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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Nostalgia," Grazia Deledda explores the intricate tapestry of emotions that define human experience, particularly the profound yearning for a lost past. Set against the backdrop of her native Sardinia, the novel employs a lyrical and evocative prose style, skillfully weaving together themes of love, regret, and the inexorable passage of time. The narrative artfully balances realism with a poetic sensibility, immersing the reader in the struggles of its characters as they grapple with their desires and memories, encapsulating the essence of early 20th-century Italian literature that often reflected on societal constraints and personal aspiration. Grazia Deledda, a Nobel laureate and a pioneering figure in Italian literature, drew upon her own experiences and heritage to craft this poignant tale. Having faced numerous challenges as a female author in a male-dominated literary landscape, Deledda's works often reflect her deep-rooted understanding of rural life and the complexities of human relationships. Her unique voice was shaped by her upbringing in Sardinia, imbuing her narratives with authenticity and emotional depth that resonate with readers. "Nostalgia" is a testament to Deledda's mastery of storytelling and her ability to evoke deep-seated emotions. For readers seeking a profound exploration of the human condition, this novel offers an intimate glimpse into the interplay between memory and identity, making it a compelling addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Nostalgia
Table of Contents
Introduction
A returning heart discovers that the road home is paved with memories as binding as any chain.
Nostalgia endures as a classic because it concentrates the essence of Grazia Deledda’s art: a lucid, unsentimental inquiry into longing, conscience, and the stubborn pull of place. Its power lies not in spectacle but in the steady pressure of ordinary lives confronted by immovable customs and the inescapable persistence of memory. By refining the drama of return into a universal meditation, the book speaks across languages and eras. Its quiet authority—born of moral clarity, psychological depth, and a near-mythic sense of the everyday—has ensured its place among the touchstones of modern narrative about memory and belonging.
Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian novelist awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, composed Nostalgia in the mature phase of her career, when her prose had achieved a spare radiance and thematic certainty characteristic of turn-of-the-century Italian letters. The book offers a concentrated exploration of yearning—for a homeland, a time, a self—that can neither be revisited nor fully renounced. Without divulging its turns, one can say it follows lives shaped by the tension between inward desire and outward duty. Deledda’s purpose is not to prescribe but to witness: to show how remembrance guides, distorts, consoles, and condemns.
Deledda’s intention, evident throughout her oeuvre and distilled here, is to elevate local experience into universal fable. She examines the negotiations individuals make with community, faith, and fate—forces that feel impersonal yet leave intimate marks. Her characters are rarely heroic; they are ordinary people compelled to reckon with the afterlives of their choices. Nostalgia’s design reveals how memory becomes a moral landscape: a terrain to cross, a burden to carry, a compass that sometimes points true. In crafting that landscape, Deledda invites readers to weigh the costs of return against the obligations of departure.
Stylistically, the book exemplifies Deledda’s economy: measured sentences, clear contours, a preference for implication over ornament. She aligns psychological action with the physical world—light, wind, stone, path—so that environment and emotion echo one another. A restrained omniscience keeps judgment at bay while letting motives surface through gesture and habit. Repetition functions as a quiet drumbeat, mirroring the way remembered scenes recur with shifting meanings. The result is a prose that feels at once tactile and emblematic: rooted in lived texture, yet lifted by the cadence of parable. Such qualities underpin its longevity and teach subsequent writers how less can be more.
Nostalgia’s central concern is the double edge of longing. Memory preserves identity, yet it can trap; belonging sustains, yet it can bind; distance clarifies, yet it can accuse. Deledda shows how the wish to return is seldom merely geographic. It is ethical, spiritual, and temporal—a desire to reenter a moment before loss or fault. Around this axis, themes of responsibility, forgiveness, and the price of silence revolve. The book lingers on how past and present braid, how customs and kinship shape choices, and how the pursuit of consolation sometimes sharpens the very ache it seeks to soothe.
Although Deledda’s imagination is famously anchored in Sardinia—with its austere beauty, intricate customs, and insular codes—Nostalgia treats setting as more than backdrop. Place becomes an active principle, a keeper of memory, an arbiter of what can and cannot be changed. The social fabric—rituals, seasons, work, and worship—acts on the characters as surely as weather acts on stone. By rendering a community’s rhythms without exoticism, Deledda demonstrates how the local clarifies the universal. Readers recognize in these contours their own negotiations with family expectation, communal honor, and the tug between rootedness and the outward gaze.
