NeMLA 2023

Thursday, March 23, 2023 at 2:15 - 4:15pm ET
Navigating Hardships: Resilience and Vulnerability in Pirandello’s Works (Seminar)
Location: Cascades II / NCC (Media Equipped)
Italian & Cultural Studies and Media Studies

Inspired by the 2023 NeMLA conference theme, this panel aims to critically explore how Pirandello addressed resilience in his works and how it developed into a process of cultural, mental, and physical adaptation for his characters. Throughout his rich corpus, comprised of poetry, novels, plays, and short stories, Pirandello tended to depict the existential struggles of his characters, framing them within the logic of an unstable and constructed reality. His narrative is in fact generally pervaded by an evident tension between resistance to and acceptance of adversity— a tension he often resolved in the truth of art.

Panelists:

• Nourit Melcer-Padon: Sicilian Resilience: Personal and Social Aspects

• Francesca Passaseo: L’altro figlio: Sexual Violence and Motherhood in Pirandello’s novelle

• Ombretta Frau: Trauma and Resilience in Pirandello’s L’altro figlio

• Luca Somigli: Marta una nessuna e centomila: spazio, identità e resilienza in L'esclusa

• Lisa Sarti: Resilience and the Tricks of Fate: Is There Hope for the Pirandellian Character?

If you have any specific questions on this panel, you can reach out to the Chairs, Lisa Sarti (lsarti@bmcc.cuny.edu) and Michael Subialka (msubialka@ucdavis.edu)

Lisa Sarti will be interviewed at an evening event at Luigi Pirandello’s home in Agrigento on August 26th, at 8pm (in Italy).

NeMLA 2022

Thursday, March 10 at 2:15-4:15 pm
Storytelling at Play: Pirandello's Stories for a Year (Seminar)
Location: GB 3 (Media Equipped)
Italian & Comparative Literature

In 1922, Pirandello embarked on his project of gathering 365 stories, one for each day of the year, to be collected into a single volume. When he died in 1936, however, he had only composed 244 stories, which now constitute his seminal collection of Novelle per un anno (Stories for a Year). This work plays a key role in Pirandello’s literary production and attests to his long-lasting commitment with the short story as a genre. Besides providing source material that Pirandello adapted across media, spanning from novels and plays to films and librettos, these stories exemplify the foundations of his poetic. This panel will investigate Pirandello’s short stories and his original storytelling from a broad critical perspective. Topics may include issues of language, culture, and translation, as well as modes of writing influenced by different literary movements (from Verismo to Surrealism and Modernism) and socio-cultural contexts. Comparative readings related to questions of gender, form, humorous and aesthetic theory, translation, adaptation, and reception are warmly encouraged.

This panel investigates Pirandello's short stories as literary texts, intertexts, or source materials for adaptations through different media, historical contexts, and comparative studies.

ABSTRACTS:

1. Ombretta Frau (A ‘Double’ Class Conflict: Sicilianità in Tanino e Tanotto)
My presentation will focus on Pirandello’s 1902 short story Tanino e Tanotto’s themes and intricate genesis to bring to light the various layers of a carefully scripted ‘circular’ narration, and of the protagonist’s existential dilemma. In Tanino e Tanotto, Pirandello’s readers will immediately recognize many of the traits of Pirandello’s poetics that define his collection Novelle per un anno: in primis, the Sicilian setting which, while prevalent in his early production, closer to the verismo tradition, remained consistent throughout his career. Additionally, Tanino e Tanotto is replete with issues around (the impossibility of) social mobility and social acceptance. The protagonist, Mauro Ragona – a countryman who, thanks to his wealth and a newly acquired title, was able to marry a noblewoman – is torn between a double existence. Ragona feels compelled to choose between his rural roots and his new lifestyle, and between a family that rejects him both for his demeanor and for his appearance, and his unquestioning lover, the simple Bartola. Ragona’s life is complicated by the birth of his two children, Tanino, blond and delicate like his mother, and Tanotto, dark and strong, a country boy like his father. The two children, a couple of opposites, function as the visual representation of Ragona’s split life.

