1991; she died in the autumn of the same year. Ginzburg’s work represents an impressive and varied collection, as her fictional creations come in the form of short stories, novellas, novels, and plays. She also produced a number of translations and essays, the latter being expressions of her ideas and principles on a wide variety of subjects and themes. Her published works, spanning nearly sixty years of a century that witnessed great social change in Europe, are testament both to a prolific career and to Ginzburg’s self-declared realization that ‘[writing] is my vocation, and I will do it until I die.’1
Ginzburg’s published short stories have never to date appeared in a single collection – either in their original Italian or in English translation. Her complete works, edited by Cesare Garboli, have appeared in Italian as Opere raccolte e ordinate dall’Autore (Mondadori, 1986–7); however, this collection, two volumes of which have so far appeared, contains only a selection of the short stories (in fact only half of them). An earlier volume of her work entitled Cinque romanzi brevi (Einaudi, 1964) similarly contains only four of the eight stories; furthermore, with the exception of La madre (‘The Mother’), none of these has so far been published in English translation. Thus while a selection of Ginzburg’s novellas, novels, essays, and plays has been available in English translation for a number of years, the short stories still remain largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. In a sense it is not surprising that no attempt has yet been made to gather all of them into a single collection, as it may be said with some truth that, beyond a common literary format, there is little to tie such a collection together. After all, the eight short stories span over thirty years of Ginzburg’s life (1933–65), time in which Ginzburg explored a variety of different literary forms, experienced several personal traumas, and also sustained periods of writer’s block. Nevertheless, there are, it is submitted, compelling reasons why these short stories should now be assembled as a single collection in English translation.
First and foremost: Ginzburg’s earliest published works – that is, those produced between 1933 and 1941 – were composed exclusively in the short story format. These compositions were fundamental to her emergence as a recognized author and, as such, represent an important collection within the context of Ginzburg’s wider repertoire of work. The significance of the earliest short stories primarily lies in their exposure of certain key themes and ideas which would come to characterize much of the author’s later work; in particular, the stories reveal characters who are leading essentially unhappy and unfulfilled lives in which they experience a deep sense of alienation from the people who surround them. This dissatisfaction frequently leads her characters to the stark realization that ‘they exist in a state of total solitude, unable to relate other than superficially and imperfectly to those around them.’2 As well as highlighting Ginzburg’s general preference for melancholic themes, these early short stories make clear that her chief preoccupation within this context was with the difficulties implicit in developing and sustaining meaningful human relationships.
If Ginzburg’s earliest works expose the author’s characteristic fascination with the essential bleakness of human existence, the stories also highlight the basic stimulus for most of Ginzburg’s writing –
her sympathy and compassion for the difficulties faced by women in their social milieu. In a society where women still continue to be consigned to positions of inferiority, Ginzburg’s achievement is indeed ‘to communicate the complex subtleties of female sensibility though the portrayal of fictional characters whose context is almost invariably one of submission or exploitation.’3 Nevertheless, the stories also highlight Ginzburg’s corresponding perception that, even with their apparently advantageous position, in reality men often remain equally vulnerable, struggling to fulfil the role demanded of them in a society dominated by masculine values. It is interesting to note that the theme of male inadequacy (appearing in a variety of different forms) remains the central focus in many of her earliest publications. In this light, it seems clear that the overall emphasis of Ginzburg’s work, evident both in her earliest publications and her later work, remains the reciprocal nature of those responsibilities which govern relationships between the sexes. This sense of mutual reliance is revealingly described by Ginzburg in her essay I rapporti umani (‘Human Relationships’): ‘the opposite sex walk beside us, brush past us in the street, maybe have thoughts and designs on us which we’ll never know; they hold in their hands our future and destiny.’4
While Ginzburg’s earliest publications point to the emergence of key ideas and themes in the author’s work, it is equally clear that the complete collection of her short stories (that is, including the works written after 1940) provides an intriguing insight into the development, improvement, and ultimate perfection of the author’s trademark literary style. Producing translations of Ginzburg’s work is a painstaking and difficult process. Nevertheless it is possible to faithfully convey the powerful simplicity of Ginzburg’s narrative style to English-speaking audiences. Sometimes initially mistaken for superficiality, in reality the unfussy and faithful reproduction of individual personality which lies at the heart of Ginzburg’s narrative technique provides an extremely effective means of conveying complex truths about the human condition. Ginzburg’s earliest fictional creations undoubtedly evince the unmistakable characteristics of this technique – in particular, her clipped style and uncluttered mode of articulation sustained by an invariably detached tone. Comparing and contrasting these early works with her later short stories demonstrates how Ginzburg’s trademark narrative technique matured and flourished with the passage of time.
The evolution of Ginzburg’s narrative technique is marked primarily by the gradual emergence of two key stylistic traits which serve to counterbalance the deep sense of pessimism which prevails in her earliest works. First and foremost there is the development of a sense of intimacy between the reader and the author’s characters. This is as a result of the author’s frequent textual allusions which describe ‘the minutiae of day-to-day existence,’5 that is, ‘innumerable items of apparent trivia which are in reality deeply revealing in the light they throw on individual characters.’6 Alongside this sense of intimacy is the emergence and consolidation of a sense of humour which ‘springs both from the fact that characters’ attempts to realize themselves and to achieve their own aims are frequently absurd and nonsensical, and from Ginzburg’s own awareness that life often juxtaposes the sublime with the ridiculous, reproducing this accordingly.’7 In terms of her developing narrative technique, Ginzburg’s achievement is made all the more impressive by the fact that she was able to resist any temptation to adopt a more ornate or ‘scholarly’ style.