In literary history, Deledda stands between Italian verismo and the inward turn of modern narrative, translating regional life into forms that carry symbolic weight. Nostalgia crystallizes that bridge: its realism is exact, yet its patterns feel archetypal. The book has helped secure Deledda’s reputation as a writer who made the margins central, showing that the so-called periphery could bear the gravest questions of conscience. Its quiet insistence widened the scope of Italian prose, offering an alternative to urban or cosmopolitan paradigms and affirming that moral drama—rendered without rhetoric—could achieve a resonance equal to grand historical canvases.
The work’s influence flows through later treatments of memory, homecoming, and regional identity in Italian and European fiction. Writers who explore the ethics of place—the way landscapes hold stories and communities hold debts—find a precursor here. Deledda’s example also strengthened the visibility of women’s voices in the national canon, proving that intimate, rural narratives could command international regard. Nostalgia’s legacy is thus twofold: it models a poetics of restraint and a politics of attention, inviting literature to turn its face toward local worlds and to extract from them patterns capacious enough to speak to distant readers.
To read Nostalgia is to experience a pressure that builds without sensational turns: the pressure of memory meeting necessity. Deledda’s narrative tempo privileges pauses, silences, and the incremental revelation of motive. Scenes appear polished but porous, allowing readers to enter with their own histories. The book’s motifs—thresholds, seasons, paths—accumulate weight as they recur, each time altered by what has been learned or concealed. Rather than dictate interpretations, Deledda trusts the slow ethics of attention. The reward is an intimacy that endures after the last page, a sense that one’s own recollections have been touched and recalibrated.
For contemporary audiences, the book’s relevance is immediate. Mobility—chosen or forced—has made questions of home, identity, and return newly urgent. Nostalgia speaks to migrants and stayers alike, to anyone balancing inherited obligations with self-designed futures. Its sensitivity to communal codes and their psychological aftereffects resonates with readers negotiating tradition amid change. Even its ecological intuition—that landscapes remember, that places answer back—feels timely. Deledda offers no easy consolations. Instead, she provides a vocabulary and a cadence for thinking through attachment, loss, and continuity, reminding us that the past is not behind us but within the ground we tread.
Nostalgia’s lasting appeal lies in its rare combination of clarity and mystery: clear in its moral gaze, mysterious in the depths it opens within ordinary feeling. It gathers central Deleddian themes—longing, responsibility, fate, and the shaping force of place—into a compact form that neither simplifies nor sentimentalizes. Readers come away with sharpened senses: of time’s texture, of memory’s obligations, of love’s costs. That enduring charge explains why the book continues to engage new generations. It is a classic not because it is monumental, but because it is exact—exact about how the heart remembers, and how remembrance remakes a life.
Synopsis
Nostalgia presents a sequence of Sardinian tales that trace how longing shapes ordinary lives. The opening pieces establish the island’s rugged geography, seasonal rhythms, and village customs, introducing families whose work and worship are entwined with the land. Through calm scenes of pastures, kitchens, and church courtyards, the book foregrounds sounds, scents, and gestures that become touchstones for memory. Subtle incidents—an absent seat at the table, a path worn by departures, a melody recalled at dusk—signal the theme without overt declaration. These beginnings invite readers into a world where distance is felt before it is named, and time gathers like weather.
Early stories focus on youth discovering the first edges of absence: a sibling sent away for work, a friendship altered by duty, a courtship paused by rumors. Village festivities, with their songs and processions, throw that awareness into relief, contrasting shared celebration with private hesitation. Scenes typically pivot on a small decision—a promise made, a visit delayed, a token kept—which reshapes expectations without finality. Deledda’s descriptive attention keeps emotion anchored to material detail, so a shawl’s weave or the creak of a door carries more weight than explanation. In this phase, nostalgia begins as a quiet ache rather than a command.
As the collection advances, departures become explicit. Young men take seasonal work across the sea; daughters weigh proposals that would uproot them; elders manage fields while scanning horizons. Letters arrive bearing money, news, and questions, yet their gaps matter as much as their words. A turning point often centers on transit: a road chosen, a ship watched from the cliff, a train’s schedule negotiated with reluctance. The stories avoid spectacle, preferring the tension of preparing to leave or deciding to stay. Nostalgia here is forecast as an aftereffect, already present in farewells and in the way a house is tidied.
