NeMLA 2022
Thursday, March 10 at 2:15-4:15 pm
Storytelling at Play: Pirandello's Stories for a Year (Seminar)
Location: GB 3 (Media Equipped)
Italian & Comparative Literature
In 1922, Pirandello embarked on his project of gathering 365 stories, one for each day of the year, to be collected into a single volume. When he died in 1936, however, he had only composed 244 stories, which now constitute his seminal collection of Novelle per un anno (Stories for a Year). This work plays a key role in Pirandello’s literary production and attests to his long-lasting commitment with the short story as a genre. Besides providing source material that Pirandello adapted across media, spanning from novels and plays to films and librettos, these stories exemplify the foundations of his poetic. This panel will investigate Pirandello’s short stories and his original storytelling from a broad critical perspective. Topics may include issues of language, culture, and translation, as well as modes of writing influenced by different literary movements (from Verismo to Surrealism and Modernism) and socio-cultural contexts. Comparative readings related to questions of gender, form, humorous and aesthetic theory, translation, adaptation, and reception are warmly encouraged.
This panel investigates Pirandello's short stories as literary texts, intertexts, or source materials for adaptations through different media, historical contexts, and comparative studies.
ABSTRACTS:
1. Ombretta Frau (A ‘Double’ Class Conflict: Sicilianità in Tanino e Tanotto)
My presentation will focus on Pirandello’s 1902 short story Tanino e Tanotto’s themes and intricate genesis to bring to light the various layers of a carefully scripted ‘circular’ narration, and of the protagonist’s existential dilemma. In Tanino e Tanotto, Pirandello’s readers will immediately recognize many of the traits of Pirandello’s poetics that define his collection Novelle per un anno: in primis, the Sicilian setting which, while prevalent in his early production, closer to the verismo tradition, remained consistent throughout his career. Additionally, Tanino e Tanotto is replete with issues around (the impossibility of) social mobility and social acceptance. The protagonist, Mauro Ragona – a countryman who, thanks to his wealth and a newly acquired title, was able to marry a noblewoman – is torn between a double existence. Ragona feels compelled to choose between his rural roots and his new lifestyle, and between a family that rejects him both for his demeanor and for his appearance, and his unquestioning lover, the simple Bartola. Ragona’s life is complicated by the birth of his two children, Tanino, blond and delicate like his mother, and Tanotto, dark and strong, a country boy like his father. The two children, a couple of opposites, function as the visual representation of Ragona’s split life.
2. Sara Iezzi (Sette novelle 'più sacre e più belle': il realismo magico dei Taviani in Kaos)
The present work carries out an analysis of Kaos (1984), a feature film by the brothers Taviani episodically structured on the basis of seven stories from Pirandello’s Stories for a Year. The study focuses on the comparison between the original text and cinematographic re-elaboration with the aim of examining analogies, discontinuities, amplifications, and omissions, and exploring the complex media relationship which articulates in a ductile interchange of content and style.
Within this framework, the filmmakers’ consistent introduction of dreamlike overtones into Pirandello’s naturalism is interpreted in the light of the expressive ways characteristic of the magic realism. The process of artistic identification and the parallelism between the creative experience of the author and the one of the directors constitute hence the fundamental questions on which this analysis is oriented, this latter aiming at providing a new interpretation of Kaos by contextualising that feeling of marvel inherent to the popular tales of Pirandello’s childhood which eventually became the heart of his short stories.
3. Maria Collevecchio (Pirandello’s Debut in Palermo: First Traces of Novels in Some Early Writings)
The purpose of the contribution is to examine some early works of Luigi Pirandello composed during his stay in Palermo (1882-1887) and linked to the cultural context of the Sicilian capital. The biographies and numerous essays dedicated to Pirandello have always presented him as “the Agrigentino”, overshadowing the city of Palermo, which he was native from paternal side, and where he stays for seven years. During these formation years, he begins to engage in writing and matures his artistic vocation. Some texts sporadically appeared in newspapers and magazines, some others were found in manuscript notebooks or in private correspondence. Apart from Capannetta (1884), the early works did not attract much attention from the critics because they were considered stylistically immature, but I think they are still important to reconstruct the training, the beginnings, the stages of the path that will lead the Sicilian writer to the world success. They often anticipate titles and themes of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year, allowing us to backdate their compositional genesis.
