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Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) |
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Italian novelist and short story writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. Grazia Deledda spent her childhood in a small isolated village, where the people spoke Logudorese, a dialect closely related to Latin. Her stories are usually set in Sardinia and depict the life and customs of simple folk – small landowners, servants, farmers, and shepherds. Often they must find their own solutions to complex moral problems. From 1900 until her death in 1936 Deledda resided in Rome. "The moon rose before him, and evening voices told him the day had ended: a cuckoo's rhytmical cry, the early crikets' chirping, a bird calling; the reeds sighing and the ever more distant voice of the river; but most of all a breathing, a mysterious panting that seemed to come from the earth itself. Yes, man's working day was done, but the fantastic life of elves, fairies, wandering spirits was beginning." (in Reeds in the Wind, 1913) Grazia Cosima Deledda was born in the Sardinian village of Nuoro into a middle-class family. Her her father, Giovanni Antonio Deledda, was a prosperous landowner, who served as a mayor of Nuoro for some time. Francesca Cambosu, Deledda's mother, was not his first choice for a wife. She spoke only Sardinian and didn't read, write or speak Italian. Until the age of ten, Deledda attended the local elementary school, where she shared a desk with a doctor's daughter. She became her close friend. Five years of school was her only formal education, before she was privately tutored in French and Italian. Deledda's father died in 1892, her older sister died in 1896 following an abortion. Deledda was an avid reader of Russian novelists, Cadrucci,
D'Annunzio, and Giovanni Verga, but her reading was unsystematic. At
the age of eight she began to compose poems. She also absorbed
stories from servants, farmhands, and shepherds. When Deledda was
fifteen, her stories, 'Sangue Sardo' (signicicantly entitled
'Sardinian Blood') and 'Remigia Helder', appeared in L'Ultima
moda, a fashion magazine Deledda made her debut as a novelist with Stella d'Oriente (1891) under the pseudonym Ilia di Saint Ismail, but it was Anime oneste (1895), a family romance for young women, which secured her fame. Deledda's early works reflected the influence of folklore. In Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna (1894-95), an ethnographuc study which appeared in the periodical Rivista delle tradizioni popolari italiane, she examined the customs of the village, where she was born. Deledda's interest in the lives of ordinary men and women and rural customs connected her to Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), who depicted provincial Sicilian people, and whose style infuenced deeply a number of prose writers. The stark landscape has more symbolic value in Deledda's later novels. Her work has been seen to fall between verismo, a 19th-century Italian literary movement related to naturalism, and decadentismo, which emphasized instincts and irrational forces; love, sin, guilt, and death are the central elements of Deledda's stories. In the 1890s, Deledda had three love affairs by mail, beginning from Stanis Manca, the drama critic for La Tribuna, who interviewed her for an article published in Vita sarda. He was followed by Andrea Pirotta, a teacher, and Giovanni De Nava, a poet and journalist. Deledda left Nuoro in 1899 and went to Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. There she met Palmiro Madesani, whom she married in 1900; they had two sons, Franz and Sardus. Madesani worked as a civil servant in the Ministero della Finanze. With her husband, Deledda moved to Rome, but Sardinia remained always for her the most important source for inspiration. She kept contact to her native region and made there frequent visits. For the remainder of her life, Deledda wrote novels at the rate about one a year, producing some 40 works. However, in 1916, the year when her mother died, her only publications were reprintings of her older works. Deledda also translated Balzac's Eugénie Grandet into Italian in 1930. Benito Mussolini claimed being a great admirer of Deledda's work, but fascist reign did not leave much traces on her writing – in Rome she lived a rather restricted life, occupied by her writing and domestic matters. Her only travel abroad she made in 1927, to Stockholm, when she attended the Nobel Prize ceremonies. Deledda died in Rome on August 15, 1936 "In Grazia Deledda's novels more than in most other novels, man and nature form a single unity. One might almost say that the men are plants which germinate in the Sardinian soil itself. The majority of them are simple peasants with primitive sensibilities and modes of thought, but with something in them of the grandeur of the Sardinian natural setting. Some of them almost attain the stature of the monumental figures of the Old Testament." (in the Nobel presentation by Henrik Schück) Il vecchio della montagna (1900, The Old man of the Mountain) was the first of the author's many books dealing with simple characters and illustrated the destructive and tragic effects of overpowering sexual attractions. Dopo il diverzio (1902, After the Divorce) was a moral story a man, Constantino, who is condemned to a long prison term for a murder, and his wife, Giovanna, who finally decides to divorce him. However, Constantino is freed after a deathbed confession by the actual murderer. Deladda's other major works include Elias Portolu (1903), which depicted a shepherd, who prepares to enter the priesthood because he falls in love with his brother's fiancée. His brother dies and he must resolve the conflict between his love and demands of society. Cenere (1904) told about a story of a young girl who sacrifices herself for her illegitimate child, killing herself in order not to harm his son's prospects in life. In this as in other stories Deledda's protagonist is a woman and a victim, who must eventually sacrifice herself. The tale was adapted into screen starring Eleonora Duse, the only film she made. The first proceeds of the film, released during the final years of WWI, went to the Red Cross. Deledda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature mainly for La madre (1920), a tragedy set in an isolated Sardinian village. It tells of a poor woman, who has made many sacrifices so that her son, Paolo, would become a priest. Paolo is torn between love and clerical celibacy. At the end she dies in a church during the service while her son looks on from the altar. The work was translated into English as The Woman and the Priest with an introduction by D.H. Lawrence. Deledda's later novels have a wider setting than the harshly beautiful Sardinia but continue to deal with moral and ethical themes, among them La chiesa della solitudine (1936), which dealt with the subject of breast cancer. Her last novel was published posthumously in 1937. Entitled by her editor, Antonio Baldini, Cosima, quasi Grazia, it was also Deledda's fictionalized autobiography – Cosima was her second name – in which she chronicled the difficulties faced by a woman who wants to be a writer. Deledda received new attention in 1971-1972 at a symposium marking the hundredth anniversary of her birth. New translations of her books are also available. Though Deledda's Christian and archaic world view has made her work somewhat outmodish, her unpretentious manner of writing creates still powerful impact. Her characters, many of them society's outcasts, are driven by their desires and sinful passions, and their face terrible fates when they challenge community values. The desire for money is spiritually dangerous. Aparently her own favorite piece of work was Canne al vento (1913), which told the story of a aristocratic Pintor family, sliding deep in poverty. Efix, the family servant, is the personification of loyalty, but she hides a secret: she has killed the father the three sisters, and tries to protect them. For further reading: 'Introduction to The Mother' by D.H. Lawrence (1928); La vita e i romanzi Grazia Deledda by Y.E. Di Silvestro (1945); Grazia Deledda by G. Buzzi (1952); The Modern Italian Novel from Capuana to Tozzi by S. Pacifici (1972); Self-Made Woman by C.A. Balducci (1975); Grazia Deledda by M. Aste (1990); Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook by Rinaldina Russell (1994); Grazia Deledda: A Legendary Life by Martha King (2005) Selected works:
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