 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) |
|
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 rhythmical 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 by Grazia Deledda, translated by Martha King, introduction by Dolores Turchi, New York: Italica Press, 1999; p. 2; original work appeared in 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 three terms. The family also owned an olive-oil press and a winery. 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. Deledda's upbringing was traditional and protective. She was rarely allowed to leave the house alone. 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 Stella d'Oriente (1891) was published under the pseudonym Ilia di Saint Ismail. Fior di Sardegna (1892, Flower of Sardinia) received good reviews, but it was Anime oneste (1895), a family romance for young women, which secured her fame. The novel was translated into French. 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 school teacher from Aggius, and Giovanni
De Nava, a Calabrian
journalist and poet. Giuseppe M. Lupini, a journalist in Rome,
attracted Deledda too, but he possibly never received a letter from
her. After turning over the management of the winery to her brother Andrea, Deledda left Nuoro in 1899. At the invitation of Donna Maria Manca, the editor of of the journal Donna sarda (Sardinian Lady), she 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. After returning to Rome, she had a brief audience with Mussolini: they exchanged inscribed photographs. Gracia 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." (Henrik Schück, President of the Nobel Foundation, in Presentation Speech, on December 10, 1927; NobelPrize.org) 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. Elias Portolu (1903), one of Deledda's major works, 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 by Mary G. Steegmann as The Woman and the Priest (1922), and republished in 1928 with an introduction
by D.H. Lawrence. In 1921, when Lawrence collected material for his travel book Sea and Sardinia
(1921), he had traveled through the island with his wife. He did not
meet Deledda, but he visited Nuoro, her place of birth. "So, we stop at
the Dazio, the town's customs hut, and velveteens has to pay for some
meat and cheese he is bringing in. After which we slip into the cold
high-street of Nuoro. I am thinking that this is the home of Grazia
Deledda, the novelist, and I see a barber's shop. De Ledda. And thank
heaven we are at the end of the journey. It is past four o'clock." (Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence, New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921, p. 242) 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. In 1971-1972, Deledda received new attention 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. Canne al vento (1913, Reeds in the Wind), which told the story of a aristocratic Pintor family, sliding deep in poverty. Efix, the family servant, is the personification of loyalty and ancient beliefs, but silent suffering surrounds her: she has killed Don Zame, the tyrannical father of the sisters whom she now protects. "Efix felt death approaching little by little, as though rising silently up the path accompanied by a procession of wandering spirits, by the panas beating clothes down at the river, by the light flutter of innocent souls transformed into leaves, into flowers...." (Ibid., p. 186) Of all her books, this novel was Deledda's own favorite one. 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); 'Deledda, Gracia' by T.G.B. [Thomas G. Bergin], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); 'Deledda, Grazia,' Nobel Prize Winners: An H. W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, edited by Tyler Wasson (1987); Grazia Deledda by M. Aste (1990); Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook by Rinaldina Russell (1994); 'Gracia Deledda 1871-1936' by Gaetana Marrone, in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English: Volume I: A-L, edited by Olive Classe (2000); Grazia Deledda: A Legendary Life by Martha King (2005); Race and Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification by Melissa Coburn (2013); 'Sardinian confines in the works of Grazia Deledda' by Rhianedd Jewell, in Italian Women Writers, 1800-2000: Boundaries, Borders, and Transgression, edited by Patrizia Sambuco (2014); Deledda: una vita come un romanzo by Luciano Marrocu (2016); Grazia Deledda: i luoghi, gli amori, le opere by Rossana Dedola (2016); Grazia Deledda: una vita per il Nobel by Maria Elvira Ciusa (2016); Constructing the Self in Language and Narrative: The Work of Grazia Deledda by Rhianedd Jewell (2018); Grazia Deledda: la scrittura dell'eccesso by Pasqualina Deriu (2021); Grazia Deledda: prospettive del religioso per una rilettura critica by Salvatore Bulla (2022); Grazia Deledda: vita culturale e familiare nella Roma del primo Novecento by Maria Elvira Ciusa (2022); Sos contos de fuchile: le novelle di Grazia Deledda by Silvia T. Zangrandi (2022); Grazia Deledda's Painterly Aesthetic, editors: Angela Guiso and Virginia A. Picchietti (2025) Selected works:
|
