Any translator of Messina’s prose must take into account the author’s steadfast allegiance to the principles of Italian verismo, as both the content and style of this school of writing profoundly influenced her work. In the 1880’s, the most prominent Italian verista, Sicilian Giovanni Verga, was in search of “a fresh human content and a style to render it in the best possible way” (Cecchetti 1973, vii). Committed to the representation of the real as opposed to the ideal, Verga and other prominent veristi turned to the regions of their youth for inspiration. In these economically depressed and politically neglected regions, the veristi focused on individuals at the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, locked in a daily struggle for survival amid poverty, ignorance, and immense human suffering.

Rejecting the bourgeoisie idiom as ill fitted to the cultural world of illiterate peasants and fisherman, the veristi sought out new forms of linguistic expression that would convey the essence of their realities. But since most of their subjects spoke exclusively in dialects, the veristi faced a perplexing dilemma. If transcribed faithfully, dialects would have been incomprehensible to mainstream readers. How could they portray the “real” world of their characters using standardized Italian, a language their subjects did not speak?

Verga’s solution was to fuse content and style by employing techniques that approximated the colorful speech of his humble characters. This innovative approach to writing demanded that language be unembellished and devoid of contrivance. The salient features of the style were the frequent use of proverbs and regional expressions, the altering of standard syntax to approximate dialect, the presence of an impersonal third-person narrator who is privy to the details of village life and who acts as an intermediary for the reader, and finally the use of free indirect discourse. As Verga scholar Giovanni Cecchetti notes, “Certain cadences and certain rhythms … evoke an environment and a way of life belonging only to Sicilians. The syntax is extremely simple, its structure consisting chiefly of a seemingly unending sequence of coordinate clauses linked together by the conjunction ‘and’” (Cecchetti 1978, 50).

Guided by these stylistic precepts, when writing of a peasant population, Messina intersperses short, clipped sentences with longer passages to convey the speech and thought patterns of a predominantly illiterate class. Her use of free indirect discourse creates the illusion of characters “narrating themselves,” though at times it is difficult—in both the original Italian and the translation—to distinguish where a character’s voice ends and that of the impersonal narrator begins. In the second story in this collection, “La Mèrica,” Messina writes: “‘And your things?’ Her things? Obviously Mamma Vita had no idea of what a city is like! Who could open a suitcase and look for things in the midst of that hell?” (Piccoli gorghi 1997, 106). This style is particularly characteristic of the first five stories translated in the current volume, since their content deals explicitly with an unsophisticated peasant world far removed from modern sensibilities.