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Introduction

THE MAN AND HIS WORK

A towering figure among early twentieth-century writers, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for literature, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) stood aloof from the literary currents of his day—Futurism, Surrealism and other more local movements—and was particularly hostile to the estheticism, self-heroization and political adventurism of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Nevertheless, recent Italian literary historians group Pirandello’s work with that of his adversaries, classifying his oeuvre as one aspect—a major one—of the so-called Decadent period: the era in which the solid middle-class values and the ultimate appeal to human rationality typical of the late nineteenth century were being challenged and assailed from many directions and in many ways.

Pirandello’s personal contribution, based on his belief that the progressive ideals of the liberators and unifiers of Italy in the 1860s and 1870s had been betrayed by the complacent bourgeois now entrenched in power, was to point out social inequalities (not through muckraking or sociological analysis, but by shedding sympathetic light on numerous individual cases) and, even more significantly, to dethrone reason by questioning the most basic assumptions about the way that people perceive the outside world and themselves. His writings are concerned with failure to communicate, disintegration of personality and the impossibility of arriving at a definitive truth.

These goals were accomplished in a vast oeuvre of poems, essays, short stories, novels and plays. Once Pirandello’s career was under way, he never fully abandoned any of these genres, although the general progression of emphasis was: poetry (in his youth), short stories and novels (particularly in his thirties and forties) and plays (the best dating from his fifties, and bringing him international fame). The same ideas and subject matter interpenetrate all the genres. There is hardly a play of which all or part is not based on an earlier short story or segment of a novel. The short stories (which are of particular concern in the present volume) exhibit many traits of poetry (refrain-like verbal repetitions used structurally, highly colored descriptive passages), of essays (theoretical considerations of psychology or the writer’s craft expounded at length, with the “plot” sometimes acting merely as an illustrative anecdote) and especially of plays (long stretches of lively dialogue, with the connecting narrative often serving as “stage directions”). Humor is never lacking, though it can become acrid.

All of Pirandello’s works are indissolubly linked to his own life and experiences. Born in 1867 near Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, he studied at Palermo, Rome and Bonn (where he learned German well and received his degree in Romance philology). He settled in Rome, and Rome (with its huge variety of walks of life and its urban sophistication) and his native Sicily (with its parched landscape, poverty and its kaleidoscope of fixations and repressions) became the two poles of his mental world. In 1897 he began a decades-long career as instructor of Italian literature at a women’s teachers college. Already known for his poetry, Pirandello was encouraged by Luigi Capuana, one of the deans of the Italian naturalist movement, to try his hand at stories and novels, and was immediately successful.

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.

“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 the engagement and the doctor’s third visit helps to establish the climactic atmosphere of what follows.

“La mosca” (The Fly) was first published in Il Marzocco on October 2, 1904. It was later included in Erma bifronte, 1906, and in the fifth volume of Novelle per un anno, 1923.

The doctor’s domestic situation is a bitter parody of the author’s own when his wife’s breakdown and paralysis in 1903 left him in charge of their three small children. The stark beauty and crushing poverty of his native region (all that the peasants can find to chat about is one crop failure after another) are tellingly depicted, as are the hateful envy of the dying man and the tragedy of “Liolà,” his life-loving cousin. The 1916 play Liolà, although it also concerns a handsome young folk poet and even includes an almond-shelling scene, is based on different material.

“La giara” (The Oil Jar) was first published in the Corriere della Sera, Milan, on October 20, 1909. It was later included in the volume Terzetti (Sets of Three), 1912, and in the eleventh volume of Novelle per un anno, 1928. Pirandello’s one-act dramatization was first produced in 1917. A ballet based on the play was performed in Paris in 1924 by Jean Borlin’s Ballets Suédois, with music by Alfredo Casella and sets by Giorgio De Chirico. The story has been translated as “The Jar.”

This has been called Pirandello’s most popular story. The confrontation of the two monomaniacs is delightful, and the wild dance at the end raises the story to almost mythic dimensions.

