Description
Four Italian novellas by the German writer who won the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature and then disappeared from English. Collected here in a new translation.
A silk-spinner crossing the water between Sorrento and Capri bites the hand of the boatman who has loved her for a year. In a walled workshop in Treviso, a banner worked in thread puts a woman in the sight of the man the whole city has turned out to see. On Capri, a jilted suitor raises a toast to the bride who did not wait for him, drains the glass and lets it shatter on the floor. In the house at Recanati, a silk case holds one underlined line of poetry, and a young Giacomo Leopardi cannot say aloud what it means.
Paul Heyse called the hinge of every true novella its falcon: the one thing specific enough to set a story apart from a thousand others, with an outline you could cut from black paper and recognize whole. In these four it is the bite, the banner, the toast, and the silk case.
Heyse was a Berliner trained in Greek and Romance philology who spent sixty years in Munich and whose imagination never lived there. It lived in Italy. He went back again and again, to Rome, to Naples, to the coast below Vesuvius, to the islands, and he wrote about that country the way a person writes about a place that has entered the nervous system and will not leave. His fisherfolk are not scenery. His Capri is not a postcard.
The prose is the reason to read him, and it is not what a reader expects from a nineteenth-century German. It is warm and physically alert. It is fast and economical: he never wastes a paragraph, and he ends on the exact beat where a lesser writer would add three pages of consolation. It watches its characters at close range without explaining or excusing them. It is exact about light, water, faces, and hands. His fishermen and grandmothers and island girls talk like people, not like a costume drama. And it lets his Italians go on speaking Italian inside his German sentences, exclaiming and praying and insulting each other in a language he refused to smooth away.
No current English edition collects these four stories. This one brings them into English in a new direct translation from the German by Renata Lenz, with an Introduction by Idara Crespi on Heyse, the Falcon Theory, and an outsider’s Italy; Lenz’s Note on the Translation; A Note on Paul Heyse; story notes; and a Glossary of the Italian his characters speak. Readers who came to us through The Blind Woman of Sorrento will recognize the coastline: the same bay, seen from the outside by a visitor who loved it, rather than from the inside by a man who inherited it.
Four complete stories in about a hundred and fifty pages. An evening or two, not a season.
For readers of Stefan Zweig’s novellas, Theodor Storm, and E. M. Forster’s Italian novels.
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