Antonio Delfini

1907–63

Few Italian writers intersected with the Surrealist movement, but Delfini was one of them. He was born and died in Modena, a city he both loved and detested. Although he wrote mostly in prose, he also produced two collections of experimental poetry, a very short plaquette self-published at the very beginning of his literary career and a longer volume published by Feltrinelli two years before his death. Largely self-taught, he sketched, wrote on matchbooks and created verbal collages from cut-up published texts. He hand-wrote a flyer advertising his first book, a collection of very brief stories that describe an unnamed protagonist’s wanderings in an unidentified city. An avant-garde writer to the core, Delfini’s recurring theme was a ceaseless re-elaboration of the past. His prose is synthetic, rhapsodic, idiosyncratic. Natalia Ginzburg helped edit his diaries, which Einaudi published posthumously in 1982. In them, he confesses to having begun and abandoned hundreds of books. He received the Viareggio Prize, a few months after he died. His most famous collection of stories, Il ricordo della Basca (Memories of the Basque Country), had various incarnations: it was first published in 1938, then republished in 1956 with an elaborate introduction: a tour de force that straddles artistic statement, memoir and metafiction. It was renamed Racconti (Stories) in the year of his death, published along with an unfinished fragment of a new story. This selection below, moving and despairing, is both static and catapults by leaps and bounds, distilling the mechanism of memory. Much of Delfini’s work was openly autobiographical, but here he presents an incisively drawn female protagonist (his father died when he was young, and he was raised in a household of women). The public library in Modena which bears Delfini’s name, created a prize in his honour to recognize young poets.

The Milliner

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Signora Elvira was past sixty. Sitting in a soft, flower-patterned chair, with comfortable armrests, she leaned her head back. She seemed to be lost in a place that was easy to get to but painful to return from. How many nights, in the years of her youth, had she sat, exhausted, in that chair? She looked at the wide bed with the big white lace-trimmed counterpane. The counterpane was a little shabby. But it didn’t matter then. Provided Arturo returned every night! The work wasn’t so important. The millinery shop she owned on the main street could easily cut back its business. All she needed was enough to live on. Arturo earned well, and she didn’t have to put anything aside for him. If only she managed to keep the apartment clean, buy a new counterpane every year, with more elaborate lace, make fragrant coffee of the highest quality every evening (there was the Brasile, the big bar that stayed open all night during Carnival), life would go on in the happiest way.

Arturo was certainly a handsome man, strong, tireless. How Goldena the dressmaker envied her! She wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving her husband, who was an office worker, to be Arturo’s. Goldena the dressmaker, although she was a pretty woman, had never succeeded with Arturo. She, Elvira, an orphan, a self-made woman, had grabbed him and wouldn’t let him go. Who rode a bicycle the way he did? Who smoked a cigar like him, inserting playful, hoarse-voiced compliments between one drag and the next? That big, raspy voice, which muddled her mind, made her spoil the shape of a hat when she thought about it. What a delight the vest (she had sewed it) that clung so nicely to his broad chest!