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.
“Con altri occhi” (With Other Eyes) was first published in Il Marzocco on July 28, 1901. It was later included in the volume Erma bifronte (Two-Faced Herm), 1906, and in the fifth volume of Novelle per un anno, 1923. Singled out in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as an exceptional psychological study, it has apparently never been translated before.
This is one of numerous Pirandello stories that deal with marital unhappiness, usually with the wife as a victim. Another theme typical of Pirandello is the realization that one’s earlier impressions on a given subject have been entirely wrong. The plot device in which the dénouement is triggered by a woman’s discovery of a document in her husband’s clothes recurs in the 1910 story “‘Leonora, addio!’” (“Leonora, Farewell!”).
“Una voce” (A Voice) was first published in the periodical Regina on September 20, 1904. It was later included in Erma bifronte, 1906, and in the sixth volume of Novelle per un anno, 1923. Like the preceding story, it is highly recommended in the Britannica and apparently untranslated hitherto.
In certain crucial passages, the turbulent thoughts of the Marchese’s fiancée are skillfully rendered in a technique close to interior monologue. The decisions she is called upon to make are of a vital, fundamental nature, like so many others with which Pirandello’s characters grapple. It is also possible to interpret the story as one in which the unflinching belief in an unalloyed truth is destructive of happiness. The incessant use of the pluperfect tense up to the time of