The domestic sphere introduces conflicts between desire and obligation. Parents tally debts and harvests while children imagine futures elsewhere, and priests counsel patience without prescribing outcomes. Illness, a failed crop, or an unexpected confession presses characters toward commitments that may close other paths. The narratives emphasize the texture of duty—prayers recited, ledgers kept, gifts exchanged—so that choices feel woven from habit as much as impulse. Turning moments hinge on conversations at thresholds or under fig trees, where silence functions like a vote. Without resolving fates, these episodes clarify what each person believes must be protected, even at the cost of change.
Midway, landscape and ritual take the foreground. Harvests, pilgrimages, and market days structure time, and the storytelling follows those cycles. A widow guards family memory through objects; a returning conscript measures what has altered during his absence; neighbors negotiate boundaries after storms redraw streams. The emphasis falls on continuity tested by disturbance. Natural events—drought, wind, unseasonal rain—become signals that human plans remain provisional. Nostalgia acquires weight through these patterns, not as ornament but as consequence, since what recurs also reminds. Key episodes end with open doors or distant bells, suggesting that recognition, rather than resolution, is the central achievement.
Later pieces widen the setting to towns and ports, where market chatter and crowded lodging houses expose characters to unfamiliar tempos. Work offers independence yet strains kinship habits learned in smaller places. Meetings with strangers, contracts in new dialects, and brief entertainments complicate loyalties. A misunderstanding, perhaps over money or pride, becomes the occasion for choosing what to value next. Even in these urban scenes, references to hills, wells, and courtyard fig trees persist, anchoring experience. The narrative rhythm balances novelty with recall, showing nostalgia not only as homesickness but as a measure against which new life is weighed.
Intergenerational tensions grow clearer. Land, dowries, and inheritance are parsed with care, and disputes are cooled by mediators or warmed by old grievances. An uncle’s advice carries the gravity of weather lore; a grandmother’s tale reframes a quarrel as a repeated pattern rather than a fresh wound. Legal rooms and kitchen tables serve as alternating stages, each with its own rules of speech. Decisions made here set terms for marriages, migrations, and reconciliations that later chapters will test. Rather than climax in verdicts, the stories often pause at the moment of agreement or delay, marking how commitments become binding.
Approaching the close, several narratives converge on decisive encounters: a planned reunion, a confession long considered, the chance to step back across a threshold once forfeited. Characters weigh whether the pull of remembered place should guide the next act or remain a private solace. Symbols introduced earlier—songs, paths, keepsakes—return, not to solve dilemmas but to clarify them. The tone favors candor over surprise. Nostalgia emerges as both companionship and challenge, a presence that asks what to carry forward. Turning points leave room for multiple futures, indicating that the work’s interest lies in orientation rather than definitive outcomes.
The concluding pieces gather the book’s elements—land, craft, ritual, kinship—into a steady affirmation of continuity amid change. Everyday labors resume, seasons tilt, and the island’s contours stand as a constant against which individual stories rise and recede. Without pronouncing a moral, the sequence suggests that longing is a durable form of knowledge, linking people to what sustains them even when they move away. The effect is cumulative: scenes of waiting, working, and returning accrue meaning through repetition. Nostalgia, as presented here, is less a retreat than a compass, guiding choices and preserving ties that outlast any single event.
Historical Context
Grazia Deledda’s Nostalgia, often published in Italian as Nostalgie, is rooted in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth century milieu of inland Sardinia, especially around Nuoro and the Barbagia region. This mountainous interior, marked by cork oak forests, granite uplands, and isolated valleys, preserved pastoral economies and customary law well after Italian unification. Daily life revolved around small villages, parish calendars, and seasonal transhumance. Sardinian dialects coexisted with Italian, and the rhythms of agriculture, shepherding, and local honor codes patterned social relations. Such a setting, distant from continental political centers, foregrounds the tensions between tradition and the intrusive apparatus of the modern nation-state.
The period evoked in the book corresponds to roughly 1880–1910, a time when Sardinia experienced slow integration into the Kingdom of Italy’s economic and administrative structures. Cagliari and Sassari were the principal urban poles, but Nuoro’s hinterland supplied much of Deledda’s imagery: stone-built villages, clan solidarities, and a moral economy shaped by scarcity and reputation. Rail and telegraph arrived late; malaria and poverty curtailed mobility. Church rituals, rural fairs, and family councils regulated life. Against this background of peripheral modernity, the work charts a social world negotiating the pull of memory and land with the push of migration, schooling, conscription, and new legal norms.
