From Sardinia to Manitoba

BarcelonaI have linked two readings that have rhymed within me like two verses of the same poem: Cosima, by Grazia Deledda, and The Fragile Lights of Earth, by Gabrielle Roy. These are memoirs by two writers who are apparently far apart in time and geography. I say apparently far apart because, as they are memories of their early years, and given that both wanted to be and were writers, their books have much in common and reading them one after the other has been a very interesting experience.

Both Deledda and Roy grew up in a rural environment, in small towns and in communities where two languages coexisted—as always happens, one stronger than the other. Deledda was Sardinian, but wrote all her work in Italian. She is the only author in Italian literature to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1926). Gabrielle Roy was born in Manitoba, a province of Canada where the dominant language was English. The Roy family was descended from several Quebec families who settled in this corner of the world and who engaged in active resistance to be able to live in French. Gabrielle wrote all her work in this language.

Of Grazia Deledda—surely due to the Nobel Prize—we have quite a bit of work translated into Catalan: Reeds in the Wind and The Mother (Adesiara Editorial), Ashes (Edicions de 1984), The Ivy (Editorial Fonoll) and Honest Souls and Cosima (Ela Geminada).

To write her memoirs of her early years, Deledda opted for fiction, but it seems she stuck very closely to her life experience. Cosima recreates a sheltered and resigned childhood on the island of Sardinia. The resignation of women, the resignation of the humble, the resignation of the Sardinians (the writer received criticism for her Italian “contaminated” with idioms and syntax from Nuorese Sardinian, which was her mother tongue). She was a very prolific author and Cosima was precisely her last work, published posthumously.

Gabrielle Roy, on the other hand, wrote conventional memoirs that, especially in the early years, focus on the anguish derived from the diglossia that affected Manitoba. This writer, unlike Deledda, has not yet been translated into Catalan, but in Spanish there have been published, in addition to the aforementioned memoirs, The Fragile Lights of Earth and Where Nests the Water Hen (both from Hoja de Lata).