2. Sara Iezzi (Sette novelle 'più sacre e più belle': il realismo magico dei Taviani in Kaos)
The present work carries out an analysis of Kaos (1984), a feature film by the brothers Taviani episodically structured on the basis of seven stories from Pirandello’s Stories for a Year. The study focuses on the comparison between the original text and cinematographic re-elaboration with the aim of examining analogies, discontinuities, amplifications, and omissions, and exploring the complex media relationship which articulates in a ductile interchange of content and style.

Within this framework, the filmmakers’ consistent introduction of dreamlike overtones into Pirandello’s naturalism is interpreted in the light of the expressive ways characteristic of the magic realism. The process of artistic identification and the parallelism between the creative experience of the author and the one of the directors constitute hence the fundamental questions on which this analysis is oriented, this latter aiming at providing a new interpretation of Kaos by contextualising that feeling of marvel inherent to the popular tales of Pirandello’s childhood which eventually became the heart of his short stories.

3. Maria Collevecchio (Pirandello’s Debut in Palermo: First Traces of Novels in Some Early Writings)
The purpose of the contribution is to examine some early works of Luigi Pirandello composed during his stay in Palermo (1882-1887) and linked to the cultural context of the Sicilian capital. The biographies and numerous essays dedicated to Pirandello have always presented him as “the Agrigentino”, overshadowing the city of Palermo, which he was native from paternal side, and where he stays for seven years. During these formation years, he begins to engage in writing and matures his artistic vocation. Some texts sporadically appeared in newspapers and magazines, some others were found in manuscript notebooks or in private correspondence. Apart from Capannetta (1884), the early works did not attract much attention from the critics because they were considered stylistically immature, but I think they are still important to reconstruct the training, the beginnings, the stages of the path that will lead the Sicilian writer to the world success. They often anticipate titles and themes of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year, allowing us to backdate their compositional genesis.

4. Alessio Aletta (Boulevards, Backstreets, Bourgeois, Beggars: A Closer Look at Pirandello’s Rome)
Rome is by far the most present location in the Novelle per un anno (approximately a third of the stories are set there), even more than Pirandello’s native Sicily. The contraposition between “Roman” and “Sicilian”short stories, whereby Rome would be the preferred location for humoristic plots while Sicily (i.e. Girgenti) is seen as closer to the Veristic tradition, has become almost commonplace among scholars. Such a simplification, however, may be disproved by a more nuanced analysis of Rome as a setting for Pirandellian stories. Indeed, not only Pirandello’s works feature Rome more than any other city: they feature it more in detail than any other place. Unlike Pirandello’s other works, his Roman stories are filled with precise topographical indications, sometimes even exact addresses; consequently, it is often possible to localize them in a specific district. By mapping these stories, some patterns emerge: most notably, there is indeed a massive presence of 'humoristic' tales, usually revolving around petit-bourgeois or white-collars, which are centered around Via del Corso and Via Venti Settembre; but we also find a considerable number of stories reminiscent of Verism, featuring working class and drifters. located in the vicinities of Stazione Termini (“Lo scaldino”, “La disdetta di Pitagora”). We also have a liminal space where these two worlds collide, between the Coliseum and Piazza Navona (“Volare”, “Come gemelle”).This paper aims to investigate the interconnections between setting, theme and style in Pirandello’s Roman short stories.

5. Lisa Sarti (Digital Pirandello: The New Life of Stories for a Year)
Pirandello wrote short stories for his entire life, collecting tales spanning a wide range of themes (socioeconomic disparities, gender roles, sexuality, the clutches of social convention), while addressing typical modernist questions of identity, relativity, and existential pragmatism.

