Grazia Deledda Research Articles

From Mater Dolorosa to Mater Degenerata: Sacrifice and Subversion in Deledda’s Cenere and Duse’s Film

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the presence of positivist and proto-Eugenic discourses in Grazia Deledda’s novel Cenere (1904) and the eponymous film adaptation by Febo Mari and Eleonora Duse, Cenere (1916). I introduce the term ‘mater degenerata’ as a trope that shows a direct influence of Lombrosian ideas on Italian literature and early Italian cinema. I argue that both authors are obsessed with the mother’s body, and their work reflects a diffused anxiety in Italian culture regarding unfit mothers. The essay has two main parts. In the first part, I introduce the ‘mater degenerata’ trope. In the second part, I offer a comparative analysis of Grazia Deledda’s novel and Febo Mari and Eleonora Duse’s film and highlight how Lombrosian positivist imageries were used in early twentieth-century Italian literature and cinema to depict the degenerate mother and to express social concerns regarding motherhood, reproduction, and national identity in liberal Italy.

‘America e Sardigna’: Una poesia in sardo della giovane Grazia Deledda (1893)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the rediscovered printed edition of ‘America e Sardigna’, a poem written in Sardinian by Grazia Deledda for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; so far, this appears to be the only poetic text composed by Deledda in her native language. The analysis is carried out at several levels: historical, ideological, linguistic, orthographic, and metric-structural. After reconstructing the editorial context, the author frames the poem within the Sardinian literary system – in relation to diachrony and synchrony, cultured and popular style, and written and oral literature, also taking into account the multilingualism arising from the Logudorese koiné and the author’s dialect, Nuorese. The study, focused through the lens of Sardinian poetic culture, considers the stylistic and aesthetic choices of ‘America e Sardigna’, and concludes by considering why Deledda broke away from an avenue of poetic invention she had only recently embarked on.

Dalle prime attestazioni al persistere di alcuni (pre)giudizi su una lingua e una modernità incomprese

Some of the first reviews of and critical writings on Grazia Deledda’s works can help us realise how long prejudices about Deledda and her writing have persisted. The prejudiced dismissal of her ‘bad’ Italian generated the cliché notion that her works notably improved in translation. This was perhaps one reason why Deledda seems to have longer enjoyed greater critical acclaim and more popularity with readers abroad than in Italy. Only recently have some young Italian (and non-Sardinian) scholars begun to study Deledda, while in Sardinia there has been new, robust research on her, illuminating all her precocious modernity. This modern approach was little understood in the 20th century and above all was denounced by the gossipy, envious, and misogynistic literary world, which Deledda herself depicted in some of her novels and short stories. While Pirandello’s novel Suo marito tends to be cited as possibly responsible for spreading negative judgments about Deledda, those who have not read her Nostalgie (1905) will not grasp how much this book may have suggested or reinforced Pirandello’s own ironic and negative representation of that same mediocre and limited literary world in his novel. More generally, to appreciate Deledda, one must read all her works, rather than only those set in Sardinia.

Proibito di Mario Monicelli tratto da La madre di Grazia Deledda come esempio di “western deleddiano”

In the 1950s, films inspired by the work of Grazia Deledda and, at the same time, by the western genre appeared. Called ‘the Deleddian westerns,’ they typically featured the conquest of a wild environment, submission to the laws of nature, the primacy of local unwritten customary laws over the official law of the state (bound up with the frequent motif of justice), and stories of outlaws from the early 20th century. In the article, we analyse Mario Monicelli’s film Proibito (1954; Forbidden), inspired by Deledda’s novel La madre (1919; The Mother). Thematising justice, Proibito is a story of bandits and a priest who must intervene for the sake of peace and the good of the community. The film’s plot transports viewers to the non-existent Sardinian Far West and goes beyond the concerns of Deledda’s novel. Though coming closer to American cinema and the western film model of the time, Forbidden went down in the history of Sardinian cinema for its realistic and non-invasive portrayals of Sardinia’s iconic symbols, such as nuraghes, village churches, costumes, and local festivals. In this article, we compare the novel and the film to conclude that the two substantially differ in their renderings of the character of the mother and her relationship with her son, his inner conflict, religion, and superstition. All these aspects are absent or marginalised in the film.