4. Alessio Aletta (Boulevards, Backstreets, Bourgeois, Beggars: A Closer Look at Pirandello’s Rome)
Rome is by far the most present location in the Novelle per un anno (approximately a third of the stories are set there), even more than Pirandello’s native Sicily. The contraposition between “Roman” and “Sicilian”short stories, whereby Rome would be the preferred location for humoristic plots while Sicily (i.e. Girgenti) is seen as closer to the Veristic tradition, has become almost commonplace among scholars. Such a simplification, however, may be disproved by a more nuanced analysis of Rome as a setting for Pirandellian stories. Indeed, not only Pirandello’s works feature Rome more than any other city: they feature it more in detail than any other place. Unlike Pirandello’s other works, his Roman stories are filled with precise topographical indications, sometimes even exact addresses; consequently, it is often possible to localize them in a specific district. By mapping these stories, some patterns emerge: most notably, there is indeed a massive presence of 'humoristic' tales, usually revolving around petit-bourgeois or white-collars, which are centered around Via del Corso and Via Venti Settembre; but we also find a considerable number of stories reminiscent of Verism, featuring working class and drifters. located in the vicinities of Stazione Termini (“Lo scaldino”, “La disdetta di Pitagora”). We also have a liminal space where these two worlds collide, between the Coliseum and Piazza Navona (“Volare”, “Come gemelle”).This paper aims to investigate the interconnections between setting, theme and style in Pirandello’s Roman short stories.
5. Lisa Sarti (Digital Pirandello: The New Life of Stories for a Year)
Pirandello wrote short stories for his entire life, collecting tales spanning a wide range of themes (socioeconomic disparities, gender roles, sexuality, the clutches of social convention), while addressing typical modernist questions of identity, relativity, and existential pragmatism.
Pirandello’s stories are now the vital part of a project that provides the very first complete English translation and scholarly edition of the 244 tales he composed before his death in 1936. Stories for a Year is a collaborative digital edition, (https://www.pirandellointranslation.org), edited by Lisa Sarti (BMCC – CUNY) and Michael Subialka (UC Davis), which brings these stories to an English-language audience as Pirandello intended them to be available to his own readers.
As a significant contribution to the field of Digital Humanities, Stories for a Year will be illustrated and discussed during this presentation with an emphasis on how digital resources were used and the role technology played in exploring the critical questions Pirandello’s oeuvre still posits. Furthermore, issues of collaboration, shared research, and copyright will be tackled as part of a wider reflection on the nature and scope of this digital project.
6. Michael Subialka (244 Stories in Search of a Translator: Pirandello’s Stories for a Year in English)
Despite his international fame, particularly after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, Pirandello’s ambitious collection of Novelle per un anno has never been fully translated into English. This paper traces the uneven trajectory of the stories’ translation history. Early translations can be found in numerous venues, especially in a few key volumes that published a selection of stories in the 1930s, but also in various individual translations published in literary magazines or other periodicals. While such “one-off” translations have continued to appear throughout the decades, a few other key volumes have put together selections of stories that came out in book form. None, however, has tackled Pirandello’s massive collection in a systematic way. Highlighting the various selection strategies and the scattered publication history of these translations, I argue that the time is ripe for a complete, systematic translation encompassing the whole corpus of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year. Drawing on the obstacles that have faced previous translators and publishers who undertook print translations of story selections, I suggest that a digital edition is the logical way forward to create a new resource for readers and scholars across the English-speaking world.