By assembling all of Ginzburg’s published short stories together in a single collection, it becomes easier to appreciate both the origins of her approach to fiction and her development and ultimate realization of a more balanced and effective literary style. This arguably reached its peak with the publication of her penultimate short story La madre (‘The Mother’) in 1958. In the name of encouraging a deeper understanding of Ginzburg’s life’s work, this complete collection of her short stories aims to complement those other collections and individual works – plays, novellas, novels, and essays – which are already widely available in English (though which, at least in some cases, are in desperate need of more up-to-date translation).
While Ginzburg’s first attempts to write came in her early teenage years, it was not until the age of seventeen that she was able to compose what she later called ‘the first serious thing I wrote’8 – the short story Un’assenza (‘An Absence’). Writing about this decisive step in later years in her essay Il mio mestiere (‘My Vocation’), Ginzburg was able to reflect on her feelings of elation which accompanied the completion of this story. Most striking, both as a general indication of her new maturity and as a pointer to one of her most characteristic attitudes as an author, is her awareness that the protagonists of a tale are ‘neither good nor evil, but funny and a little sad.’9 This discovery was indeed a defining moment for the young writer: ‘it seemed to me that I discovered how people in books should be – funny and at the same time sad.’10 Overcome with happiness and a feeling that now she could ‘write millions of stories,’11 Ginzburg followed the completion of Un’assenza by embarking on a new phase of intense activity, producing a short story every one or two months.12
In Un’assenza,13 written in 1933 and published four years later, masculine inadequacy is the central theme. Deliberately inverting traditional sexual stereotypes at a time when they were significantly more rigid than in our own day, Ginzburg examines a loveless marriage of convenience in which the dominant figure is clearly Maurizio’s wife Anna, an ambitious woman anxious to establish a position in polite society and openly dismissive of her placid, good-natured husband, who is possessed of enough wealth to make work unnecessary and whom she consequently despises. Maurizio’s general passivity and lack of emotional drive have allowed him to dawdle through life unthinkingly, and he is only made aware of the essential aridity of his existence when his wife leaves him for a trip to San Remo (where he suspects she is meeting a lover), and in the void created by her absence he realizes for the first time that her presence is quite indifferent to him, that their small son is merely a nuisance, and that he is cut off completely from the world of ordinary people, whose inferior lifestyle disgusts him. In a fleeting moment of truth he contemplates killing himself, only to draw back at the chilling thought of mud at the bottom of the river. In a supremely ironic finale Ginzburg shows him seeking refuge in that most typical of masculine stereotypes in Latin society: a visit to the local brothel, where, however, he arrives bored and joyless, unable even to summon up basic lust, a fitting conclusion to an apparently simple story which in effect seriously questions basic assumptions about human behaviour. The message is further emphasized by Ginzburg’s focus throughout on the pathetic Maurizio, his self-assured wife only appearing indirectly as he reflects on the inadequacy of their relationship.14
Written one year later, the short story Giulietta15 focuses on a very different kind of male. Aldo, leaving behind his rural background, has moved to the city and become a doctor, acquiring more sophisticated habits and now living with a girl, the Giulietta of the title, something he has carefully kept from his family at home. When his younger brother Ferruccio decides to follow in his footsteps and moves to the town in his turn to attend high school, he naturally expects to be put up by Aldo, who is thus obliged to reveal his relationship with the young woman. If it is easy to appreciate his embarrassment at explaining this to someone who is little more than a child and who must now also conceal what is clearly – in view of the period and the brothers’ background – a shameful secret, Aldo’s reactions to this crisis are clearly contemptible. Because Aldo is too shy to explain the situation to Ferruccio on the way home, his confusion at seeing how easily his brother and mistress make friends quickly turns to frustration and anger at his inability to make things clear and is equally quickly revealed as springing from a basic deviousness of character. Initially tempted to flee the apartment and leave the two young people to their own devices, he reluctantly returns home after having gone out to buy cigarettes, only t
o lose his temper at table when Ferruccio naively suggests they all spend Sunday with the family, feeling ‘suffocated by unhappiness and resentment’; conscious that his brother is blameless, he inevitably directs the full brunt of his feelings on Giulietta, whom he observes ‘with hostility’ as they prepare for bed after he has explained things to Ferruccio. The story ends chillingly with Aldo’s sudden awareness that her expression resembles that of her mother, an ‘old hag in a rest home,’ while she touchingly asks him if he is angry with her.16
A combination of parental antagonism and maternal insensitivity is at the root of Ginzburg’s next short story, I bambini (‘The Children’),17 which appeared in the literary review Solaria in 1934. The author’s feelings of resentment towards her mother, unable or unwilling even to consider her problems, much less to help her resolve them, were balanced by an equally strong conviction that she could expect no help from her father, a well-intentioned but nevertheless socially incompetent despot whose angry moods and ceaseless criticism of his wife and children dominated the family home.18 In I bambini her parents’ characteristics are neatly inverted to produce a hen-pecked father, who, when not absent on business, creeps around the house in his slippers seeking refuge from his wife among the pots and pans in the kitchen, and a tyrannical mother who is constantly scolding and punishing her children while declaring she can no longer bear to put up with them. If this inversion is clearly a fictional transposition of Ginzburg’s own domestic environment, the story also reproduces – albeit in extreme form – her feelings of bitterness in relation to both her parents’ neglect of her true needs, beginning as it does with the short sentence, ‘they had always been afraid of her,’ and continuing with the equally significant statement, ‘Sometimes they would wonder if there were any other children in the world who didn’t love their mother.’19