Guilt and dishonor on a wild and remote island

The criteria and decisions of the Nobel Prize in Literature are always quite unpredictable, but seen with the perspective that a century has given us, the Nobel awarded to Grazia Deledda in 1926 is still somewhat incomprehensible. Not because she was not literarily deserving, but because it seems that her condition as a Sardinian woman who wrote about the harsh and brutal reality of her native island was far removed from the committee of Swedish readers who had awarded George Bernard Shaw in 1925 and would award Henri Bergson in 1927. The prize only makes sense if we understand that Deledda was a peripheral writer who earned a place at the center of the Italian and European cultural landscape thanks to three merits and one concession: the merits of having talent, of doing a lot of work (she was the author of about thirty novels and four hundred short stories) and of achieving great international success, and the concession of renouncing her mother tongue, Sardinian, to write in the language, Tuscan-based Italian, that the reunification of Italy (1861) made official and imposed.The novel Cendra, originally published in 1903 and now presented in Catalan by Mercè Ubach in a translation that seems rigorous and with a prologue that contextualizes the work and the author, is a good entry point to Deledda's literary universe. A novel of passions and unshakeable community social codes, a story of primary characters and imposing landscapes, Cendra combines two literary traditions: that of popular storytelling and that of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel. We are closer, in any case, to the vivid anthropological drama of Giovanni Verga's verismo than to the analytical positivism, with its scientific gaze and socio-ideological background, ofÉmile Zola.Compensate for the brutality of a miserable world

In Cendra, Grazia Deledda demonstrates that she is an agile and vigorous storyteller and that she knows how to create a gallery of characters that border on the archetypal without falling into typological folklorization. She also demonstrates that she is a virtuoso of precise and exuberantly sensory descriptions. The paragraphs in which she describes the Sardinian landscapes bring to mind the untamed talent of a painter with a strong, imaginative, wild, and symbolic stroke. Deledda's verism, in this sense, has a poetic breath that compensates for the brutality of an often miserable world populated by characters who fight, insult each other, drink, curse, and commit suicide.The dramatic core of the plot is a classic of 19th-century literature, and it attempts to answer the following question: how can a child of guilt, a bastard son of an already married father and a mother who abandons him as a child, make himself worthy of a respectable life? The protagonist's adventure, Annania, who through the blows of fortune and thanks to a benefactor goes from rural Sardinia to the city of Cagliari and, afterwards, to the continent and Rome, resonates with Balzacian and Stendhalian echoes. Deledda, however, ensures that he never fully sheds either Sardinian reality or his Sardinian condition: the weight of inherited guilt, the sense of honor and dishonor, primal passions, the present as a projection of old atavisms, life as fate... Reading Deledda reminds us that true literature can spring from European capitals as well as from small villages on the most remote islands.