9,59 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Forced back to her remote hometown by the war, Giulia is immediately drawn to a couple in a similar situation: graceful, spontaneous Ada and her husband Paolo, a sickly teacher and partisan in hiding. Joined from Turin by Giulia's husband Stefano, the two couples form an intense bond; as the Germans begin to occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the muffled hum of threat over a long, hard winter.In prose of subtle, enigmatic atmospheres and acutely precise images, Lalla Romano evokes both the tension and the stillness of life in occupied Italy. Translated into English for the first time, A Silence Shared is a captivating classic novel that inhabits the silent spaces between historic events, depicting the mysterious luminosity of human relationships in extraordinary circumstances.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
A Silence Shared
LALLA ROMANO
Translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore
PUSHKIN PRESS
Contents
Silences
An Introduction by Brian Robert Moore
“For me, to write has always been to pluck from the dense and complex fabric of life some image, from the noise of the world some note, and surround them in silence.”
lalla romano
A Silence Shared is a book cut directly from the fabric of the author’s life, a journey through memory in which Lalla Romano’s own experiences of World War II are relived, and reinterpreted, from the viewpoint of the novel’s protagonist, Giulia. In 1943, after her home in Turin was damaged during the Allied bombings, Romano and her young son went to stay with her parents in Cuneo, the town of penetrating silences that is never referred to by name in the novel. Like the character Stefano, Romano’s husband, Innocenzo Monti, had to remain in Turin for work, forcing their family to separate. Prior to her return to Cuneo, Romano, who had published her first collection of poetry in 1941, was working as a teacher and frequently exhibiting as a painter, too—between the late 1920s and early 1930s, she had studied at the art school of Felice Casorati, entering into some of the most vibrant, and most committedly antifascist, artistic circles in Italy at the time. But it was in Cuneo that Romano became more directly engaged politically, joining the antifascist Partito d’Azione (Party of Action). It was also in this period that she grew close to the partisan Adolfo Ruata and his wife Eugenia, the real-life Paolo and Ada, who due to Adolfo’s poor health took refuge in the countryside near Cuneo towards the end of the war. Tetto Murato, the novel’s enigmatic original title, refers to the place name of their hideaway: a tetto, the standard Italian word for “roof”, signifies in local usage a group of farmhouses, while the seemingly fated adjective, murato, or “walled in”, echoes the characters’ isolation and closeness as they shelter from the dangers of the outside world.
With the Nazi-Fascist occupation and the Italian Resistance raging beyond the house’s walls, the novel’s true subject is the profound understanding and the delicate, at times strained intimacy that develops between these two couples, as Giulia and occasionally Stefano spend time with Paolo and Ada at their refuge throughout the long winter. Just as Giulia feels an undeniable and magnetic connection with the intelligent yet physically vulnerable Paolo (a victim of Fascist torture), she notices similarities in character that draw together the more assured and vital natures of Stefano and Ada. The experience as lived by Giulia becomes an absorbing and subtly subversive exploration of human affinities, of the mysteries of intellectual and physical attraction, phenomena that are often just hinted at in her narration, remaining understated despite their intensity.
Romano rarely strayed from autobiographical subject matter, and the entirety of her published work, with the exception of a few early stories, is narrated in the first person. Forever rejecting the term “memoir” for her books, Romano acknowledged that A Silence Shared was the novel in which she most freely distorted the details of her own life: beyond the difference in name, Giulia is younger than Romano was then, and she is not yet a mother. While Romano described these transformations as arising naturally, it seems the divergence between protagonist and author was not taken lightly: in early drafts, the book wasn’t told from Giulia’s point of view, but from the distanced perspective of a third-person narrator, a conspicuous aspect for a writer who would declare, “I feel I’m in reality, with my feet on the ground, only if I say ‘I’.” The conscious shift to the first person highlights, perhaps more than any other point in her literary output, Romano’s willingness and determination to “say I”, an artistic choice from which she would never again waver. In the particular case of A Silence Shared, this entails a decision to identify with her protagonist Giulia and to make their reality a shared one, treating the book as a true and honest, albeit not an entirely factual depiction of her own life. For as Romano would later affirm, any alterations or reinventions did not “change the truth of the book, which does not (ever) consist in its truthfulness”.
