The Church of Solitude

Translator’s Afterword

` Translator’s Afterword Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) In 1900, when Grazia Deledda, twenty-nine years old and newly married, left Sardinia for Rome, she already had sixteen books in print. By the time of her death thirty-six years later, she was the author of over sixty volumes, including novels, collections of stories and folklore of Sardinia, poetry, and essays. Two things about this life of literature are truly remarkable: the fact that, although Deledda spent more than half her life in Rome, the location of most of her fiction is Sardinia; and the degree of anonymity in which Deledda lived and worked, in spite of the level of international recognition that came with the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to her in 1926. Deledda was only the second Italian author (after Giosuè Carducci in 1906), and is still the only Italian woman writer, to have been so honored. And yet, by her own choice, she lived and worked in obscurity; even her death was barely noted in the Italian press. Deledda died on August 15, 1936. The first notice of her death in Milan’s prestigious daily newspaper Corriere della sera was a brief note on August 18, reporting on the funeral held in Rome the day before and explaining that the writer had asked her family to announce her death only to a closed circle of friends.1 It is clear that the two obsessions of Deledda’s life, Sardinia and privacy, are closely related to her strong, eccentric personality . Grazia Deledda grew up in Nuoro, a rather remote provincial capital in the center of the island. She was a middle-class child and an autodidact. She gorged on fiction, especially nineteenth -century French and Russian novels, throughout her 155` 156 Translator’s Afterword childhood, and published her first novel, Sangue Sardo (Sardinian Blood) at fifteen, and her first collection of stories (her earliest work still in print) when she was nineteen years old.2 Deledda left an account of her bookish girlhood in the posthumously published autobiographical novella, Cosima, a tender reminiscence of a young girl caught between the romance of bandits and heroes of old Sardinia and a gradually awakening intellectual curiosity stifled by the very home she so loved.3 In 1899, she moved to Cagliari, the largest city in Sardinia; the next year she met and married Palmiro Madesani, a career bureaucrat with whom she moved to Rome. The couple had two sons, Franz and Sardus. It is clear that Madesani provided her an escape to the larger world for which she had longed, but Deledda’s later life proved just as clearly that “you can take the girl out of Sardinia, but you can’t take Sardinia out of the girl.” The Madesani-Deledda household in Rome was exceptionally private, even reclusive, and a thriving center of literary production. In her first two decades in the capital, Deledda published approximately one novel a year, including some of her more famous works, such as Dopo il divorzio, Elias Portolu, Cenere, L’edera, and Canne al vento.4 During this period, Palmiro Madesani gradually became his wife’s literary agent. This very unusual combination, a woman author whose husband supported and was supported by her career, inspired a satirical novel by Luigi Pirandello, Suo marito (Her Husband), in which a thinly disguised Grazia Deledda appears in the portrait of Silvia Roncella, a woman writer recently arrived in Rome with her husband from Taranto.5 Deledda seems to have been offended by this book, so out of respect for a fellow writer, Pirandello withdrew it from circulation and did not allow it to be reprinted. When Pirandello died in 1936, some four months after the death of Deledda, he left a partly revised manuscript which was published by his son, Stefano, with the title Giustino Roncella nato Boggiòlo.6 Although the extensive changes to the first four chapters were meant to soften the parody of Deledda, E. Ann Matter 157 the new title still satirizes the role reversal of the MadesaniDeledda marriage by suggesting that the husband took his wife’s name. It is the first version of this book that remains in print, with its vivid ironical portrait of “numberless young Italian women authors: poets, short story writers, novelists (a few of them also playwrights).”7 Pirandello may have found the idea of a woman author comical, but the fact of...