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  Praise for

  NEAPOLITAN CHRONICLES

  “Anna Maria Ortese is a writer of exceptional prowess and force. The stories collected in this volume, which reverberate with Chekhovian energy and melancholy, are revered in Italy by writers and readers alike. Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee reward us with a fresh and scrupulous translation.”

  —JHUMPA LAHIRI,

  author of The Lowland and In Other Words

  “As for Naples, today I feel drawn above all by Anna Maria Ortese ... If I managed again to write about this city, I would try to craft a text that explores the direction indicated there.”

  —ELENA FERRANTE

  in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey

  “This remarkable city portrait, both phantasmagorical and harshly realistic, conveys Naples in all its shabbiness and splendor. Naples appears as both a monster and an immense waiting room, whose inhabitants are caught between resignation and unquenchable resilience. Beautifully translated, this lyrical gem has been rescued from the vast storehouse of superior foreign literature previously ignored.”

  —PHILLIP LOPATE,

  author of Bachelorhood and

  Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan

  “This beautiful book is a landmark in Italian literature and a major influence on Elena Ferrante—both as a way of writing about Naples and because Anna Maria Ortese may have been the model for the narrator of Ferrante’s quartet of novels set there. Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee have rendered Ortese’s lively, Neapolitan-inflected Italian in vivid, highly engaging English prose.”

  —ALEXANDER STILLE,

  author of The Sack of Rome and

  Benevolence and Betrayal

  “Naples is a vast succession of cities—Greek, Samnite, Roman, Byzantine, Aragonese, Spanish, Bourbon, Savoyard—and every phase has had its chronicler. In the aftermath of World War Two, battered, humiliated Naples found no abler witness than Anna Maria Ortese. Sixty-five years later, with international interest in Naples unexpectedly high, Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee have given us an essential, eloquent translation as faithful to Ortese’s time as it is vividly alive for our own.”

  —BENJAMIN TAYLOR,

  author of Naples Declared and Tales Out of School

  “Anna Maria Ortese was the last great writer of the generation that produced Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Today, few critics would disagree with the poet Andrea Zanzotto, who rates her as ‘one of the most important Italian women writers of this century.’”

  —THE INDEPENDENT

  “Gives an essential glimpse into the origins of Ferrante’s work ... A mesmerizing companion to Ferrante’s Neapolitan project as well as a daring work of both social criticism and narrative inventiveness that stands, toweringly, on its own.”

  —SERAILLON

  “An astonishing descent into the underworld … A modern artist has rarely rendered so intensely the spectrality of all things.”

  —LA REPUBBLICA

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in Italian in 1953 by Giulio Einaudi, Turin, as Il mare non bagna Napoli

  Copyright © 1994 Adelphi Edizioni, Milan

  Translation Copyright © 2018 Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie ad un contributo alla traduzione assegnato dal Ministero degli Affari esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale Italiano.

  This book has been translated thanks to a grant by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ortese, Anna Maria

  [Il mare non bagna Napoli. English]

  Neapolitan Chronicles/ Anna Maria Ortese; translation by Ann Goldstein

  and Jenny McPhee.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-51-1

  Library of Congress Control Number 2017949071

  I. Italy—Fiction and Nonfiction

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

  PREFACE

  The “Sea” as Disorientation

  A PAIR OF EYEGLASSES

  FAMILY INTERIOR

  THE GOLD OF FORCELLA

  THE INVOLUNTARY CITY

  THE SILENCE OF REASON

  Evening Descends Upon the Hills

  The Story of Luigi the Bureaucrat

  Chiaia: Dead and Restless

  Worker’s Identification Card No. 200774

  Literal Translation: “What is the meaning of this night?”

  The Boy from Monte di Dio

  AFTERWORD

  The Gray Jackets of Monte di Dio

  TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

  In January, 1933, Anna Maria Ortese’s brother Emanuele Carlo, a sailor in the Italian Navy, died during a maneuver off the island of Martinique. “The effect of this news on the household was at first a kind of inferno, but then a strange silence,” Ortese wrote many years later. “It’s like an amputation: a part of the soul is gone forever. And the soul reacts by ceasing to listen to any noise or sound or voice of the surrounding nature or of its own life ... That silence, at least for me, who was always alone … lasted several months, and I couldn’t see any way out. Finally, one day—rather, one morning—I suddenly thought that, since I was dying from it, I could at least describe it.” The result was a poem, “Manuele,” published in the review L’Italia Letteraria, in September of the same year. Ortese went on to say, “My life, from that day, changed radically, because now I had a means through which to express myself.” The editor of the review, Corrado Pavolini, continued to publish her poems, among those of such writers as Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Umberto Saba, and suggested that she also try writing stories.

