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- Herausgeber: Dedalus
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Dedalus European Classics
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 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.
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Dedalus European Classics
General Editor: Timothy Lane
THE QUEEN OF DARKNESS
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited
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www.dedalusbooks.com
ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 15 1
ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 21 2
Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors
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First published in Italy in 1902
First published by Dedalus in 2023
Translation copyright © Graham Anderson 2023
The right of Graham Anderson to be identified as the editor & translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed & bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p A.
Typeset by Marie Lane
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.
THE AUTHORGRAZIA DELEDDA
Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street where she was born has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at age eleven. She published her first short story when she was sixteen and her first novel, Stella D’Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was nineteen. She left Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settled in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she met the civil servant Palmiro Madesani whom she married in 1900. They then moved to Rome.
Grazia Deledda wrote her best work between 1903–1920 and established an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period was set in Sardinia. She published Elias Portolu in 1903, La Madre in 1920 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. She died in 1936 and was buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.
THE TRANSLATORGRAHAM ANDERSON
Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the book pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph. As a translator, he has developed versions of French plays, both classic and contemporary, for the NT and the Gate Theatre, with performances both here and in the USA. Publications include The Figaro Plays by Beaumarchais and A Flea in her Ear by Feydeau.
His translations for Dedalus include Sappho by Alphonse Daudet, Chasing the Dream and A Woman’s Affair by Liane de Pougy, This was the Man (Lui) by Louise Colet and This Woman, This Man (Elle et Lui) by George Sand. He has also translated Grazia Deledda’s short story collections The Queen of Darkness and The Christmas Present. He is currently translating Marianna Sirca by Grazia Deledda for Dedalus.
His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.
CONTENTS
I
NTRODUCTION
T
HE
Q
UEEN OF
D
ARKNESS
T
HE LOST BOY
TWO KINDS OF JUSTICE
T
HE BLACK MARE
S
ARRA
THE FIRST KISSES
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 makes her first significant impact on the reading public, these stories stand alongside Elias Portolu as an important indication of what was to come.
Deledda’s attitude towards her literary career was energetic and ambitious. Her inner convictions drove her to seek success and recognition, yet she was humble enough to accept criticism and advice if it came from people she respected. Her character was generally shy and retiring — even wary and suspicious, and she did not like fuss. Yet in familiar company she could be an outgoing and amusing woman. The novels and stories she wrote in her later years increasingly revealed this more relaxed and optimistic side.
Notable works over the next few years included Cenere (Ashes, 1904), L’edera (The Ivy, 1908), Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind, 1913), Marianna Sirca (1915) and La madre (The Mother, 1920). After her Nobel Prize, her range widened still further. In 1930 alone, for example, she published Il dono di natale (The Christmas Present), a collection of often charming stories, sketches from her own girlhood and Sardinian fables, the novel La casa del poeta (The House of the Poet) and Eugenia Grandet, a translation of Balzac’s 1833 novel about the repressed daughter of a miser, Eugénie Grandet.
After Deledda’s death, a complete but unpublished novel came to light amongst her papers. It was published posthumously in 1937, and is an almost entirely autobiographical account of her earlier years in Sardinia. Its title, Cosima, was one of her own middle names. It describes the joys and miseries of her journey from obscurity to the threshold of an extraordinarily productive career, that of an ambitious woman in a still essentially male world.
If her name is not well known to English speakers, it is to be hoped that the coming centenary of her Nobel success and the increasing availability of her works in English will bring her once again the admiration she received in her lifetime.
Interested readers might wish to read Martha King’s biography, Grazia Deledda: A Legendary Life, to which I am indebted for some details in the first part of this introduction. Martha King has also translated a number of Deledda’s works, including Canne al vento and Cosima. La madre, regarded by some as Deledda’s best novel, was published by Dedalus Books in M G Steegman’s translation in 1987 and re-issued in 2021. And alongside The Queen of Darkness (La regina delle tenebre), Dedalus will shortly be publishing The Christmas Present (Il dono di natale) and Marianna Sirca.
THE QUEEN OF DARKNESS
She was beautiful, rich, engaged to be married. She had never experienced real misfortune of any kind. Then one day, at the age of twenty-five, Maria Magda quite suddenly felt in her heart an empty blackness.
It was like the onset of a physical illness, which worsened every day, growing, spreading.
She was happy in her own house, and another happiness awaited her. But in order to seize the new happiness she must abandon the old, and it seemed to her that the sorrow of leaving her family so far behind, of leaving the comforting paternal home, of losing her freedom, of abandoning the land of her birth, would be bound to inspire in her such nostalgic regret that it would poison her new happiness. There were times, especially at night, in the dark, when the prospective future filled her with deep anguish. Then she would open her eyes, stare into the dense shadows of the bedroom and think: ‘No, I refuse to leave anything behind, I will not give up anything, never, never!’
And what then? The long-cherished dream of love? Ah, her happiness now, it was incomplete, it was not even happiness in comparison with the other. And at times, especially the soft, violet-shaded hours of evening, she pined as never before with desire for her distant beloved.
Sometimes she thought the true happiness might lie in merging the present and the future into one, by living with her husband in the family home.
But these moments were as lightning flashes, followed by pitch darkness. Yes, all right, and then? And then she felt that sooner or later, two, three, ten months, love would die (perhaps it was in its death agonies already if, not even married yet, she was able so clearly to envisage its end). From the grand dream all that would emerge would be a man and a woman bound together by the laws of men and not by those of the heart. But this too might not happen: yes, they would remain in love for ever, as in those novels of romance. They would have been happy all their lives, yes, fine, and then? And then it must all fall apart, time was passing, death was on its way. Ah, this was it, Magda’s ailment. Or at least, in certain moments of introspection, this was what it appeared to her to be.
She could feel time passing, she could sense the vanity of all things, and deep down she had a dreadful fear of death. This fear, for a woman who still believed she could dominate events by a minute attention to the inexorable passing of time, was poisoning her life: a life to which she was so tenaciously attached. It was the idea of the coming end that arrested all impetus in its tracks, froze all joy in her heart, dried up every idea of pleasure. So, at least, she believed.
She began to become silent, withdrawn. If she went out into company, if society’s entertainments made her forget her troubles, she returned home feeling hollow and disgusted with herself. Well, the entertainment was over now: why had she been so mindlessly distracted, forgetting that time was passing?
And if, instinctively, she played the scene over in her mind and, doing so, felt once more the satisfaction of her triumphs, her elegance, her splendour, an inner demon would grin derisively and mock her. Then she would draw back in disgust, amazed at how she could have lost herself in the trivialities of female vanity.
She began to remain in the house, not even going out for the ritual promenade at the approach of evening. Her only excursions were to the countryside, where she plunged into a vision of nature as if it were some holy, sweet-smelling pool, a kind of sacred immersion, driven by some powerful intuition. But even then she did not feel at peace. Even out there, surrounded by nature, the idea still pursued her of time fleeing, of the vanity of all things.
The person on whom Magda’s moral sickness fell most cruelly was the distant fiancé. She did not write to him any more, or wrote him harsh letters, heaping unlikely reproaches on his head. She found him coarse and vulgar, and often, in her anger at the miseries of the world and the perfidy of society, she directed all her bitterness at him. Then she would repent, but it was a feeble and fleeting repentance. Finally, one day, analysing herself thoroughly, she believed she had found the