Pirandello’s stories are now the vital part of a project that provides the very first complete English translation and scholarly edition of the 244 tales he composed before his death in 1936. Stories for a Year is a collaborative digital edition, (https://www.pirandellointranslation.org), edited by Lisa Sarti (BMCC – CUNY) and Michael Subialka (UC Davis), which brings these stories to an English-language audience as Pirandello intended them to be available to his own readers.

As a significant contribution to the field of Digital Humanities, Stories for a Year will be illustrated and discussed during this presentation with an emphasis on how digital resources were used and the role technology played in exploring the critical questions Pirandello’s oeuvre still posits. Furthermore, issues of collaboration, shared research, and copyright will be tackled as part of a wider reflection on the nature and scope of this digital project.

6. Michael Subialka (244 Stories in Search of a Translator: Pirandello’s Stories for a Year in English)
Despite his international fame, particularly after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, Pirandello’s ambitious collection of Novelle per un anno has never been fully translated into English. This paper traces the uneven trajectory of the stories’ translation history. Early translations can be found in numerous venues, especially in a few key volumes that published a selection of stories in the 1930s, but also in various individual translations published in literary magazines or other periodicals. While such “one-off” translations have continued to appear throughout the decades, a few other key volumes have put together selections of stories that came out in book form. None, however, has tackled Pirandello’s massive collection in a systematic way. Highlighting the various selection strategies and the scattered publication history of these translations, I argue that the time is ripe for a complete, systematic translation encompassing the whole corpus of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year. Drawing on the obstacles that have faced previous translators and publishers who undertook print translations of story selections, I suggest that a digital edition is the logical way forward to create a new resource for readers and scholars across the English-speaking world.

“Pirandello’s Short Stories:
Translation, Reception, and Critical Frameworks”

MLA Roundtable sponsored by the Pirandello Society of America.
Session 348 at the 2022 MLA Convention (January 6-9, 2022, Washington DC).

Friday, 7 January 3:30 PM-4:45 PM (Eastern Time). Held Virtually.

Speakers: Cristina Carnemolla (Duke University), Steve Eaton (independent scholar), Santi Luca Famà (Stockholm University), Marella Feltrin-Morris (Ithaca College), Virginia Jewiss (Yale University), Lisa Sarti (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY), Enrico Vettore (California State University, Long Beach)

Presiding: Michael Subialka (University of California, Davis)

The roundtable will feature interventions by scholars and translators as well as discussion. The abstracts of their presentations are below. We encourage anyone attending the MLA this year to join us!

Cristina Carnemolla: “Colonial Wound and Colonial Trauma in Pirandello’s L’altro figlio (1926)”

This paper analyzes Luigi Pirandello’s short story L’altro figlio (1926) from a decolonial feminist perspective. Current studies have focused mainly on its film translation by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani – Kaos (1994) – or on themes like motherhood, rape, violence, and migration (Ardissino, 2008; Bianconi, 2014; Dima, 2010; Ferroni, 2016; Poggioli-Kaftan, 2019; Tambasco, 2016). While these critics used feminism, trauma studies, or postcolonial theory to analyze Mariagrazia’s story considering those topics separately, I claim that the decolonial feminist approach accounts for a holistic reading of the text. In this sense, Sicilian women inside the colonial system created by the annexation of the island to the Italian peninsula are considered subaltern not only to local men but also to peninsular men. The alterity of Rocco Trupia symbolizes the product of this internal colonization. He is not recognized as her own child by Maragrazia and is a metaphorical embodiment of the colonial wound. In this new system, born by the violence of rape, Mariagrazia sees Rocco as the result of a trauma that I read in decolonial terms. Moreover, northern men, personified by the young “stranger” doctor, are described in the paternalistic attempt of reconciling the mother with the “other” son they helped to engender. Finally, all male characters in this short story are either portrayed as leaving for the Americas or staying and remembering to the protagonist the Italian nation’s traumatic origin. Therefore, women have no choice but to suffer and being subjected to different forms of violence.