“Non è una cosa seria” (It’s Not to Be Taken Seriously) was first published in the Corriere della Sera on January 7, 1910. It was later included in Terzetti, 1912, and in the eleventh volume of Novelle per un anno, 1928. A previous translation was called “It’s Nothing Serious.” Certain story elements were reused by Pirandello in his three-act play Ma non è una cosa seria (But It’s Not to Be Taken Seriously), 1918.

Perazzetti is a first-rate Pirandello eccentric, unable to control himself even though his actions are based on a strong personal philosophy. Pirandello had already used the plot element of a marriage-to-prevent-marriage in his story “La signora Speranza” (Mrs. Speranza; included in the second series of Beffe della morte e della vita [Jests of Death and Life], 1903, but not in Novelle per un anno), and it is on this earlier story that the above-mentioned play is chiefly based. The only plot elements in the play taken from the 1910 story that is included in the present volume are the wounding of the protagonist in a duel with a prospective brother-in-law and his sending his unwanted wife to live in the country. On the other hand, the 1910 story is the only version containing the significant thematic elements of the protagonist’s helpless laughter, his theory of the “primordial beast” and—most Pirandellian of all—the many roles that different situations compel him to play.

Pirandello evidently liked Perazzetti so much that he used him in another story, the 1914 “Zuccarello distinto melodista” (Zuccarello, the New Kind of Singer), but in that story he merely placed him in another offbeat adventure without resuming the themes of “Non è una cosa seria.”

Duels occur in other Pirandello stories as well, usually as grotesque affairs into which the unmartial hero is forced against his will.⁴

“Pensaci, Giacomino!” (Think It Over, Giacomino!) was first published in the Corriere della Sera on February 23, 1910. It was later included in Terzetti, 1912, and in the eleventh volume of Novelle per un anno, 1928. Pirandello’s three-act dramatization (same title) was first produced in 1916. The story has been translated with the title “Better Think Twice About It!”

Pirandello’s long years as an instructor are reflected in the attitude of Professor Toti and the many other teachers who appear in his stories and plays. The story is told completely in the present tense, so that the dialogue sounds like stage dialogue and the narrative sounds like stage directions. In the 1916 play, the entire first act takes place at the high school and concerns Toti’s “wooing” of the janitor’s daughter, who is already pregnant by Giacomino. The rest of the play follows the story pretty much, the main difference being in the introduction of a slimy jesuitical priest as spiritual adviser of Giacomino’s devout sister. Here Pirandello gives all too free rein to his declared atheism and produces a one-sided anticlerical tract.

“La tragedia d’un personaggio” (A Character’s Tragedy) was first published in the Corriere della Sera on October 19, 1911. It was later included in the volume La trappola (The Trap), 1915, and in the fourth volume of Novelle per un anno, 1922. It has been translated with the title “The Tragedy of a Character.”

Besides being very readable, this story is highly important for its thematic connection with the play Six Characters and with the famous manifesto/foreword to that play, one of Pirandello’s most explicit statements about his art. Yet another instance of the author’s “giving audience” to his characters during announced visiting hours occurs in the 1915 story “Colloquii coi personaggi” (Conversations with My Characters; later included in the volume Berecche e la guerra [Berecche and the War], 1919, but not in Novelle per un anno), but the nature of those conversations is not really similar to the present story. On the other hand, the 1906 story “Personaggi” (Characters; never included in a collected volume) is extremely closely related to both the 1911 story and the Six Characters preface. In the 1902 story “Pallottoline!” (Tiny Spheres!), the main character, an amateur astronomer, forgets his woes by thinking about the Earth’s insignificance within the whole universe: a clear analogy to Dr. Fileno’s “philosophy of distance” and his reverse use of the telescope.

“La rallegrata” (A Prancing Horse; literally, The Prance) was first published in the Corriere della Sera on October 26, 1913. It was later included in La trappola, 1915, and in the third volume of Novelle per un anno, 1922. It has been translated with the title “Black Horses.”

