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Canongate Books - Elio Vittorini

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114 pages

English

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Vividly capturing the heat, sounds and smells of southern Italy, Conversations in Sicily astounds with its modernity, lyricism and originality. Driven by a sense of total disconnection, the narrator embarks on a journey from northern Italy to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. Through the conversations of the islanders and a reunion with his mother, he gradually begins to feel reconnected. But to what kind of world? Written during Mussolini's time in power, Conversations in Sicily is one of the great novels of anti-fascism.

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	27 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847677341
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents
Title Page Introduction Author’s Note Part One Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Part Two Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX Chapter XX Part Three Chapter XXI Chapter XXII Chapter XXIII Chapter XXIV Chapter XXV Chapter XXVI Chapter XXVII Chapter XXVIII Chapter XXIX Chapter XXX Chapter XXXI Part Four Chapter XXXII Chapter XXXIII Chapter XXXIV Chapter XXXV Chapter XXXVI Chapter XXXVII Chapter XXXVIII XXXIX XL Part Five Chapter XLI Chapter XLII Chapter XLIII Chapter XLIV Chapter XLV Chapter XLVI Chapter XLVII Chapter XLVIII Epilogue Chapter XLIX Afterword About the Author and Translator Copyright
Introduction
Italo Calvino wrote of Conversazione in Sicilia as ‘one of the great unique books of our literature’. In his monograph on the work of Elio Vittorini, published a year after Vittorini’s death in 1966, Calvino went on to describe Conversazione as ‘a promise that continues to promise, a prophecy that continues to speak to us as prophecy’. He envisioned it as a work of art parallel to Picasso’s Guernica , ‘ the book- Guernica ’.
Vittorini himself, however, saw the aim of the novel as art form in terms of neither painting nor of prophecy, but of music and motion – the opera. As a critic, he thought the novel needed to be brought closer to its origins in poetry, theater and music, to be recovered from a European tradition of ‘intellectualism’ in which it had developed into a branch of philosophy. Yet to the extent that he achieved such an opera in Conversazione in Sicilia , it was not out of a literary theory (which came afterwards). As he explained it some years later in a preface to another novel, Conversazione arose both out of his need to be ‘the person I had become’ and his need ‘to say a certain something which, only by saying it in the way that music says things, in the way opera says them, the way poetry says them, could one risk saying them in front of the public, in front of the king, in front of il duce , during the reign of fascism in Italy’.
This does not mean that Conversazione in Sicilia is more an act of politics than of literature. Vittorini was a man of ideological passions, and his writing was born in political journalism and commentaries on current affairs. Yet he always resisted, even when it was unfashionable to resist, the idea that art is a vehicle for politics; even in 1945, at a high point of his political zeal, he wrote that ‘In art, aims do not count … nothing new and alive can emerge unless art is pure and simple human discovery …’ He was a man of conscience, continually revising his ideas about how such a conscience might be expressed in the world. His emphasis was not on the righteous nobility of ‘the writer as conscience of the state’, as others have had it, but on the faulty, weak, ambivalent, entirely human conscience of the storyteller. The power of Conversazione in Sicilia is not that of the writer speaking to us as ‘conscience of the world’; it is that of the world – the sensual and suffering, beautiful and wronged world – speaking to the conscience of the narrator.
Vittorini’s obsession with conscience did, at times, make him pedantic, especially in works like Uomine e no ( Men and Not Men ). But in Conversazione in Sicilia , lyric and lesson, the earthly and the abstract, are for the most part held in a tremulous and radiant balance.