Biographical details in A Silence Shared are therefore never “givens”, and it is worth considering one such detail as it appears in the very first pages: “I had work to do in those weeks, a classic to translate. I sank into it like something that was outside of time, which calmed me.” In 1943, the writer Cesare Pavese, a former university classmate of Romano, asked her to translate Flaubert’s Three Tales for the publishing house Einaudi, where he was as an editor. This unnamed classic, referenced infrequently and seemingly in passing, bears an understated importance, not only because Romano uses it to introduce the theme of sinking into a time outside of time, which plays out in the novel as a whole. The period depicted in A Silence Shared, in fact, overlaps with a creative process that leads directly to the birth of the prose writer and novelist. Romano described translating Flaubert as nothing short of life-changing: “The translation of this simple and essential prose allowed me to realize that prose can be just as rigorous as poetry, that prose and poetry are, rather, the same thing. ‘A Simple Heart’ was decisive for me: the end of the prejudice I had against the novel. I also owe to Flaubert my shift from painting to narrative.”
Translation, this interpretive art, is truly at the heart of the book, a fact evidenced in Romano’s ability to take the silences, the subtle actions and the spare words of the four protagonists, and have them assume deeper shades of meaning for the reader. They speak to us in the more universal language of hidden intentions, of profound and often conflicting emotions, of gestures both realized and implied—communication that primarily exists in the unsaid. “Where there is love / even silence / is word”, Romano wrote in her posthumously published Diario ultimo (Last Diary), and the transformation of silence into word is one of the principal artistic feats accomplished in these pages.
In reality, Romano translated not one, but two classics during the war: after Flaubert, she turned to the painter Eugène Delacroix’s journal (Adolfo Ruata, a translator himself, would find a publisher), a project that left a similarly profound mark. Romano, who would publish multiple travel journals and diaries over the decades, consistently employed in her prose a diarylike intimacy and immediacy of expression, while simultaneously incorporating internal debate and dialogue, including parenthetical reconsiderations and asides. A striking example is the reflexive question presented after Giulia first encounters Paolo: “I felt as though he didn’t even see me, that his—blind?—eyes were seeing something behind me, through me.” Formal elements such as these, which seem natural for a diarist though quietly startling in a novel, reveal Romano’s approach to writing as a gradual and never-finished process of “seeing the truth within myself”, to use again the words of Giulia. Nevertheless, the book that offers the clearest counterpart to A Silence Shared is the one Romano had most recently translated, Béatrix Beck’s tale of infatuation set during the German occupation and the French Resistance, Léon Morin, prêtre. The existential and political discussions that fill Beck’s book grant an impression of the different shape Romano might have given to her own Resistance novel, had she not decided after the initial stages of writing to substitute longer discussions with brief, pregnant lines and to leave the “frequent and endless” conversations “unsaid” on the page, as she wrote in her afterword.
Finally, translation is key to Romano’s writing, and to A Silence Shared in particular, as an art of transition, of carrying over, with the novel happily inhabiting a liminal space between mediums. Just as Romano saw the book as something between prose and poetry, the most notable Italian poets of her day, from Eugenio Montale to Pier Paolo Pasolini, described her novels as essentially poetry in prose. The lyric rhythm of the text is informed by a musical conception of the power of silence and pauses when effectively placed amid sound and noise, a dynamic mirrored in the way the suspended, snow-muffled atmosphere that forms around the couples is intermittently disrupted by the war. In an introductory note to her book Le lune di Hvar (The Moons of Hvar) Romano would describe this distilled quality of her prose in the following terms: “The words have to be few, between spaces and silences: that way they live.” The novel also occupies a transitional state as regards Romano’s relation to the visual arts and to the silent art of painting. Although she displays an innate eye for visual description, the book is hardly a descriptive novel in the traditional sense; her painterly talent is instead in finding a stillness that, like Old Masters paintings, captures the exact moment of unspoken revelation. This revelatory dimension even becomes overt in the novel’s few direct references to the art form: when Ada “looked like a painting that shone for an instant”, no longer seeming herself “but Ada as goddess, as sacred dancer, revealed by a light reflected off the wall of a dark temple”; or at the dinner table in Tetto Murato, where “everything livened up again, after freezing in dismay, like a tableau vivant that had truly come to life”.