Italian unification in 1861 formally joined Sardinia to the new nation-state, but the island’s path had begun earlier with the 1847 Fusione perfetta, which abolished the distinct Sardinian institutions of the Savoy kingdom. After 1861, national laws, prefectures, and the 1865 administrative reforms extended centralized governance. Taxation, conscription, and a uniform penal code altered local autonomy. While the Risorgimento’s battles were fought elsewhere, the consequences were immediate: carabinieri outposts multiplied, and roads and rail began to penetrate the interior. The book’s portraits of villagers negotiating distant authority mirror this slow, often resentful incorporation into Italian legal and bureaucratic structures.
The Editto delle Chiudende of 1820, an enclosure decree specific to Sardinia, initiated the privatization of communal lands, reshaping property relations throughout the nineteenth century. By encouraging fencing and legal titles, it altered traditional access to pastures and water, fostering disputes between shepherds, smallholders, and emerging notables. Conflict over tancas, the enclosed plots, continued for decades, with boundary stones, hedges, and walls becoming flashpoints of litigation and violence. In Nostalgia, the persistent motif of land as memory and destiny echoes these long-term transformations: characters’ attachment to fields and flocks stands beside anxiety over encroachment, debt, and the juridical language of ownership.
Banditry and the culture of vendetta in Barbagia, particularly in the late nineteenth century, shaped Sardinia’s reputation and the daily calculus of risk. Kidnappings, retributive killings, and feuds were fueled by honor codes and scarcity, yet also by the dislocations caused by changing property regimes and policing. In the 1890s, intensified carabinieri patrols, extraordinary measures, and mobile columns attempted to pacify mountainous districts. While Deledda avoids sensationalism, her evocations of fear, secrecy, and the delicate balancing of dignity and compromise reflect this environment, where a misinterpreted gesture or broken promise could spiral into decades-long enmities under the watchful eye of an often-distant state.
Mass emigration from Italy between 1876 and 1915 involved roughly 14 million people, with peaks after 1900 toward the Americas and North Africa. Sardinia participated on a smaller scale than mainland regions, but islanders still left for Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, and, notably, for Tunis, Algeria, and Marseille. Steamship routes from Cagliari and Porto Torres connected families to trans-Mediterranean destinations. Remittances, letters, and remade kin networks altered village economies and expectations. The pervasive longing in Nostalgia resonates with this outward tide: absence, return, and the moral claims of the patria piccola frame characters’ decisions amid a widening world that both promises and threatens.
Within Sardinia, seasonal migration and internal departures intensified after 1890, as young men sought work in mines, docks, or mainland construction sites. The census snapshots of 1901 and 1911 show demographic stagnation in interior communes, reflecting departures and delayed marriages. Emigrant chains formed through padrone networks and family sponsorships, easing passage yet deepening obligations. Ships’ manifests list clusters from the same villages, revealing collective strategies of risk. Nostalgia captures the emotional ledger of these movements: the departure ritual at the village edge, guardianship of land by those who remain, and the hope that faraway wages can redeem mortgages, dowries, and reclaimed status at home.
After 1900, migratory flows diversified toward French and Belgian industrial basins as well as Latin America. Italian consular reports, parish registers, and savings bank ledgers demonstrate how remittances stabilized indebted households, financed enclosures, or purchased modern tools. But emigration also fractured customary authority and gender roles, as women managed property and negotiations in men’s absence. Deledda’s attention to the moral dimension of money, gifts, and vows reflects these pressures. Nostalgia’s elegiac tone does not merely mourn departure; it registers the reconfiguration of identity that migration produced, as letters and remittances returned entwined with new ideas about work, dignity, risk, and belonging.
Industrial mining expanded in the Sulcis-Iglesiente district during the late nineteenth century, drawing Sardinians and mainlanders to lead, zinc, and silver pits. On 4 September 1904, in the town of Buggerru, the army fired on striking miners demanding better hours and pay, killing three and wounding several others. The incident sparked Italy’s first national general strike later that month, signaling a new scale of labor mobilization. Although Nostalgia centers rural worlds, its sensitivity to class hierarchy and exploitation reflects this industrial conjuncture: the stark contrasts between owners and workers, the precarity of wage labor, and the moral outrage provoked by lethal repression.
