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The Queen of Darkness and other stories

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
140 Seiten
Englisch
Dedaluserschienen am31.03.2023
The ancient traditions of Sardinia feature heavily in this early collection. The stories collected in The Queen of Darkness, published in 1902 shortly after Deledda's marriage and move to Rome, reflect her transformation from little-known regional writer to an increasingly fêted and successful mainstream author. The two miniature psycho-dramas that open the collection are followed by stories of Sardinian life in the remote hills around her home town of Nuoro. The stark but beautiful countryside is a backdrop to the passions, misadventures and injustices which shape the lives of its rugged but all too human inhabitants.

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at 11. She published her first short story when she was 16 and her first novel, Stella D'Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was 19. Leaves Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settles in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she meets the civil servant Palmiro Madesani who she marries in 1900 and they move to Rome. Grazia Deledda writes her best work between 1903-1920 and establishes an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period is set in Sardinia. Publishes Elias Portolu in 1903. La Madre is published in 1920. She wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and received it in a ceremony the following year. She dies in 1936 and is buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.mehr
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KlappentextThe ancient traditions of Sardinia feature heavily in this early collection. The stories collected in The Queen of Darkness, published in 1902 shortly after Deledda's marriage and move to Rome, reflect her transformation from little-known regional writer to an increasingly fêted and successful mainstream author. The two miniature psycho-dramas that open the collection are followed by stories of Sardinian life in the remote hills around her home town of Nuoro. The stark but beautiful countryside is a backdrop to the passions, misadventures and injustices which shape the lives of its rugged but all too human inhabitants.

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at 11. She published her first short story when she was 16 and her first novel, Stella D'Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was 19. Leaves Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settles in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she meets the civil servant Palmiro Madesani who she marries in 1900 and they move to Rome. Grazia Deledda writes her best work between 1903-1920 and establishes an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period is set in Sardinia. Publishes Elias Portolu in 1903. La Madre is published in 1920. She wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and received it in a ceremony the following year. She dies in 1936 and is buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781915568212
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum31.03.2023
ReiheDedalus European Classics
Seiten140 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse841 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14610228
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

INTRODUCTION

The Sardinian town of Nuoro, where Grazia Deledda was born in September 1871, sits among the rugged mountains and steep valleys in the north-east of the island. If Sardinia itself had a fairly remote connection with il continente - mainland Italy - then this small town and its surrounding villages were another world altogether. Traditional costumes were worn, ancient customs observed and life for the agricultural majority was far from easy. The long-standing freedom to graze animals and collect firewood from uncultivated lands ended in the early nineteenth century when an edict from the Turin government, l´Edetto della Chiusura, allowed landowners to put up walls and fences; and Sardinian authorities began to sell off sheep pastures and cork woods to the highest bidders. Grazia Deledda was therefore fortunate to be born into one of the more well-to-do Nuorese families: her father, trained as a lawyer, had numerous business interests and owned several parcels of farming land. The fifth of seven children, his daughter grew up in relative comfort in a large three-storey house - now the Grazia Deledda Museum - built by the kindly, energetic and poetry-loving Giovanni Antonio Deledda. Grazia´s mother, Francesca Cambosu, was of simpler stock, although her family, too, was not without means. Francesca spoke Sard, the island language, and could neither read nor write Italian. She was, in Grazia´s eyes, a rather distant and severe woman, deeply religious, devoting her life to the upkeep of her household and the proper instruction of her children.

Deledda enjoyed only a scant formal education. At that time and in that place, a girl could only expect four years of elementary schooling, after which her destiny was to practise the domestic arts at home until the family found her a suitable husband.

A dreamy pupil, Grazia nevertheless seized on the opportunities to broaden her understanding of the world. She even returned to school for an extra year. Books became the source not simply for learning but for adventures of the imagination. By her teenage years she was writing stories and poems of her own and spending her free hours reading voraciously from the library of her uncle, a priest, and from a trunk of books left behind by a tutor in Italian whom her father had briefly employed for the benefit of his eager daughter. Some of these early efforts were published in local Sardinian papers and journals and little by little the self-taught writer began to expand her horizons. Her wide reading took her from the romantic fiction in women´s magazines to the romantically-flavoured novels of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Eugène Sue, to Manzoni´s I Promessi Sposi and Tolstoy´s Anna Karenina.

While these were unusual interests for a young girl brought up in a narrow and traditional society, she still took delight, and a full part, in the many feast days and festivities which marked the calendar of her fellow Nuoresi. She loved the island tales and legends, the local gossip, the characters that peopled her immediate world. The urge to write about them, to describe them in her own terms, was matched by a fierce ambition. She boldly wrote to editors in Cagliari, and even in Rome, seeking an outlet for her writings. An early story, Sangue sardo (Sardinian Blood) was published in L´ultima moda, a Rome-based magazine, in 1888. In 1890, a short romantic novel, Stella d´Oriente, was serialised in a Cagliari periodical and later published in book form. Her tales of Sardinian life incurred the incomprehension and wrath of many of her connections in Nuoro, where it was unheard-of for a young woman to write in the first place, while to take themselves as subjects for her fictions was little short of shameful.