Romano continued to implement visual elements in her work—in 1975 she produced her first “visual novel” in which photographs are conceived as the text and the accompanying words as illustrations—and although she abandoned painting during the war, Romano the visual artist still exists, quite literally, in these pages. The manuscripts are full of drawings, especially female nudes and faces in profile. Female models were a common subject of study at Casorati’s school, but as the handwritten words move between and become submerged in these figures, it is impossible not to recall that Romano’s novel, while ethereal, is one of attraction and the body: the beautiful body of Ada, the comforting physicality of Stefano (“Stefano’s dry body smelled good, the smell of bread fresh from the oven”) and, of course, the sick body of Paolo, whose very malady becomes beguiling, mystifying—in other words, another source of attraction.
Another silence present in the novel, and to a certain extent in Romano’s life, is her silence regarding her involvement in the antifascist struggle. Romano consistently downplayed any direct involvement in the Resistance, preferring not “to talk of personal undertakings”, as she said in the interviews gathered in L’eterno presente (The Eternal Present), though she added that taking action was a necessity: “In important moments, you have no choice. Even if one is an artist, one is also a citizen.” Adolfo Ruata was a key figure in the Partito d’Azione in Cuneo, and their close relationship during the Resistance—and the severe risks of helping to protect such a figure—points to Romano’s engagement. An early chapter with handwritten edits reveals that Romano originally considered making Giulia’s political role more explicit, portraying it similarly to how she would later describe her own involvement: “Faced with the alternatives of history, she, too, was a partisan; but of political action she felt annoyance and, almost, shame, though she knew that in that moment it was her duty.” Even if Paolo is the only true partisan in the finished novel, this undisclosed element of the author’s life is perhaps another reason why Giulia and Paolo’s mysterious affinity is so strong, and why they seem “made to understand each other”.
Clearly uninterested in using her writing as a tool for self-aggrandizement, Romano was no more interested in aggrandizing the actions of others, and the fact that the novel didn’t celebrate the Resistance more directly attracted some criticism following its publication in 1957—Giulia’s narration even alludes obliquely to how the leftist ideals of the Resistance, and the people who fought for them, were in many ways abandoned in post-war Italy. But the Resistance and the war more generally are by no means secondary or an accidental backdrop. On the contrary, it is the large-scale historical event itself that forces the characters into a kind of exile from daily life, as they develop a deeper and unrepeatable form of solidarity through their common hopes for the future. This can be understood as the last and most essential silence in the novel, namely, the suspension of what the characters consider to be normal life, the hushed anticipation of what will come “after”. But as the war ends and a return to the everyday begins, Tetto Murato, along with the exceptional relationships that were shaped there, inevitably transforms into a thing of the past, an unreachable and legendary period that, like childhood itself, was nevertheless lived firsthand. There is a suggestion of this return to childhood in Romano’s fictionalization of herself and the other real-life figures, since she named the characters Giulia and Ada after Eugenia and Adolfo’s two daughters, who were young girls at the time of the war.
The depiction of events that emerges is therefore metaphysical, dreamlike, with an atmosphere verging on fairytale, and yet realistic. To read letters between Romano and the Ruatas from the time is to be presented with all the truth of the novel, which ultimately proves to be an authentic snapshot of people and their temperaments in the face of war and illness: Eugenia who, like Ada, shows joyful assurance even in dire circumstances; Adolfo, with his restrained yet palpable affection for Romano. Most remarkably, even the seemingly mystical element of living in a time outside of time was truly an experience shared. In April 1945, on the eve of the Italian liberation—when the characters, too, would separate in A Silence Shared—Adolfo confessed in a letter to Romano that the “days that you were here now seem to me so short, and different from all the rest, and most of all that they are outside of time; in the way that everything that belongs to memory is, in reality, outside of time, and I mean not only the chronological kind—which doesn’t matter—but psychological time, which is the only time, for us”.*
* Lalla Romano’s epistolary correspondences and the manuscripts of Tetto Murato are held in the Fondo Lalla Romano at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan, an extensive archive that was donated to the library by Antonio Ria, Romano’s dedicated companion during the last decade and a half of her life. In addition to Mr Ria and the Braidense, I would like to express my thanks to PEN America for helping to support this translation through the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature.
The only true silence is a silence shared.
cesare pavese
I
I had heard people talk about them, the way locals talk about out-of-towners: as something suspicious, if not outright scandalous.
He, a teacher and intellectual, sent to that isolated town near the border as if in a kind of exile; she, proud, aristocratic. No one knew how they managed to get by: they didn’t give lessons, and yet no one could say they had racked up any debts. Worst of all was that they “didn’t go to church”.
