Marianna Sirca

Grazia Deledda

tammi 2006 · Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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Jan Kozma's translation of Marianna Sirca is the near-literal rendering of a novel written by Grazia Deledda (1871-1936), the celebrated Italian author from Sardinia who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. Almost all of Deledda's stories treat the lives, loves, tragedies, and triumphs of the author's native land - the remote, isolated, and often forbidding island of Sardinia. This new translation includes an introduction that highlights the salient episodes of Grazia Deledda's life and which situates Marianna Sirca both literarily within the author's opera omnia and as part of the general literary trends of the early European twentieth century. Jan Kozma presents the homonymous protagonist, Marianna Sirca, as one of the great literary precursors of the liberated, independent, modern woman - an ironic twist, given the repressive culture in which Marianna lives. The translator also provides numerous explanatory foot-notes that elucidate particular arcane aspects of Sardinian life in the late nineteenth century.

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Among the most honored women writers of modern Italy, Deledda wrote naturalistic or realistic novels, drawing upon her Sardinian background for material. Some critics hold, however, that in Deledda's formula often only the names of places and people serve to evoke a Sardinian atmosphere of strangeness. Her best works especially Elias Portolu (1903), Cenere (1904), and The Mother (1920) contain excellent portrayals of women. While her characters are complex, often dominated by an overwhelming sense of destiny and by nature's mythic powers, her narrative structures remain simple and classic. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926.