Il perturbante come strategia sovversiva: realismo magico ed elementi fantastici nei Racconti sardi di Grazia Deledda

This paper discusses the absence of Grazia Deledda both in Spanish university curricula and on the Spanish publishing market, an oblivion shared by other female authors of her time. This exclusion has a dual cause: the writers’ gender and the literary genre they cultivated. In this study, I offer a new reading of Deledda’s Racconti sardi (1894) through a critical analysis of its architectural elements, resonating with magic realism and the fantastic genre. These elements fit within the aesthetics of the liminal (Tomassini, 1992), which seeks to reinterpret the history of otherness as opposed to normative and legitimised histories. While magic realism proposes a world tailored to the experience of the other, which belies the official truth, the fantastic highlights the flaws of the uniform conception of reality. Such narratives may convey a subversive, albeit often overlooked, message as the mechanisms of the genres of the non-real promote readers’ estrangement, a revision of the contract of fiction and, therefore, multiple levels of reading. These accomplishments make Deledda a classic author whose narrative production, which starts from the local to become universal, is worth continual re-reading.

Le “pagine sempre mediocri” di un premio Nobel per la letteratura. Excursus nella critica deleddiana del suo tempo

The reception of the work of Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) is a conspicuous paradox. Although she was a successful author and a Nobel Prize winner (1926), she is little known and little studied, especially when compared with the other Nobel laureates, in particular male ones. My aim is to investigate the origins of Deledda’s ‘misfortune’ by exploring the common issues critics raised with respect to Deledda’s books in her day. One of those was, prominently, Deledda’s alleged imperfect style, a recurring theme in criticism throughout her career. Also, the Sardinian dimension of her works left no critic indifferent and led to her writing often being reduced to ‘regional’ or ‘folkloric.’ Many critics insisted that Deledda’s Sardinia, little known on the ‘Continent’ at the time, enjoyed considerable success precisely because of its ‘exotic’ quality. Finally, Deledda’s status as a woman writer was a salient factor in the reception of her work. Indeed, critics tended to adopt a condescending, or even sexist, tone, whether their assessment of Deledda’s work was favourable or detractive, which was a real commonplace in the reception of women authors back then. My aim is to investigate the role of these issues in the exclusion from the canon of a writer who has remained unique in Italian literature to this day.

Ethnicity, Gender, and the Making of a Transnational Decadent Canon: Georges Hérelle’s Translations of Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda

Ethnicity, Gender, and the Making of a Transnational Decadent Canon: Georges Hérelle’s Translations of Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda

L’image de la Sardaigne dans les premières traductions du roman « Canne al vento » de Grazia Deledda en français et polonais

The article deals with the first translations of Grazia Deledda’s novel Canne al vento (1913) into French and Polish (Des roseaux sous le vent, 1919; Trzcina na wietrze, 1934). They are compared with the original in order to examine the procedures by which the image of Sardinia inscribed in the original work was rendered or distorted. The culture-specific items taken into consideration represent several cultural fields (religion and beliefs, constructions, rural spaces, gastronomy, games, legendary creatures). The peritexts were also considered in order to observe to what extent they participate in the (re)creation of the image of Sardinia. The analysis shows that the French translation (by Marc Hélys) offers more contact with the different aspects of Sardinian culture than the Polish one (by Ida Ratinowowa). It is therefore the former that better fulfils the programme of “telling Sardinia to the world,” conceived by the Italian writer.

Teaching Italian Through Literature: A Canadian Glimpse on Grazia Deledda's Sardinia

Teaching Italian Through Literature: A Canadian Glimpse on Grazia Deledda's Sardinia

Autographs in Italian: A. G. Dostoevskaya’s Collection

The wife of F. M. Dostoevsky was one of the first female collectors in Russia. The article examines her collecting activities, which included collecting postage stamps and autographs of world historical figures, based on archival sources. The motivation and support for this undertaking were provided by the writer himself, and the "suppliers" were his correspondents and acquaintances. The article focuses on autographs in Italian in the collection of A. G. Dostoevskaya, which are stored at the department of manuscripts of the Russian State Library. These are five undated letters of famous Italians received from A. N. Jacobi (Peshkova-Toliverova), who lived in Italy in the 1860s and had a wide social circle there. A. N. Jacobi had been familiar with the Dostoevskys since the mid-1870s, and continued to communicate with Anna Grigorievna even after the writer's death. Among the documents handed over to A. N. Jacobi are a letter from the poet Aleardo Aleardi to the artist Guglielmo de Sanctis, a letter addressed to her from the Italian opera singer Elisa Volpini, politician Ricciotti Garibaldi (son of J. Garibaldi) and two letters from the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi. The sixth autograph in Italian in the collection of A. G. Dostoevsky is a letter to her from a fan of Dostoevsky’s work by the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda in 1912. In this letter, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature expressed her admiration and love for the "powerful genius" Dostoevsky. Grazia Deledda not only communicated in writing with Dostoevsky's widow, but also met with his daughter Lyubov in Italy in the 1910s. The article introduces unique letters in Italian from the collection of A. G. Dostoevskaya into scientific circulation for the first time, and provides their translation into Russian. These documents are of double value: as autographs of famous historical figures and as collection items of Dostoevsky's wife.

