TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) is best known for his plays, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. A pro- li+c, restless writer, he also published novels, poetry, essays, and translations. Yet throughout his long literary career, the short story was always the genre to which he returned. He published his +rst story when he was seventeen, and hundreds more over the years, in- cluding one the day before he died. Others appeared posthumously, making for about two hundred and +fty in all. And what stories! Simultaneously heartbreaking and humorous, these hauntingly beautiful tales display a lyricism and naturalism largely absent from his philosophically driven theater. !e Pirandello we meet here is a master storyteller, with an ear for dialogue, an eye for reveal- ing details, and a keen sense of the crushing burdens of class, gen- der, geography, and mores. Archetypical +gures lend some stories a folkloric quality, while animal characters cast others almost as fables. Still others recall the Italian literary movement of verismo or realism, or continue the long tradition of the burlesque. !e nar- rative range is vast, yet the stories all share an extraordinary depth of psychological observation. Many of the themes will be familiar to those who know his plays, but the stories surprise us with their variety and emotional insight, and humanize the grand questions acted out in his works for the stage. vii viii,Translator’s Introduction In Pirandello’s most famous play, the groundbreaking Sei per- sonaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), six characters from an un+nished play interrupt the rehearsal of another play and demand to act out their story, or in other words, to live. !is bold work of meta- theater, which premiered in 1921, upended conventional notions of author, actor, and audience, dra- matized the tension between life and art, and revolutionized the very concept of theater. !e play’s central themes—identity, self- creation, art’s falsifying necessity—percolate through all of Piran- dello’s works, but it is in his short stories that they receive the most tender treatment. In these ironic, often bitter tales the author truly animates his concept of humor, which, as opposed to comedy, moves the reader beyond laughter to re-ection and compassion. Many of the stories are set in Sicily, the author’s birthplace. !e arid terrain, isolated villages, and noxious sulfur mines seem to map the fragile interior world of his characters. Others, set in Rome—where Pirandello moved in 1887 to study, and where he later took a job as a professor of Italian literature at a women’s teach- ing college—grapple with the erosion of tradition and the ills of modern urban life. Rich in picturesque detail, these stories preserve a memory of an Italy that is long gone, but their appeal is far more than as period pieces. !eir recurring concerns—solitude and be- trayal, the rigidity of social conventions, madness, disappointment, +nancial ruin, old age, suicide, and untimely death—still speak to us today. !e scorned lover, the despondent widow, the intransi- gent bureaucrat, the pompous lawyer, the wretched peasant, the frustrated priest, the lonely mother, the rebellious child: freed of the con+nes of formal theatrical production, Pirandello’s charac- Translator’s Introduction,ix ters here take center stage, exposing the general human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. As a whole, these works o.er a devastating yet deeply compassionate vision of life, which the author presents without moralizing. Every story is jewel- like and precise in its expression. Take, for instance, “!e Cat, a Gold+nch, and the Stars,” in which a pet bird encounters a neighbor’s cat. !e title, with its jarring combi- nation of de+nite and inde+nite articles, foreshadows an inevitable tragedy. !e bird that to a pair of elderly grandparents is the gold- +nch—it belonged to their beloved granddaughter, now dead—to the cat is simply a gold+nch. !e old couple’s hopeless anthropo- morphism, which sees in the gold+nch the embodiment of their granddaughter’s spirit, is an expression of love and a longing for meaning in a meaningless world. Yet their fundamental humanity cannot but clash with the cat’s pure feline instinct. Both humans and cat are blameless, for they act in keeping with their natures, the irreconcilability of which is, for Pirandello, the essence of tragedy. !e domestic drama, ampli+ed to cosmic proportions through the framing device of the unseeing stars, transforms this seemingly simple story into a devastating re-ection on man’s desire to soften the cruelty of the world. !e grandparents’ insistence on meaning, like the text’s suggestion of metaphor, unravels