Cristina Carnemolla is a Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation project, entitled “From the ‘Southern Question’ to the ‘Southern Thought’: South as a Method”, attempts at bridging the gap between post- and decolonial theories on the one hand, and Global South studies on the other, by focusing on literary and cultural production in Spain, Italy, and Latin America at the turn of the 19th century. Her academic interests are multiple, and encompass gender studies, especially intersectionality, mediterranean and transatlantic studies, and critical theory.

Steve Eaton: “Confessions of a Pirandello Translator: Practical Tips on Selecting, Translating, and Placing Stories from the Novelle per un anno”

Stories from Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno are a tempting target for would-be literary translators: a massive trove of wonderful short stories, in the public domain, by a celebrated and much-studied Nobel-Prize winning author. As someone who has translated and published several of these stories, I propose to discuss some interesting aspects of the translation and publication process. My intended audience is anyone interested in Pirandello’s writing, but in particular anyone considering translating one of his stories.

—Who’s ‘qualified’ to translate? Is that a valid question? How do I know if I’m doing justice to the work?

—The pros and cons for the anglophile translator of working with an Italophone co-translator

—Questions of style, in particular the “original” vs. “lively” schools of thought

—For the novelle, in contrast to plays, essays and novels, who is the intended audience? In particular, academic vs. popular readership

—Considerations regarding stories that have already been translated

—What venues are available for publication, and what are their trade-offs? Comparative lit/translation journals vs. general fiction reviews vs. open online publication

—Some examples of interesting translation issues from a recently published story (perhaps “Prima notte” / “Wedding Night”)

Steve Eaton is a literary translator living in Austin, Texas, He has translated six stories from Novelle per un anno in three journals (and also experienced rejections). His translation of Gaetano Savatteri’s novel La congiura dei loquaci will be issued by Italica Press in July 2021 under the title A Conspiracy of Talkers.

Santi Luca Famà: “Voicing Posthumanity: Alternatives to Anthropomorphism in Pirandello’s Short Stories for a Year and VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy”

“Who is the ‘anthro’ in Anthropocene?” (Alaimo 2016). The numerous attempts to answer this question (for instance, Braidotti 2013, Weik von Mossner 2017) showcase a fundamental struggle in conceiving living experiences in beyond-than-human terms. The aim of my paper is to discuss the feasibility of anthropomorphism (i.e. humanization of both animate and inanimate nonhumans) and its possible alternatives through an interdisciplinary and comparative study of Pirandello’s Short Stories for a Year (1884-1936) and VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy/Area X (2014). Specifically, by zooming in on these two cases, I investigate how some human characters in both books are endowed with the ability to translate nonhuman experience in a non-anthropocentric manner. This figure can help to reach a post-anthropocenic and post-anthropocentric conception of human life by simultaneously empathizing with and voicing the nonhuman without trivializing its specificity. In such a way, readers can (if not fully grasp, at least) sense what a nonhuman experience might entail, hence creating a path to shorten the human-nonhuman divide while also acknowledging it.

Santi Luca Famà is a PhD candidate at the University of Stockholm, who graduated cum laude from the Research Master’s program in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Groningen with a thesis titled “In the Blissful Unconsciousness of Beasts: A Posthuman Analysis of Nonhumanity in Luigi Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno.” In Fall 2018, he was a research intern at the University of Ghent in the framework of the ERC-funded project “Narrating the Mesh” (NARMESH) under the supervision of Prof. Marco Caracciolo. His current project aims at investigating the link between narrative innovation and posthumanism in Italian modernist fiction. His publications include a chapter in the collective volume Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human (ed. by A. Godioli and C. van den Bergh, Brill, forthcoming) and an article for Pirandello Studies (2020). He has also presented work at the 2019 edition of the annual conference of the Society for Pirandello Studies (London, Senate House).