Translating Anthropomorphic Metaphors: An Ecostylistic Contrastive Analysis of Grazia Deledda’s The Mother

This contribution explores the translation of anthropomorphic metaphors via a contrastive analysis of La madre, by the Sardinian Nobel Laureate in Literature Grazia Deledda, and its 1922 translation (The Mother) by Mary Steegman. 
 
 It will be argued that the target readers’ perception of the symbolic relationship between landscape and cultural identity, which Deledda presents metaphorically through the use of anthropomorphism, can be reshaped by the translator’s interpretation. To explore the patterns that reveal the translator’s approach to anthropomorphic metaphors, the study will be based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), notably Prandi’s distinction and theory on metaphor translation (2019), and ecostylistics.

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico. By Rafael Ocasio. Rutgers University Press, 2021. Part of Rutgers University Press's Critical Caribbean Studies Series, this bilingual anthology includes numerous Puerto Rican folktales that were originally collected and published by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1914 and 1915. Rafael Ocasio, professor of Spanish at Agnes Scott College, includes the original Spanish versions of these folktales along with his English translations of the tales. He also includes a scholarly introduction in which he discusses the history and cultural significance of these tales within the context of Puerto Rican history. The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales. Edited and translated by Cristina Mazzoni. Princeton University Press, 2021. In this anthology, Cristina Mazzoni presents English translations of twenty fantasy stories that first appeared in Italy between 1875 and 1914. Among the authors featured in this collection are Carlo Collodi (the author of Pinocchio) and Grazia Deledda (a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature). Mazzoni provides a scholarly introduction in which she relates these stories to the history of Italy during the decades immediately following Italy's political unification. This volume is part of Princeton University Press's Oddly Modern Fairy Tales Series. We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers. Edited by Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks. Chicago Review Press, 2021. Intended for grown-up fans of Ann M. Martin's Baby-Sitters Club Series, this collection functions as a companion guide to the series. The contributors to this collection grew up reading this series, and they explore how the series shaped their views on gender, friendship, politics, and other topics. Although these contributors write from an adult perspective, they still value the pleasure the Baby-Sitters Club Series gave them during their growing-up years. [End Page 432] Copyright © 2022 Children's Literature Association

Прийоми відтворення гастрономічних реалій Грації Деледди в українських перекладах

Прийоми відтворення гастрономічних реалій Грації Деледди в українських перекладах

A moufl on is waiting on the doorstep. Cosima by Grazia Deledda as a literary transformation of a biography

The article analyzes the methods of a literary transformation of the biography of Grazia Deledda in her unfi nished novel Cosima (editio posthuma 1937). This novel marks an important attempt to expand the autobiographical context of Grazia Deledda’s literary output insofar as, in generic terms, it represents „a novel of transformation” (analogous to Bildungsroman but presented from a woman’s perspective). Deledda’s method of rewriting a biographical narrative consists employing some elements of a fairy tale, with the moufl on as an allegory of the fate of a woman who tries to compromise her desire of artistic freedom and obligation to fulfi l gender roles. Thus literary biography of the novel’s protagonist (and also of Grazia Deledda herself) establishes a paradigm of fight as an expression artistic freedom in the face of various forms of cultural imposition.