  Ortese was born in Rome in 1914, one of six children, into a peripatetic and economically struggling family. Her father was a government employee and was often transferred; the family lived all over Italy and also, for three years, in Libya. In 1928 they settled in Naples, her mother’s native city. Ortese had little formal education, but, with Pavolini’s encouragement, she continued to write stories, publishing them in L’Italia Letteraria and other reviews, many of them under the pseudonym Franca Nicosi, in order to avoid her family’s disapproval. The new editor of L’Italia Letteraria, Massimo Bontempelli, brought her work to the attention of the publisher Valentino Bompiani, and, in 1937, he brought out a collection of her stories, Angelici Dolori (The Sorrows of Angels). When the war came, the family was displaced many times, but in 1945 returned, finally, to Naples. Ortese had begun working as a journalist, while continuing to write stories; in 1950 she published a second collection of stories, and in 1953 Neapolitan Chronicles, a book that includes both fiction and journalism.

  Neapolitan Chronicles presented a Naples “shattered by war,” in which suffering and corruption were widespread and very real. Ortese’s bleak picture takes in not only the struggling masses of the poor but bourgeois, aristocratic, and intellectual Naples as well. Of the five chapters, three are fiction and two are journalistic accounts arising from intensive research and, at times, intrepid reportage. The first story, “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” set mainly among the residents surrounding a squalid courtyard in one of the city’s densely packed neighborhoods, is told essentially from the point of view of a child who is nearly blind, and contrasts the child’s blurred view of her surroundings, and her desire to see clearly, with the
brutal, ugly world she will see when she gets her glasses. Vision—seeing, observing, taking in—is both a reality and a stark metaphor for Ortese throughout Neapolitan Chronicles. In “Family Interior,” Anastasia, a hardworking shop owner who has been supporting her mother and siblings for years for the first time in her life allows herself to see the grasping, selfish nature of her family, and to imagine something different from her life of “house and shop, shop and house,” but it’s a vision that can’t be sustained: when her mother calls, she can only say “I’m coming.” “The Gold of Forcella” returns to the crowded, destitute Naples of “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” and the desperation of the women who have come to the charity pawnshop of the Bank of Naples to try to get a few thousand lire for some small, precious possession.

  “The Involuntary City” is a portrait of the inhabitants of Granili III and IV, a notorious eighteenth-century building intended to be temporary housing for the homeless and the displaced after the war. The essay was first published in the review Il Mondo, in two parts, the second of which was titled “The Horror of Living.” The narrator tries to convey the horror first by a recitation of data about the “structure and population” of the place, but immediately realizes that this is insufficient and goes on to describe entering the “almost absolute” darkness of the ground-floor corridor, making her way through the entire building in order to record the grim human details of life there. Elena Ferrante, long before the publication of The Neapolitan Novels, said of “The Involuntary City” that if she were to write about Naples she would want to explore the direction indicated by Ortese’s account: a story of “small, wretched acts of violence, an abyss of voices and events, tiny terrible gestures.”

  The last chapter, the long chronicle “The Silence of Reason,” describes a journey to postwar Naples in which Ortese visits several of the writers and editors who had been her colleagues at the avant-garde literary and cultural magazine Sud, published between 1945 and 1947. In this account, she wanders around Naples, both seeing and recalling people and places, and finds that her former colleagues have, essentially, betrayed their youthful ideals, becoming complacent and bourgeois.

  The book brought Ortese attention (“I suddenly found myself almost famous”) and won the Premio Viareggio, an important literary prize, but its reception was mixed. On the one hand, its depiction of a harsh, ugly, impoverished, and corrupt postwar Naples (and postwar Italy) was seen as something new and necessary; on the other the book was viewed as “anti-Naples,” an indictment of the city, particularly by the young intellectuals described in the final chapter as having compromised their beliefs, who saw it as both a personal betrayal and a betrayal of the city. As a result of the book’s “condemnation,” she writes, she “said goodbye to my city—a decision that subsequently became permanent.” Indeed, in the fifty years following the book’s publication, she returned to Naples only once.

  Neapolitan Chronicles sold well, but Ortese complained that she got nothing from it, having already used up her advance: and this was to be her situation for most of her life. Although she worked constantly, publishing journalism, stories, and eleven novels, she always struggled to have enough money to live, and sometimes had to rely on the financial help of friends. In 1986, the publishing house Adelphi, headed by Roberto Calasso, began reprinting Ortese’s earlier works and publishing her new ones. It was a fortunate development—“They believed in my books [and] published them with respect”—which, finally, brought her acclaim in Italy. She had rarely stayed long in one place, living variously in Milan, