Short Story Writers From Italy

"(PB: You wrote your essay “The Little Virtues” a long time ago, really in another age. A number of American readers are very much taken with the piece while finding it a direct challenge to their familiar assumptions. Would you still offer parents the same advice with regard to the upbringing of their children or have your thoughts changed?) NG: I’m sure that I would write exactly the same thing; even in these difficult times one should only teach the big virtues, generosity more than anything else. The rest can be learned later on."

"Every time I sit down to write a book I feel that I have to start from zero, that I have to re-learn how to write."

"A journalist recently said in the newspapers that writers should keep their mouths shut as much as possible and I think he was probably right. Better to write than to speak."

"unfortunately, a great number of judges and social workers are rigidly unable to judge cases in a human way."

"for a mistake, my God, you don’t make a child suffer!"

"I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute."

"what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the strength, of a horse to pull ahead."

"Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it."

"(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me."

"in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything."

"dialect is really impossible to translate adequately."

"(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well. I’ve read the major authors, but in Italian, not English. Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen. I hardly know contemporary American literature. The two American authors I love most, who are by now dead, alas, are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. And then I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing. But even before that Pavese was busy introducing us all to the great American writers."

"I’m not really a poet. It’s only once in a while that what I have to say seems to find its best expression in a poem. But I do read a number of poets—Montale, Sandro Penna, Sabba."

"My Jewish identity became extremely important to me from the moment the Jews began to be persecuted. At that point I became aware of myself as a Jew. But I came from a mixed marriage—my father was Jewish, my mother Catholic. My parents were atheists and therefore chose not to give us, the children, any religious instruction. They were totally non-observant. You might say that a Hebrew spirit dominated the household in the sense that my father had a very strong, very authoritarian character. And I suppose it’s true that many of the family friends were Jews, but many were not. So, while I did not have any sort of formal Jewish upbringing, I nevertheless felt my Jewishness very acutely during the war years (my first husband, Leone Ginzburg, was a Jew) and after the war, when it became known what had been done to the Jews in the camps by the Nazis. Suddenly my Jewishness became very important to me."

"When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life."

"they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”"

"Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water."

"But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart."

"Groups? Movements? I don’t really think these groups exist. I don’t think in Italy there even are such things as currents or trends. The whole scene is really much too chaotic for such groups to form and stay together as separate entities."

"Italian humorist Giovanni Guareschi–a staunch anti-communist journalist and writer–coined a famous sentence to mock Stalinists “Contrordine, compagni!”, i.e., “Counter-order, comrades!”. It was the sudden announcement of an impromptu change in policies and ideas that activists ought to support with the same enthusiasm and dedication they previously displayed for their blatant contrary. Guareschi’s amusing assumption was that, no matter what, communists dully obey whatever kind of order comes from the party, inhaling the “official truth” (even typos in articles and manifestos) from a “third nostril” that nature provided them with."

"‘Don Camillo, the system of teaching Christian charity by knocking people over the head is one that doesn’t appeal to me,’ the Lord answered severely."

"But the young people of today are benighted creatures born with telephone numbers imprinted on their brains, and where passion is concerned they have about as much grace as a pig in a cornfield."

"Those were the days when there was a great deal of argument about that piece of international machinery known as the ‘Atlantic Pact’, which may have owed its name to the fact that between words and deeds there lies the breadth of an ocean."

"In the valley a bicycle is just as necessary as a pair of shoes, in fact more so. Because even if a man hasn’t any shoes he can still ride a bicycle, whereas if he hasn’t a bicycle he must surely travel on foot."

"I was born near the Po and it is the only respectable river in all Italy. To be respectable, a river must flow through a plain because water was created to stay horizontal and only when it is perfectly horizontal does it preserve its natural dignity. Niagara falls is an embarrassing phenomenon, like a man who walks on his hands."

"Minutes and seconds are strictly city preoccupations. In the city people hurry, hurry so as not to waste a single minute, and fail to realize that they are throwing a lifetime away."

"The party delegate was one of those gloomy, tight-lipped persons who seem to have been made for wearing a red scarf round the neck and a tommy-gun slung from one shoulder."

"Non perder tempo chi cerca aver fama, voglia acquistar grazia di sua dama."

""Political regimes come and go, but bad habits endure." (alt trans = 'remain')"

"This reminded me of what Ignazio Silone said in 1945 soon after he returned to Italy from his Zurich exile: "The Fascism of tomorrow will never say 'I am Fascism.' It will say: 'I am anti-Fascism.'""

"What struck me most about the Russian Communists, even in such really exceptional personalities as Lenin and Trotsky, was their utter incapacity to be fair in discussing opinions that conflicted with their own. The adversary, simply for daring to contradict, at once became a traitor, an opportunist, a hireling. An adversary in good faith is inconceivable to the Russian Communists. What an aberration of conscience this is, for so-called materialists and rationalists absolutely in their polemics to uphold the primacy of morals over intelligence! To find a comparable infatuation one has to go back to the Inquisition."

"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place."

"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."

"In principio, dunque, era la noia, volgarmente chiamata caos. Iddio, annoiandosi della noia, creò la terra, il cielo, l'acqua, gli animali, le piante, Adamo ed Èva; i quali ultimi, annoiandosi a loro volta in paradiso, mangiarono il frutto proibito. Iddio si annoiò di loro e li cacciò dall'Eden."

"Un male incerto provoca inquietudine, perché, in fondo, si spera fino all'ultimo che non sia vero; ma un male sicuro, invece, infonde per qualche tempo una squallida tranquillità."

"Quando non si è sinceri bisogna fingere, a forza di fingere si finisce per credere; questo è il principio di ogni fede."

"We were good friends. The news of his recent death hit me hard. I still feel the pain of his loss. And of course I remember how I responded to his early writing. When I was very young Gli Indifferenti was of crucial importance as I formed my first views about writing. I’d have to say that for me Moravia’s earlier work was also his strongest. I love the work up to and including Roman Stories. I think he thought they were perhaps too popular, too much in the mode of a sort of national narrative. Whereas for me the stories in this collection are extraordinary. He managed in that book to depersonalize himself in a masterful way...by that I mean that he recreated himself in the form of many different characters in such a convincing way. His gift for getting inside the personality of characters so totally different from himself was truly remarkable. This was a gift comparable to that of Maupassant, a writer who managed to get inside many diverse characters at a time, so as to paint a complete fresco of the France of his period, of the life of the peasants, of the servants, of the city and of the provinces. He was a really great writer who is absolutely forgotten now. I would like somehow to bring him back. (PG: Is his work translated into Italian?) NG: Yes, but now it is totally ignored. There is a work of his which I particularly love, a novel called A Life, which I’m in the process of translating now."

"No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does."

"Perhaps the greatest novel of the century."

"I giovani sentono i dolori più acerbamente dei vecchi: per questi l'uscita di sicurezza è più vicina."

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

"Un contadino che mi dà il suo pezzo di pecorino mi fa un regalo più grande di Giulio Làscari quando m’invita a pranzo. Il guaio è che il pecorino mi dà la nausea; e così non resta che la gratitudine che non si vede e il naso arricciato dal disgusto che si vede fin troppo."

"Un palazzo del quale si conoscessero tutte le stanze non era degno di essere abitato."

"Che cosa se ne farebbe il Senato di me, di un legislatore inesperto cui manca la facoltà d'ingannare sé stesso, questo requisito essenziale per chi voglia guidare gli altri?"

"His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open."

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi."

"As for Calvino, I have to say honestly that I love especially his earlier work, his stories, his fiction up to and including Invisible Cities—a very beautiful book which I adore. I love less what came after Invisible Cities. The more recent work seems to me too cerebral. But then, that’s just my personal preference, and it is hard to convince readers about what is most authentic in someone’s work. Recently a book by Calvino was published posthumously, a book called La Strada di San Giovanni. In this book there is a beautiful story—the title story, in fact—which is a sort of memoir written in 1965 or so—which he never thought to publish. And there are other wonderful pieces in that collection."

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic. Calvino in his book, The Uses of Literature says, "I leave the critics the task of placing my novels and short stories within or outside of some classification of Fantasy. For me, the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it; the patterns of symmetry, the network of images deposited around it as in the formation of a crystal." (The Uses of Literature, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 73)"

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."