Italo Svevo

1861–1928

Trieste, in Italy’s extreme north-east, belonged to the Hapsburg Empire until 1918, when it was incorporated into the kingdom of Italy. Svevo, a profound hybrid with deeply doubled roots, was born there with the name Aron Ettore Schmitz. Today he is hailed as one of the first great Italian Modernists, but Svevo is in fact a literary Janus figure, his artistic orientation as Italian as it is central European (the pseudonym represents, quite literally, the cultural and geographical amalgam that constituted his essence; ‘Italo’ represents Italy, and ‘Svevo’ describes a person from Swabia – ‘Svevia’ in Italian – which is in south-western Germany). The son of an Austrian Jewish father and an Italian Jewish mother, he was educated in German, spoke dialect at home and was an Austrian citizen. He converted from Judaism to Catholicism in order to marry, but had a Jewish funeral. He worked in a bank and, after marriage, for his father-in-law’s company, which produced underwater paints. But his passion, since adolescence, was literature; he nurtured himself on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the psychoanalytic works of Sigmund Freud, and he mixed the Triestine dialect and German to create his signature, unconventional Italian. His English teacher in Trieste was James Joyce, whom he befriended. Perpetually conflicted between his artistic calling and familial responsibilities, Svevo’s most important novel, La coscienza di Zeno (translated into English not as The Conscience of Zeno, but as The Confessions of Zeno), was published in 1923. Until then his work went largely unnoticed; the silence that followed Senilità (Senility, given the English title As a Man Grows Older), a novel published over two decades before, almost caused him to stop writing. But Joyce adored Senilità, to the point of committing pages of it to memory and providing its English title. Physical decline, ineptitude and idleness were ongoing themes, and almost all of Svevo’s stories, published towards the end of his career, describe the battlefield of old age. The protagonist of this selection is typical of Svevo’s warrior-heroes, in part both neurotic and noble, infantile and enlightened.

Generous Wine

Translated by John Penuel

A niece of my wife’s was getting married at that age at which girls stop being girls and start becoming old maids. Until shortly before, the poor thing had rejected life, but pressures from the entire family had then persuaded her to return to it and, renouncing her desire for purity and religion, she had agreed to speak to a young man the family considered a good match. Immediately thereafter, it was Goodbye, religion, Goodbye, dreams of virtuous solitude, and the date of the wedding was set for sooner even than the families would have preferred. And now we were sitting down to dinner on the eve of the wedding.

As an old satyr, I had to laugh. What had the young fellow done to get her to change her mind so quickly? He had probably taken her in his arms to make her feel the joy of living and seduced her rather than convinced her. So they really had to be wished all the best. All people, when they marry, need good wishes, but that girl needed them more than anybody. What a disaster if one day she were to regret having let herself be led back into a life that, by instinct, she had abhorred. And I, too, accompanied a drink or two of mine with good wishes, which I managed even to tailor to that particular case: ‘May you be happy for a year or two, since it will be easier then for you to put up with the other long years, out of gratitude for having enjoyed yourselves. Joy gives way to longing, and it, too, is a sorrow, but a sorrow that masks the fundamental one, the sorrow of life.’