Transport and communications transformed Sardinia between the 1870s and 1890s. Narrow-gauge railways and complementary lines extended from coastal hubs into the interior, with connections toward Nuoro completed in the late 1880s. The Legge Baccarini of 1879, funding public works, underwrote roads, ports, and rail that would slowly integrate peripheral regions. Telegraph posts and postal routes shortened distances in time if not in culture. Nostalgia registers the consequences of this partial modernity: news arrives faster than trust; officials arrive before services; the village square becomes a site where national directives meet local skepticism, and where mobility is both desired and feared.
Malaria was endemic in Sardinia into the early twentieth century, constraining agriculture, depressing labor productivity, and shortening lives. Italian public health policy began distributing low-cost State Quinine after 1900, supported by physicians such as Angelo Celli and by scientific breakthroughs on the parasite and vector. Mortality rates fluctuated with rainfall and poverty, and marshy lowlands near coasts and river plains were particularly affected. In Nostalgia, illness shadows seasonal work and family plans, heightening the sense of fate that landscapes impose. The book’s concern with vulnerability and endurance echoes a society where fever seasons shaped calendars as surely as church feasts.
Education reforms sought to reduce illiteracy and forge national identity. The Casati Law of 1859 established a framework for primary schooling; the Coppino Law of 1877 made elementary education compulsory and secular; and the 1904 Orlando Law extended obligations. Sardinia lagged: census data indicate illiteracy above 60 percent in 1871, dropping but still high by 1911. Girls faced additional barriers. Teachers posted from the mainland confronted linguistic divides and poor infrastructure. Nostalgia’s portrayals of letters read aloud, contracts misunderstood, and the prestige of the written word align with these reforms’ uneven penetration, where schooling promised mobility yet unsettled customary authority.
Church-state relations shaped political participation and social norms. The papal Non Expedit discouraged Catholics from voting in the new Italian state for decades, though its application softened under Pius X in the early 1900s. Parish priests mediated disputes, managed confraternities, and oversaw rites that structured community time. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum encouraged Catholic social initiatives, which sometimes competed with socialist clubs in mining districts. Nostalgia’s ethical universe reflects this religiously inflected public sphere: sin and penance, vows and absolution, and the persistent power of confession and rumor to regulate behavior where secular courts felt distant or distrusted.
The rise of organized labor and socialism in Italy—from the founding of the Partito Socialista Italiano in Genoa in 1892 to the expanding network of mutual aid societies—reached Sardinia’s ports and mines by the turn of the century. Worker circles, reading rooms, and cooperatives multiplied, often in tension with notables and clergy. The 1904 general strike, catalyzed by Buggerru, displayed national solidarity mechanisms that connected island struggles to mainland movements. Though Nostalgia remains anchored in rural plots, its attention to communal justice, gossip as social sanction, and the moral economy of work mirrors the broader politicization of need and dignity.
Food crises and political repression on the peninsula framed the 1898 riots culminating in the Bava Beccaris massacre in Milan, where troops used artillery against protesters, leaving dozens dead. Nationwide states of siege and censorship followed, chilling public assembly yet radicalizing parts of the working class. News of such events reached Sardinia through newspapers, sailors, and itinerant workers, contributing to a climate of caution and guarded speech. In Nostalgia, this context appears obliquely in the measured way characters weigh public confrontations, the fear of denunciation, and the reliance on kinship channels rather than formal politics to resolve conflicts.
As social critique, the book exposes a stratified moral order in which wealth, literacy, and official connections confer power over land and reputation. By dramatizing boundary disputes, debt, and the negotiation of honor under the gaze of priest and policeman, it questions the justice of a modernization that burdens the poor with taxes, conscription, and legal costs while offering scant protection. The depopulated village and the absent son stand as indictments of an economy that compels departure. The state appears as paperwork and rifles before it appears as school or clinic, placing formal legality against the ethics of survival.
Politically, the work interrogates the promises of post-unification Italy by showing how peripheral communities bear the costs of integration without proportionate voice. It highlights gendered constraints intensified by migration and law, revealing women as custodians of property and dignity yet excluded from decision-making. Class divides are drawn through the contrast between owners and dependents, urban investors and rural labor. By echoing the Buggerru shock, the malaria burden, and the enclosure legacy, the book critiques a developmental path that privatized commons, policed poverty, and exported labor, making nostalgia not merely sentiment but a record of unredressed social claims.