Pirandello’s sympathy for the plight of animals (especially dogs and horses) that share human society is evident in a number of stories. But the main subject here is really that of death and burial, a theme that Pirandello developed countless times from every conceivable point of view. (He himself once wished for a simple funeral, with a pauper’s hearse drawn by a single horse and no crowd in attendance; his testamentary desire to have his ashes placed humbly in his native home was not fulfilled until long after his death, because the Fascist regime demanded a showy public funeral in Rome.)

The “horsy” vocabulary in this story is quite difficult, and the present translator gratefully acknowledges the borrowing of a few technical terms from the above-mentioned “Black Horses” (in Better Think Twice About It And Twelve Other Stories, translated by Arthur and Henrie Mayne, published by John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, London, 1933)—but even there some of the text is simply omitted! The reader’s indulgence is requested for any technical deficiencies that still remain in the present version after exhausting the aid of all available dictionaries.

“La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero” (Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law) first appeared in the volume of stories E domani, lunedì … (And Tomorrow, Monday …), published by Treves, Milan, 1917. It was included in the (posthumous) fifteenth volume of Novelle per un anno, 1937. It is the source of the three-act play Così è (se vi pare) (Right You Are, If You Think You Are), produced the same year that the story was published. The story has been translated with the title “Signora Frola and Her Son-in-Law, Signor Ponza,” “Mrs. Frola and Her Son-in-Law, Mr. Ponza” and “A Mother-in-Law.”

This is probably the key Pirandello story about the relativity of truth and the impossibility of penetrating other people’s minds. Valdana is also used as the name of a provincial town in the 1909 story “L’illustre estinto” (The Illustrious Deceased). In the above-mentioned story “‘Leonora, addio!’” there is a woman who is unmistakably kept locked up by an insanely jealous husband.

Even though the play based on this story is one of Pirandello’s most important, and was a turning point in his whole career, it is still possible to prefer the original story. Among other things, the play introduces a character who exists merely to speak for the author (like the raisonneur role in nineteenth-century French drama) and who literally, and all too mechanically, has the last laugh at the end of each act. The play turns the son-in-law and mother-in-law into more obviously pathetic characters, and converts the puzzled townspeople into pernicious priers. The fruitless questioning of the son-in-law’s female companion, a secondary element in the story, becomes the all too carefully prepared climax of the play, in which she appears symbolically veiled, changing the whole tone of the proceedings. Above all, the play lacks the extreme charm of the final two paragraphs of the story, in which the relationship of the two main characters is more lovingly described, and in which it is even possible to detect a delicious conspiracy against the reign of reason and the tyranny of truth.

¹All dates given in the present volume are those of first publication (for stories and novels) or of first performance (for plays).

²One feature of Italian that cannot be reflected sufficiently in an English version is the variation in the second-person mode of address: from the intimate tu (with second person singular verb forms), through the mildly respectful voi (with second person plural verb forms; no longer in current use), to the fully respectful lei and super-respectful Ella (with third person singular verb forms). In “Lumie di Sicilia” (Citrons from Sicily) the servant switches from voi to lei and back depending on his appraisal of Micuccio’s status; Micuccio says voi to his fiancée’s mother, who says tu to him. In “Una voce” (A Voice), the Marchese’s companion no longer addresses him as lei but as tu after their engagement, whereas at one point she is addressed with a quite sarcastic Ella by the doctor. And so on. Wherever voi is a plural, however (that is, more than one tu), an attempt has been made to indicate this in the English by means of some such device as “the two of you.”

³The name Jeli had already been used in Verga’s important story “Jeli il pastore” (Jeli the Shepherd), in which, moreover, the hero’s wife is named Mara (compare Màlia in the Pirandello story).

⁴The above discussion of the story reflects what the translator believes to have been Pirandello’s intentions. There is ample evidence in the story, however, to suggest viewing Perazzetti as a homosexual, barely aware of his true leanings, whose “wild imagination” is a mental mechanism for avoiding marriage with at least a plausible excuse to society and to himself.