Marella Feltrin-Morris: “Ailing Bodies: Translating Pain in Pirandello’s Short Stories”

In Luigi Pirandello’s novels and short stories, characters often display exaggerated or distorted physical features (e.g. bulging eyes, protruding lips, lumpy noses, mismatched heads and bodies), thus conveying a tragic fixity and subjugation to a hideous role. Such features turn the characters into puppets with no control over themselves or over what others do to or make of them. And if the body is hardly in tune with its owner’s self-image even when healthy, when it is struck by illness (not exclusively mental, but especially physical), the distortion and brutalization it undergoes makes it even more alien to the life it contains. Bereft of health, like a broken mechanism the ailing body hangs limply, emits suspicious noises, writhes, twitches and puts up a brave struggle against a condition that prevents it from continuing to perform its customary functions. How to translate, then, a broken mechanism, one that defies not only the expectations of “normality,” but the limits of language to convey its anomalies? This paper intends to discuss the challenges of rendering Pirandello’s ailing bodies in English translation, focusing on three short stories—“Bobbio’s Hail Mary” (“L’avemaria di Bobbio,” 1912), “The Illustrious Deceased” (“L’illustre estinto,” 1909), and “Tap Tap” (“La toccatina,” 1906).

Marella Feltrin-Morris has published articles on translation and paratext, as well as on modern and contemporary Italian writers. Her translation of Paola Masino’s novel, Birth and Death of the Housewife, was published by SUNY Press in 2009. Her translations of short stories by Luigi Pirandello, Paola Masino and Massimo Bontempelli have appeared in North American Review, Two Lines, Exchanges and Green Mountains Review, among other journals. She is an Associate Professor of Italian at Ithaca College.

Virginia Jewiss: “Translating Pirandello’s Novelle”

Pirandello is a master storyteller. Much of the drama of his short stories is generated by his dynamic syntax and playful ambiguity—two characteristics that present notable challenges to the translator. This paper will draw on my experience of translating thirty of his novelle, which were recently published by Yale University Press (Stories for the Years, 2020). I will take as my starting point Il gatto, un cardellino, e le stelle (The Cat, a Goldfinch, and the Stars). In this deceptively simple story, a beloved goldfinch is eaten by a neighbor’s cat. The title, with its provocative combination of definite and indefinite articles, signals the fundamental problems of identity and perspective, which are recurring themes throughout Pirandello’s works. The repetition of key phrases implies fixed identities for all the characters involved, yet the deliberate inversion of subjects and objects reveals the problematic slippage between the bird, the girl who loved him, and the elderly grandparents who love her. The Italian, which allows for implied subjects, creates the equivocation that is at the heart of this tragedy, yet English requires grammatical subjects to be explicit. How can equivocation be preserved in translation? Analysis of other stories will highlight further concerns. My observations, which are grounded in the particulars of Pirandello’s extraordinary prose style, most notably his rhythmic sentences, silences, and structural deftness, aim to articulate the various solutions I employed in translating them.

Virginia Jewiss received her PhD in Italian literature from Yale University and has taught at Dartmouth College, Trinity College’s Rome and Yale, where she directed the Yale Humanities program in Rome. She is currently Associate Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She has translated the work of numerous Italian authors and film directors, including Luigi Pirandello's short stories, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, and screenplays for Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone, and Gabriele Salvatores. Her translation of Dante's Vita Nuova is forthcoming with Penguin Classics.

Lisa Sarti: “Digital Pirandello: Stories for a Year in the New Millennium”

For his entire life Pirandello wrote short stories that have engaged readers across continents and time periods for their wide-ranging, captivating themes. Pirandello’s unfulfilled dream was to collect 365 stories in a single volume and make them available to his readers for them to read one each day of the year. Pirandello’s stories are now the vital part of a collaborative project that provides the very first complete English translation and scholarly edition of the 244 tales Pirandello managed to compose before his death in 1936. This presentation illustrates Stories for a Year (https://www.pirandellointranslation.org), the digital edition edited by Lisa Sarti (BMCC – CUNY) and Michael Subialka (UC Davis), which brings these stories to an English-speaking audience as Pirandello intended them to be available to his own readers. Issues of digitization, copyright, collaboration, and authorship will be addressed as part of a wider conversation on the relevant contribution of Digital Humanities to connect the legacy of past authors with modern technology.

