Little Novels of Sicily

"Verga is simply one of the great narrators of all time and his novellas are probably among the best pieces of fiction written in Italy, ever. Given my intense admiration of this guy and my feeling that these stories cannot help but impress, then it seemed such an obvious choice to me. Let me say a few words about Verga. Verga was from Sicily but he had no desire to write about it. He was living in Milan and he was writing upmarket society novels. One day somebody comes to him and says: “Look, as part of this desire to bring the fairly newly unified Italy together, we’re trying to get writers to write stories about different regions.” Verga says the last thing he wants to do is write about Sicily. But they say to him that there was some money in it for him and he was always susceptible to money because he tried to have this high society lifestyle. So he writes this story Nedda , which is a story of a young peasant girl in love with a peasant guy and they’re too poor to get married and her mother is dying. They make love simply because one day the whole call of nature in the springtime is simply too much for them. Of course she gets pregnant, he dies in a farming accident and she is completely destroyed by the criticism of society for her being pregnant without a husband. The interesting thing in Verga is how he shows the victim, the girl, acquiescing to this sense of the terrible error she’s made. Verga wrote a whole brilliant range of stories which really show how this traditional peasant and Catholic community, which was beginning to be romanticised as something wonderful that modern society was losing, how instead it’s a terrifying trap of a collective psychology, always ready to destroy individuals. It’s a kind of flip side to his high society novels. He shows all the dangers of these communities. The stories are just so well told. His attack on the Catholic church throughout these stories is amazingly courageous and effective. They’re wonderful stories and Lawrence, the translator, really understood what Verga was doing. Yes, a rural mining community. He grew up in a tight-knit community, so he understood exactly the mentality that Verga was evoking and criticising. I can remember writing an essay once, comparing Lawrence’s translation of the story “Black Bread” with the new translation, which is in a Penguin Classics edition by a Cambridge professor called McWilliam, who has recently died. It doesn’t take very much to show just how much better Lawrence understood the story than McWilliam did. Because what McWilliam does is he sees Verga’s idiom and then just fills his English with idiomatic expressions. But he’s simply not careful enough to realise that many of his English idiomatic expressions don’t fit in with the peasant mentality that he’s describing. Whereas Lawrence is incredibly careful to make sure that he doesn’t move Verga into a more modern English idiom that is completely different from the idiom he’s using. So yes, I think Lawrence did a good job."