Author Biography
Grazia Deledda was an Italian novelist born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia, and died in 1936 in Rome. Writing across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she became the most internationally recognized voice of Sardinian narrative and one of the few women to enter the European canon of her time. Her fiction brought rural Sardinia into modern literature, blending regional realism with psychological intensity. In 1926 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Italian woman and the second woman ever to be so honored. Across dozens of novels and stories, she explored fate, conscience, and the social codes that bind communities.
Raised in a provincial environment, Deledda had limited formal schooling beyond the basics but pursued a rigorous self-education through reading and disciplined writing. As a teenager she published sketches and tales in magazines, and by the early 1890s she had issued her first novels, including Fior di Sardegna and La via del male. Her literary horizon drew on Italian verismo and European naturalism, while remaining deeply indebted to Sardinian oral tradition, proverbs, and song. This combination of influences shaped an early style attentive to humble lives, moral struggle, and landscape, setting the foundations for the mature work that would define her career.
Around 1900 she married and settled in Rome, a move that expanded her readership and professional networks while leaving her thematic allegiance to Sardinia intact. Elias Portolu, first serialized around the turn of the century and published in book form soon after, marked a breakthrough with critics and readers for its portrayal of desire, guilt, and destiny. Cenere followed in the next years, confirming her ability to stage intimate tragedies within rigid social frameworks. Though she engaged with literary life in the capital, she worked privately and steadily, cultivating a prose that balanced narrative economy with lyrical description.
From the late 1900s through the 1910s she produced a series of novels now regarded as central to her achievement. L'edera, Marianna Sirca, and especially Canne al vento deepened her exploration of honor, poverty, and redemption in insular communities shaped by custom and belief. La madre in the early 1920s heightened her psychological focus on conscience and religious burden. Critics noted her capacity to universalize provincial material without exoticizing it, and readers responded to the intensity of moral conflict. While some contemporaries found her fatalism austere, the clarity and rhythm of her storytelling secured a lasting audience.
International recognition grew steadily, culminating in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926. The award acknowledged the poetic power of her narrative and the sincerity with which she rendered human experience within a distinctive regional world. Translations multiplied, and adaptations broadened her reach; notably, Cenere was brought to the screen in the 1910s with a major stage actress in the lead, further publicizing her work. Deledda did not position herself as a public intellectual or political polemicist; rather, she sustained a consistent artistic program, publishing regularly and refining a voice that readers associated with moral gravity and emotional restraint.
Recurring elements define her technique and themes. She set most narratives in Sardinian villages and countryside, where family honor, communal judgment, Catholic morality, and the pull of the land constrain individual desire. Her prose fuses standard Italian with cadences and imagery rooted in regional speech and folklore, without extensive dialect display. Characters often confront guilt, secrecy, and the inexorable consequences of choice, yet they are rendered with compassion rather than didacticism. Nature functions as both setting and moral force, winds and stones echoing inward turmoil. This synthesis of psychological scrutiny and ethnographic detail made her work distinctive among Italian modern realists.
In her later years in Rome she continued to publish novels and stories, including reflective works that looked back on formative experience. An autobiographical narrative, Cosima, appeared posthumously, illuminating the discipline and vocation behind her early efforts. She died in 1936, leaving a body of writing that remains central to Italian literary history and to Sardinian cultural memory. Today scholars read her alongside European realists and modernists, and general readers return to Canne al vento, Elias Portolu, and La madre for their lucid treatment of moral conflict. Her legacy endures in discussions of regional literature, gender, and national identity.
Nostalgia
INTRODUCTION
Since the days of Latin, to how few authors has it been given to obtain an European reputation!