I had felt bad for these strangers. For them, life in that provincial town could not have been easy.
One day, a woman was pointed out to me on the balcony of a new house built over the old fortified walls—I knew it had to be her.
There was an ancient grace to this figure as she carried out the dancelike act of hanging laundry on a clothesline. Squeezed into a robe which opened out like a bell, she twirled rapidly with abrupt, even haughty movements; her hair she wore knotted at the top of her head.
I stood looking at her, mesmerized, and I was sorry when she went back inside.
On a small bench, her young daughter still sat clutching a doll. There was something ancient about her, too; maybe her long, very fair hair, which fell down over her little shoulders.
What came over me then was almost pity, a desire to protect her.
I too felt lost in that town, where I had spent my childhood, no less: my return had been forced by the war.
I lived in the now unfamiliar house of two elderly cousins of my mother. The cousins had been beautiful in their youth, and still were now that they were old, or nearly old. Stefano, my husband, regarded them admiringly, subtly paying his respects; they were grateful for the way he treated them like ladies. They listened attentively—slightly rigid—as he told of wartime life in Turin.
As for me, Stefano’s brief visits shook me, and left me feeling weaker.
The cousins had set up a gloomy room for us, their mother’s old sitting room. The only option was to stay put on the bed, in that room cramped with furniture and other useless things, which moreover happened to be freezing cold. The bed, located in the middle of the room, was tall and had a bulging “bombé” frame. It wasn’t a double bed, and even for two skinny people it was tight.
Stefano would lie stretched out; he stayed composed while he slept as long as he didn’t have bad dreams.
He liked the summer, sleeping sheetless as though in a field. I, on the other hand, liked a winter bed. In the summer and in the winter Stefano’s dry body smelled good, the smell of bread fresh from the oven, I used to say. But now it was hard to find that warm aroma again: always too much cold had been endured. His feet were icy, and in his hair lingered the sad smell of trains from his journey there.
I had work to do in those weeks, a classic to translate. I sank into it like something that was outside of time, which calmed me.
When people came to see the cousins, I would put away the book, the dictionaries and notebooks, and I’d flip through issues of Pro Familia, bound by year. (I stayed in there with them because it was the only heated room.) That magazine, with its photographs of high-ranking clergymen, was no less gloomy than the visits.
The visitors were elderly women, the widows of generals and the like: gossipy and piously narrow-minded.
The cousins listened without interruption. They didn’t enquire into other people’s business. Not that they were particularly easy-going; they just avoided indiscretion.
Sometimes, if the woman talking was more colourful, I listened too. That was how I heard about Ada and Paolo. The woman was telling a story about them: an example, she said, of “punished unbelief” and “divine retribution”.
The story went back a couple of years, to when “they” had arrived in town with their baby daughter who was only a few months old. The baby did not “even” have a necklace with a medallion of the Madonna around her neck, so the wet nurse secretly pinned a medallion to her shirt. The baby ended up swallowing the medallion. The doctor couldn’t figure out the problem and kept tormenting the child, who was eventually saved, when she was on the verge of dying, by a doctor in Turin.
If a story just like that one—dying babies, divine retribution—had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. Now I found it frightening for the meaning its narrator gave it. I saw no greatness in their God.
II
I was walking alone under the porticoes; I passed by a young woman with a long stride who didn’t look like she was from around there. I glimpsed her eyes flashing at me, something black and light blue. I recognized her, called after her. She froze for a moment; I told her that I’d been hoping to meet her, that I was also from Turin. Her expression immediately changed, and, smiling, she invited me to come to her house the next day.
In the house I mostly noticed a rather large, shadowy painting. Under a big feathered hat, a pale woman’s face peered out with a dark look in her eyes, sad as if in reproach.
“Paolo’s mother,” she said. “She was such a beautiful woman.”
I compared her uplifted, luminous face with the waxen face of the woman in the painting. She added almost nonchalantly, though firmly, too: “It’s all we have left from Paolo’s house. It was such a lavish house.” I smiled to myself for all of those “suches”, which evoked a world both naïve and absolute, although it wasn’t lost on me that she was at all times referring to the past.
Other paintings, English-style ink drawings: all of it had come from his house.
So, they had no other home but this one. They, perhaps, did not have anyone left.
It was different for Stefano and me: our homes and families were still there. But we had left without well-made and austere pieces of furniture or paintings.