under the aloof gaze of the satiated cat, who may be the only uncon-icted being in all of Pirandello’s works. Pirandello’s prose style shapes his arguments. In “!e Cat, a Gold+nch, and the Stars,” the repetition of key nouns and phrases implies +xed identities, while the deliberate inversion of subjects and objects articulates the dangerous slippage between bird, girl, x,Translator’s Introduction and grandparents. Narrative compression heightens the story’s fatalism: the cat does not make his appearance until the +nal para- graphs, and the denouement comes swiftly, matter- of- factly, yet is compounded by ambiguous pronouns when clarifying nouns are called for. From the very +rst lines, incomplete sentences, el- lipses, and unanswered questions force the reader to do the work of making connections: “A stone. Another stone. A man goes by and sees them side by side. But what does this stone know of the one next to it? Of the water, or the gully where it -ows?” Pirandello’s deliberate ambiguities and dynamic syntax present notable challenges to the translator. Italian allows for equivocation, which is central to this story, through its allowance for implied sub- jects, whereas English requires them to be explicit. Furthermore, word order in Italian is relatively free, allowing Pirandello to craft such masterfully confusing phrases as “No, non la vicina, il gatto, il gatto voleva uccidere il vecchio”—which, on +rst reading, could be taken to mean: “No, not his neighbor, the cat, the cat wanted to kill the old man.” Logic, rather than language, makes us invert the words and restore order—such as it is—to the drama: “No, not his neighbor but the cat, the cat the old man wanted to kill.” And yet the +rst reading harbors its own sardonic truth, as the reader will see. Another animal story, “!e Revenge of the Dog,” opens with a beautiful, almost mystical description: “Without knowing how or why, one +ne day Jaco Naca found himself the owner of the whole sunny hillside below the city, from which there was a magni+cent view of the open countryside, of hills and valleys and plains, and in the distance the sea, far away, after all that green, blue on the horizon.” !e sentence unfurls as does the view, and the eye moves Translator’s Introduction,xi pleasantly across the gently sloping landscape of words. Here it is not ambiguity but rhythm that most demands the translator’s atten- tion, for the next sentence, even longer, but unrelentingly choppy, establishes a jarring contrast that sets the tone for the entire story: Some three years back, a foreigner, with a wooden leg that creaked at every step, had appeared, all in a sweat, at a farm- house in the narrow, malaria- infested valley of Sant’Anna, where Jaco, yellow with fever, shivering to the bone, and ears buzzing from quinine, worked as a farmhand; the foreigner announced that a thorough search of the records had led him to discover that that hillside there, which until then was be- lieved to be without an owner, actually belonged to Jaco: if he were willing to sell him part of it, for some still rather vague plans of his, he’d pay the o"cial appraisal. !e harsh jerkiness of all those short phrases simultaneously intro- duces onomatopoetically the wooden-le gged foreigner and the sickly Jaco Naca, and also foreshadows the divisive fate of the gentle landscape and its inhabitants. !e action oscillates between the sunny hillside and the miserable little valley, “narrow as a grave,” re- calling the moral landscape of Dante’s Divine Comedy. !e classical epic is also evoked. !e three- part “Donna Mimma,” recasts the classical journey of education in a feminine key and maps it onto the con+nes of Sicily. We follow a beloved midwife who is forced to leave her small village to study in dis- tant Palermo, in order to earn a diploma for the profession she has been practicing successfully for years. During her absence, Donna Mimma is replaced by a “little coquette from the Continent”—in xii,Translator’s Introduction other words, a young woman from northern Italy. !e Italian smor- !osetta, as Donna Mimma scornfully calls her new adversary, com- bines the older woman’s disdain for independent, modern women with typical Sicilian distrust of non-Sicil ians. !e contest between the two women conveys the +erce tensions between Sicily and the mainland, setting wisdom against knowledge, experience against education, and capturing all the bewilderment and frustration of old age. It also charts the sort of devastating concessions required to unite this deeply divided nation. Ancient folk wisdom is sacri- +ced to science, humanity gives way to bureaucracy, and “progress” crushes tradition. But—as with so many of Pirandello’s plotlines— things prove not so straightforward.