The english translation of Grazia Deledda’s La Madre and the relevance of culture in translating Landscape metaphor

Este artigo explora o impacto da estrutura cultural do tradutor na tradução da metáfora relacionada à paisagem por meio de uma análise contrastiva de La madre, de Grazia Deledda, Prêmio Nobel de Literatura, e a tradução de 1922, The Mother, realizada por Mary Steegman. A cultura influencia a visão da natureza ao fornecer normas e ideologias distintas sobre como as pessoas se relacionam com os outros e com o mundo natural. A linguagem do espaço de Deledda se originou de uma percepção subjetiva, assim como seu uso de metáforas relacionadas ao espaço. Na tradução, no entanto, a negociação de significado envolvendo metáforas da paisagem se torna mais complexa. A percepção subjetiva e a individualidade do autor do original se sobrepõem à subjetividade do tradutor, que impacta o texto de chegada com consequências políticas e ideológicas. Esta contribuição examina em particular o antropomorfismo e a relação entre metáfora e símile. Argumentar-se-á que a interpretação do tradutor pode remodelar o relacionamento e a compreensão dos leitores-alvo desse cenário. A análise será baseada na teoria conceitual de metáfora e na hipótese de tradução cognitiva de Mandelblit (1995). A ecoestilística fornecerá uma estrutura adicional para examinar os padrões que revelam a abordagem do tradutor em relação à natureza e paisagem.

Free to choose: Female characters in the stories of Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda’s strategies of female characters’ construction and agency are at the core of this essay. The goal is to investigate how the Nobel prize winner shapes the identity as the actions of her female characters in a decidedly eccentric manner if compared to contemporary Italian narrative. The path of the essay is chiefly chronological as it starts from her first short stories 1888, published in the context of widely circulated periodicals, to ends with Cosima, the autobiographical novel published in 1936, the year of Deledda’s death. A typology of her characters emerges in relation both to the cultural assumptions that strongly influence the first production of Deledda as well as to the heterogeneous literary models with which the writer weaves a dense and uninterrupted dialogue.

The traditional figures of women in Sardinian cinema

In this article I focus my attention on the archetype of women in Sardinian cinema. First of all, I explain the definition of the cinematographic movement which dominates Sardinia and I try to find the answer if Sardinian cinema cinema sardo exists. The next part of this paper shows the division of the cinema in Sardinia into two categories: seen from an external perspective by authors originating off the island and its culture, defined as hetero-representation, and seen from an internal point of view, developed by directors born and culturally raised in Sardinia, defined as self-representation.In the second part of the paper, I write about the term il deleddismo, which means the picture of Sardinia seen by the writer Grazia Deledda. Gianni Olla uses this term with reference to the cinema, il deleddismo cinematografico, as a way to enter the Sardinian world from the cinematic point of view. In early Sardinian cinema, stereotypes aimed at educating society and in the case of women by the merits of 20th-century ideology — to show them how they should behave. In recent decades this has not changed completely, but the figure of the modern woman is more often shown as the main character, who possesses far more power than her predecessors.

A Quiet Revolution: Illness as Resilience in Grazia Deledda's <em>La chiesa della solitudine</em>

A Quiet Revolution: Illness as Resilience in Grazia Deledda's <em>La chiesa della solitudine</em>

Grazia Deledda and the Transgressive Power of Writing as Poiēsis

Grazia Deledda and the Transgressive Power of Writing as Poiēsis

THE RENDITION OF METAPHORS AND THE TRANSLATOR’S INFLUENCE IN THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF GRAZIA DELEDDA’S LA MADRE

Description is the chief discursive strategy to communicate information on space. The ekphrastic role of landscape description, however, might go beyond setting the scene. One of the ways to fully express ideas related to landscape and human experience is metaphor, where landscapes often serve as a referent. The negotiation of meaning involving landscape metaphors is culturally and socially situated, and becomes more complex once translation is involved. This contribution will argue that the translator’s interpretation can re-shape the features of such negotiation and consequently the target readers’ understanding of that landscape. The use of metaphors in relation to landscape and nature will be observed via a contrastive analysis of Sardinian Nobel Laureate in Literature Grazia Deledda’s novel La madre and its 1922 translation (The Mother) by Mary Steegman. The contrastive analysis will be based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), drawing from Prandi’s classification and theory of metaphor and Schäffner’s classification of metaphor translation (2017). Ecostylistics will be employed to analyse those patterns in literary texts which are generally excluded from ecolinguistic consideration, but which still uncover the translator’s approach with regards to nature and landscape. The aim is to highlight the degree to which metaphor translation depends on the translator’s cultural framework and perceptions of nature as well as personal style and interpretation, possibly shifting the impact of metaphor from the source text to the target text. Particular attention will be devoted to the stylistic and narratological consequences of translating a metaphor with a simile. Keywords: conceptual metaphor theory; ecostylistics; metaphor; simile; metaphor translation: Grazia Deledda.