It was the serious and thoughtful reception of her novel La via del male (The Way of Evil) by the distinguished writer and literary critic Luigi Capuana in 1896 that brought Deledda to the point where she could consider her talent and ambition validated. The obstacles in her path, largely a matter of her Sardinian background (geographical and literary remoteness, social disapproval, the need to master Italian as a second language), could all be overcome.

By 1900, at which time the population of Nuoro stood at a mere 7,000, Deledda yearned for a wider life. She needed to be in Rome. She needed, also, at the age of twenty-eight, a husband. On a visit to Cagliari in 1899 Deledda was introduced to a civil servant, a secretary in the finance department named Palmiro Madesani, a good-looking and good-humoured man a few years her senior. The two were married in January 1900 and Grazia immediately pressed all her contacts, by now quite wide, to help secure her husband´s transfer to Rome. And indeed, within two months Madesani had been offered a minor post in the Finance Ministry there. By the middle of March, the couple was installed in an apartment not far from Via Nazionale, the broad avenue leading into the Piazza della Repubblica. Grazia Deledda had finally arrived.

Over the next thirty-odd years, Deledda published nearly fifty works. Most of them were novels, most of them set in Sardinia. But she also wrote upward of 250 short stories, usually collected in brief volumes (of which the present is an example), and a small number of plays. The stories ranged from Sardinian folk tales to stories for children, scenes from her own life as a girl in Nuoro, alongside the numerous brief fictions drawing on her intimate knowledge of the island of her birth.

The impressive body of her work, its distinctive, not to say unique evocations of an almost forgotten location and culture, earned her, in 1926, the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she collected at a ceremony in Sweden the following year. She was in famous company: George Bernard Shaw had won the prize for 1925, Henri Bergson was to win it for 1927. She was, however, only the second woman, after Selma Lagerlöf in 1909, to be so honoured.

It was at about the same time that health issues, which had been troubling her for some years, came to the fore. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, underwent a successful operation, but became increasingly withdrawn. She spent her final years quietly, though as industriously as ever, watching closely over the fortunes of her two sons and delighting in the company of her niece Mirella, a charming snapshot of whom appears in her 1930 collection, Il dono di natale (The Christmas Present). Sadly, the cancer returned, and Grazia Deledda died in August 1936, a few weeks before her 65th birthday.

Although her early life on Sardinia formed the bedrock of her writing career, it was the freedom of her new-found status and location that enabled her to make full use of it. To begin with, she had the much-anticipated pleasure of being able, with Madesina, to attend the opera and theatre and immerse herself in the cultural life of the capital city. Her first child, a son, Sardus, was born in December 1900; her second, Francesco, in 1904. She published a new work almost every year, earning increasingly widespread admiration and acceptance. And it was at the time of her marriage and move to Rome that she secured her first major success, the novel Elias Portolu, which was followed soon afterwards by this present collection of short stories, La regina delle tenebre. Elias Portolu is the story of a young man who returns to Sardinia after serving a prison sentence on the mainland. He falls in love with Maddalena, the fiancée of his brother. Unable to take the decisive step of winning her for himself, he adopts the alternative and seemingly negative course of becoming a priest. When the brother and fiancée die, and although Elias´s sense of conscience had been appeased, there is a prevailing sense of cold comfort which was to be typical of many of Deledda´s later works. The novel first appeared in Nuova Antologia in 1900, but reached wider renown when it was published in translation in the distinguished French journal La revue des deux mondes in 1903.

In the meantime, following a summer visit to Sardinia where, next to the church on the side of Mount Ortobene the Deledda family had a cumbissia (see The Black Mare), the short story collection The Queen of Darkness was published in 1902. It reveals, in compact form, the many different sides of Deledda´s character as a writer. Criminality and deceit are frequent themes, as in the long story The Black Mare; deceit and injustice in Two Sides of Justice and Sarra; while a simpler and happier love story, The First Kisses, concludes the collection. The first two stories have nothing to do with peasant life on Sardinia, however. The title piece presents the journey of a mysteriously troubled soul towards the realisation that her true destiny, her salvation, is to be an artist, a writer whose purpose is to evoke and bring to life the world that has formed her. In its direction, if not necessarily in its material facts, the story has autobiographical implications. The Lost Child deals with another troubled soul, a lonely man driven towards suicide by unspecified causes who finds a reason for living after a night-time encounter with an unhappy small boy. These two miniature psychological dramas, played out in the minds of two middle-class protagonists, are quite different from the Sardinian novels´ which were to become Deledda´s staple fare and make her name. The sense of brooding and sadness, though, and the intense descriptions of the effects of nature, are very much part of the Deledda oeuvre. As she finds her mature voice and...
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Autor

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at 11. She published her first short story when she was 16 and her first novel, Stella D'Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was 19. Leaves Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settles in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she meets the civil servant Palmiro Madesani who she marries in 1900 and they move to Rome.Grazia Deledda writes her best work between 1903-1920 and establishes an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period is set in Sardinia. Publishes Elias Portolu in 1903. La Madre is published in 1920. She wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and received it in a ceremony the following year. She dies in 1936 and is buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.