Lisa Sarti is Associate Professor of Modern Languages (Italian) at CUNY – Borough of Manhattan Community College. An expert on Pirandello and modern Italian literature, she is the co-editor of PSA, the journal of the Pirandello Society of America. She is co-author of the recent volume Scrittura d’immagini: Pirandello e la visualità tra arte, filosofia e psicoanalisi (Rubbettino, 2021), and she previously co-edited the volume Pirandello’s Visual Philosophy: Imagination and Thought across Media (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017). Together with Michael Subialka, she is co-editor of a new digital edition of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year as part of their digital humanities project, www.pirandellointranslation.org.

Michael Subialka is moderating the roundtable. He is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of California, Davis, and currently serves as the Co-President of the Pirandello Society of America, where he is also the co-editor of their scholarly journal, PSA. His monograph on Modernist Idealism: Ambivalent Legacies of German Philosophy in Italian Literature, was recently published by the University of Toronto Press (2021), and he is co-author of the book Scrittura d’immagini: Pirandello e la visualità tra arte, filosofia e psicoanalisi (Rubbettino, 2021). Together with Lisa Sarti, he is editing a new digital edition of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year as part of their digital humanities project, www.pirandellointranslation.org.

Enrico Vettore: "Impermanence and No-self: A Buddhist Reading of Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno"

Pirandello’s library contains a handful of works that show his interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy in general (including Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation). Despite that, and despite the many similarities between Pirandello’s Weltanschauung and Buddhism, there are very few studies that link his oeuvre to Buddhist philosophy. In my Zen reading of Uno, nessuno e centomila, I showed how this seldom used approach is not only viable, but also effective in helping better understand the novel in all its nuances. While different in content and from Uno, nessuno e centomila, the Novelle per un anno, too, show how Pirandello obsessively returns to the topics of the vita-forma and the almost necessary dissolution of the ego and subject. In Buddhist terms, Pirandello’s “vita” as ever-changing flux is anicca (impermanence) while the dissolution of the ego and subject is represented by the word anatta (no-self). In my paper, I read a cluster of short stories ––among which “La carriola,” “La trappola,” and “Pallottoline”–– through the lens of these Buddhist concepts. I show that the realization of anicca––the impermanence of all phenomena (among which are human beings)–– brings Pirandello’s characters in these stories to realize that the necessary next step is the impermanence of what we usually consider as our deepest never-changing essence: our own Self (anatta). Freed from these illusions, the characters are able to eliminate mental constructions and live more authentically, perceive things as they are, and understand the fundamental unity of all beings. Moreover, Pirandello chooses to have his characters make the reader deeply feel the ideas by creating a dialogue about their discoveries with an interlocutor, or the reader, or both. This type of direct connection with their fellow human beings who are still in the dark seems to mirror the Buddhist practitioner’s return to the world to help other fellow sentient beings.

Enrico Vettore is Professor of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach. His main scholarly interests include: Philosophy and Literature, Italian Cinema and Jungian and post-Jungian literary criticism, Ecocriticism, and Zen philosophy. He has published articles on Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, Leonardo Sciascia and Alessandro Manzoni, Sciascia, Borges and Schopenhauer, Petrarch and Schopenhauer, an alchemical reading of Pasolini’s Medea and a Zen reading of Pirandello’s One, No one, and One Hundred Thousand. He is currently working on an ecocritical/ecopsychological reading of Antonioni’s trilogy and on a book project on Celati and Zen philosophy.

The 2019 edition of the PSA journal has been sent to the presses and should be shipped to our members by mid-June. Keep an eye on your mailboxes, or sign up to become a member to get access to all of our PSA issues.