Carlo Emilio Gadda

1893–1973

Gadda both intimidates and exasperates; those who don’t worship him tend to throw up their hands, as if he were the later Henry James or the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. For those not reading him in Italian, he also poses a particular challenge, in that many claim he is untranslatable (I disagree). He began his professional life as an electrical engineer, but imprisonment as a soldier in the First World War, which killed his brother, inspired him to start writing. The word ‘macaronic’ is key to appreciating Gadda – it stems from a poetic genre that combined Latin metres with vernacular words, and found its most famous interpreter in Teofilo Folengo, whose Baldus was to inspire Rabelais. Gadda, too, kneaded together high and low registers, mixing dialect with literary language, and this collision is central to his aesthetic. The result was a voice, quintessentially unique, that never ceased to confound, to challenge, to upend. His approach to genre was equally playful; story, novella, novel were restrictive terms Gadda rejected. Like Pasolini, Gadda learned Roman dialect and worked with it; he also shared, with Pasolini, a homosexual identity and themes of prostitution and life on the urban periphery (most famously explored in the novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana; in English, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana). Gadda lived briefly in Argentina, and translated the work of the New Spanish dramatist Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, who wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had a difficult relationship with his mother and lost his father when he was sixteen. This story – plotless, careening, terrifying – appears both in a short-story collection and as a chapter in the autobiographical novel, La cognizione del dolore (most recently published as The Experience of Pain). Set in an invented South American country, it is a marriage of chaos and coherence. Gadda began writing it after his mother’s death, and it was left intentionally unfinished. The author’s footnotes form an integral part of the story. Indeed, they are not really footnotes at all, but digressions.

The Mother

Translated by Richard Dixon

She wandered about, alone, in the house. And those walls, that copper: were they all she had left? of a life. They had told her the exact name, cruel and black, of the mountain: where he had fallen: and the other name, desolately serene, of the ground where they had taken and left him, with face restored to peace and oblivion, devoid of any response, for ever. The son who had smiled at her, brief springtimes!, who had so sweetly, passionately, hugged, kissed her. A year later, at Pastrufazio, a military non-commissioned officerfn1 had presented her with a diploma, had given her some kind of book, asking her to sign her name in another register: and on doing so he handed her a copying pencil. First he had asked her: ‘Are you Señora Adelaide François?’ Turning pale on hearing mention of her name, the name that tormented her, she had replied: ‘Yes, I am she’. Trembling, as if at the savage harshening of a sentence. To which, after the first hideous cry, that dark voice of eternity continued calling her.