We English seem exceptionally slow in making ourselves acquainted with the works of foreigners. Dante and Cervantes, Goethe and Dumas, are perhaps no worse known among us than they are in their homes; but we seldom find out a modern writer till he has been the round of all the other countries. We are opinionated in England. We think other folk barbarians, even if we don't call them so; we visit them for the making of comparisons, generally in our own favour; of trying their manners and customs, arts and morals, not by their standard but by ours. We never forget that on the map of Europe there is the big continent, and away in a corner, by themselves, extraneous, cut off, and "very superior," physically and morally isolated and self-contained, are our two not over enormous islands. We don't regret that sea-voyage, literal and metaphorical, which is necessary to transport us to the lands of the barbarians; and though we travel a great deal, I declare I think we all (and especially newspaper correspondents) go about enclosed in a little bubble of our own foggy atmosphere, seeing only the things we intend to see, hearing the things we mean to hear, and already believe. We are poor linguists moreover, and when we talk with the barbarians we only catch half they say and omit all attention to what they hint; we frighten them by our abruptness, our unintentional hortatoriness and unconscious conceit, so that they don't say to us what they mean, nor tell what they suppose to be true. We come home swollen with false report and evil surmise, and at once commit ourselves to criticism and laudation equally beside the mark. I wonder now do we really understand the errors of Abdul Hamed and Nicholas II as thoroughly as we think we do? and in our long glibness about the Dreyfus case[1] has it never occurred to us we may have been partly deluded?—as the barbarians were deluded when they chattered of us in the time of the Boer War!
Well, we can't help our position in the far-away corner of the map; but perhaps we should become less odd and more sympathetic if we read the barbarian's books a little oftener; books in which he is talking to his brother barbarians, and has not been questioned by an island catechist; books, superior or inferior to our own it matters little, which at least are written from another standpoint, and which by their mere perusal must extend our knowledge, and remind us that "it takes all sorts to make a world."
The best way, of course, is to read foreign books in their original language. Don Quixote was right when he said translation was a bad job at its best. But life is short and the gift of tongues is miraculous; some of us are too busy with our Dante and our Schopenhauer to waste time on a railway novel, and more are lazy and can't be bothered to look out words in a dictionary. The humble translator has his function. If he can succeed in giving any of his author's spirit, he may interest his reader enough to send him to the original itself next time;—in which case the translator will have done a worthy deed, and the author will perhaps forgive a certain mangling of his ideas, spoiling of his best passages and general rubbing of the bloom from his peach, inevitable in a process scarce easier than changing the skin of an Ethiopian or repainting the spots of a leopard.
Grazia Deledda, the new writer, for not so many years have passed since the publication of her first book, has already conquered not only her fellow-countrymen but many more distant peoples. Several of her novels have been put into French for the Revue des Deux Mondes and have appeared in Germany in various magazines and journals. One at least has been published in America, and this particular book, Nostalgie, is in process of translation into German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, and French. In England alone—poor, isolated, ignorant England—is the author's name almost unknown.
She is a Sardinian, and most of her books have been about her native island, the simple folk, and quiet histories of a forgotten corner where the tourist has hardly penetrated. But Signora Deledda now lives in Rome, and true to her method she observes and describes the things and places about her, the people among whom her lot is cast. The scene of Nostalgie is therefore laid in the capital, but with constant allusion to a district in the north of Italy evidently familiar—her husband's country—which she tells us is dear to her as a second home, and from which she has dated her preface. As a writer she prides herself on her Realism—strange, ill-comprehended, often misapplied word! The realism of the highly imaginative may easily seem romance to the prosaic; and Signora Deledda will pardon us if we say that if only in her pictures of scenery, in her intimate knowledge of the influence of Nature on the heart and the mind of her votaries, there is something very superior to realism—at least in the common acceptation of the term. Grazia Deledda sees her figures set in a landscape, belonging to it, born of it. Half the tragedy of this book arises from the fact that the heroine having lived alone with Nature is suddenly transplanted to a city where she imagines herself bereaved of the mighty mother. Years have to go over before she realises that the mighty mother never really deserts her children, and that the "still sad music of Humanity" is as much a part of Nature as the sough of the wind, the rustling of the leaves in the poplar-trees, and the unending roll of the river waters.
The form of Signora Deledda's novels is almost autobiographical. There is one principal character, hero or heroine as the case may be, and the story develops from his or her point of view. In the book before us, we know all about Regina, we are, as it were, inside her; but the other personages are known to us only in so far as she knows them. We are never admitted to a scene from which she is absent, nor is anything explained to us but in so far as she understood or guessed it herself. The minor characters are little more than sketched; figures in a crowd of which Regina saw the outside and occasionally touched the soul. One feels the gracious influence of her mother as she felt it, but we are told little about her and practically never see her in action. The plot is slight, but it hangs together perfectly with unity and focus, never giving a feeling of strain. It is all very un-English; neither the life nor the actors are like ours, nor at all like what is described in our novels. The history and romance of Rome are sternly omitted. History and romance are already the property of the foreigners "who come down on Rome like a swarm of locusts," who wear "dress fasteners" and "impossible hats," who "resemble a nation of inquisitive children amusing themselves in the desecration of a stupendous sepulchre."