* * *
Elio Vittorini was born in 1908 in Siracusa, Sicily, the eldest of four brothers. Like the father of the narrator of Conversazione , Vittorini’s father worked for the railway, and throughout his childhood his family moved around the island. Between thirteen and seventeen, he used his father’s free railway passes to run away from home ‘to see the world’. At home he collaborated with anarchist groups and student protests (he was frequently suspended from school), corresponded with writers on politics, and began writing his own political essays. When he was nineteen, he married and moved to Venice, where he worked for a construction firm and began writing stories, criticism and social satire for numerous newspapers and magazines. In 1929, he created a stir with an article accusing Italian literature of ‘provincialism’.
He and his young family spent the next several years in Florence, living with an uncle. Vittorini worked as an editor for Solaria and as a proofreader and type corrector for the daily paper La Nazione , where during work breaks an elderly typesetter taught him English using an old copy of Robinson Crusoe . He went on to publish translations of works by Edgar Allan Poe, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Daniel Defoe, W. Somerset Maugham, Erskine Caldwell and others – an occupation which became essential to his livelihood after lead toxicity and subsequent lung complications forced him to leave his typesetting job. He also published a collection of short stories, Piccola borghesia , and wrote his first novel, Il garofano rosso (The Red Carnation) , some of which saw print in serial instalments but which the fascist censors banned from publication in book form.
Two events of 1936 contributed to the gestation of Conversazione in Sicilia , which Vittorini began drafting in the fall of 1937: he was expelled from the Fascist Party for an article supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and he saw his first opera, a production at La Scala of Verdi’s La traviata .
Of the effect of the Spanish war on his thinking at the time, he later wrote:

My thoughts came out of my need, just as my need came out of the life I was living then, out of the love I was feeling ever more powerfully for the things of the earth, for men … for the children who were mine, for children who weren’t mine, and for a woman who, unfortunately, wasn’t my woman … Mas hombre , I thought. I believed I’d picked up these two Spanish words from the war in Spain, and from nights with my worker friends listening to Radio Madrid, Radio Valencia, Radio Barcelona; and at bottom my thoughts were nothing more than mas hombre ; nothing other than mas hombre , nothing more articulate or rational than mas hombre , yet nothing less blaring than mas hombre; mas hombre was a drum, a cock’s crow, it was like tears and like hope. What does mas hombre mean? I imagine it means, if the expression exists, ‘the more a man’, but in my history it exists, certainly it exists in the book which later became Conversazione …
Of his experience at the opera, he wrote:

In those days there was a special way of going to the opera, with one’s heart full of expectation for Teruel, for the battles in the ice fields of the Spanish mountains near Teruel, just as I imagine Verdi’s contemporaries were full of the Risorgimento as they listened to so much of his music, just as Verdi himself had been as he composed it. But the opera in itself, with everything surrounding it of the time in which I was watching and listening to it, made me realise that, in its combination of elements, the opera has the potential denied to the novel of expressing grand universal feelings.
Through music, Vittorini went on to reflect, the opera was able to go ‘beyond the realistic references of its action to express the meanings that are a larger reality’, while the novel, ‘such as it is today among the conformists of literary realism, doesn’t manage to foster meanings which can transcend the novel’s own engagement with a minor reality, without becoming philosophy’.
Striving both to emulate the opera and to rescue words themselves from the lockstep imposed on them by dictatorship, Vittorini’s language in Conversazione in Sicilia is an antidote to propaganda. Full of echoes and extraordinarily attentive to expressive sounds that are not words, exactly – from the doleful fife of the opening, to the disembodied ‘heh’s and ‘ahem’s of the characters, to the mother’s ‘old tunes without words’, sung ‘in a half moan, half whistle, and warble all at once’ – it is language bearing mysteries. And as in a musical score, or in an opera, expressive sound and motion are connected – the fife begins the ‘movement’ which is the narrator’s journey in Sicily, a journey which is also a conversation.
Thus the extraordinary lyricism of Conversazione in Sicilia : a language which like memory is ‘twice-real’, existing in two worlds at once: both word and music, concrete and intangible, it is the sing-song language of childhood and a melancholy poetry of adulthood, the language both of modernism and of the premodern fable, of the particular and the universal, of fact and significance, reality and the ‘something-more’ of imagination (a ‘larger reality’) existing not side by side but simultaneously.

In 1938, Vittorini moved to Milan for an editorial job at the book publisher Bompiani. Conversazione in Sicilia was appearing in serial form in Letteratura , the work’s subtlety apparently escaping the fascist censors. It first appeared in book form in 1941, under the title of an accompanying short story, Nome e lagrime , published by Parenti. It sold out immediately and was reprinted by Bompiani a few months later. But Americana , the anthology of American short fiction Vittorini edited for Bompiani, was immediately blocked on publication that very same year: the censors demanded the deletion of Vittorini’s notes and commentary.
In 1942, he began to collaborate with the anti-fascist front and the Communist Party, working on the clandestine press. He was arrested, and from jail watched the bombing of Milan, which destroyed his house and all his books and manuscripts. After his release from prison, he redoubled his efforts for the Resistance: editing, typesetting and distributing the