Yet even for the foreigner the supreme interest of Rome must be that it is no mere museum, but a living city still. Busy with churches and temples, statues and paintings, inscriptions and sites, we are apt to overlook the contemporary Romans whom we have not come forth to see. To themselves they must necessarily be the most important part of the Eternal City; and the greater number of them are not princes and dukes with historic names, nor even renowned churchmen, or patriots and kingdom builders, but good, simple, workaday, middle-class persons such as are the backbone of all countries and of all societies.
It is among such unnoticed folk that Grazia Deledda has taken us in Nostalgie; and it is not too much to say that her pages have a distinction and a force which recalls, at least in a measure, the style qui rugit of the author of Madame Bovary.
Helen Hester Colvill.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
To my Husband—
Do you remember a young and attractive lady who called on us one day in the course of our first year's residence in Rome? Her visit was surprising; for I did not know the coronet-surmounted name on her card, and at that time few outside our small circle of intimates had discovered our nest in Via Modena, or had courage to climb a century of steps in pursuit of two useless persons unpractised in giving letters of introduction or inditing dedicatory epistles. The lady, whom I will call Regina, explained, however, that she came from your native province and was the bearer of messages from your friends. We talked a long time of that vicinity, dear to me as a second home; then she asked if I did not yearn after my native Sardinia, whose children are reputed always great sufferers from homesickness.
"Not so much," I replied. "I love Rome with all my heart; besides, I am so busy with my work that I have no time for the indulgence of idle phantasies."
"You work so hard? Happy you!" sighed the young lady; and added, "But, no! no! Homesickness is not mere phantasy; nor is it a disease, as so many call it! It is a passion; and, like other passions, can drive one mad if ungratified. During my first months in Rome I suffered from acute and morbid nostalgia; but now I have been home for a while and have come back almost cured."
"I don't know——," I said; "such nostalgia as I have felt has been quite harmless."
"Then there must be several kinds, some harmless, some dangerous," conceded the young lady with a smile; and she continued rather shyly: "but our whole existence is one long chain of nostalgia—don't you think so? The nostalgia of yesterday, the nostalgia of to-morrow; the longing for what is lost, the yearning for what can never be attained——"
After this first visit we saw Regina several times. I liked her, she was so clever and original; but to you she proved unsympathetic. "I can't see clearly into her life," you complained to me more than once.
This much we learned about her. Her husband was far from rich and she had brought him but a slender dowry, yet they rented a handsome Apartment and lived almost luxuriously. We, on the other hand, who worked hard and between us made an income the double of theirs, were content with the modest life of poor artists; gladdened indeed—like the careless existence of the birds building in the laurel below our windows—by the songs of love and the mere joy of living and struggling on in good hope of victory.
Remembering, as I minutely do, the whole simple romance of our early married life—on this day when we have attained to almost all our hopes (a little by my good-will, chiefly by your intelligence and activity, never by stooping to any transaction disapproved by our conscience)—to you, dear comrade of my work and of my life, I dedicate this tale. In it the reader will not find one of those stale themes for which my romances have been unjustly blamed. It is a simple narrative, a transcript from life, from this our modern life, so multiform, so interesting, sometimes so joyous, oftener so sad; beautiful always as an autumn tree laden with fruit—some of it rotten,—and with leaves—many of them already dead.
A simple narrative, I say; so simple that criticism deeming it a test of my literary powers, hitherto devoted only to the passions and sorrows of a primitive society, may deem that I have failed. But such judgment will not disturb me. This novel has not been written as a test; and criticism resembles the Exchequer which almost always taxes us on capital greater than what we really possess.
Alas! that we cannot contest its terrible authority! nor make it understand that our patrimony, though small, is at least our own! If we forced ourselves to give all it has the audacity to demand, we should not only ruin ourselves, but to the last remain unsuccessful in appeasing our creditor.
Grazia.
Roncadello (Casalmaggiore). October, 1904.
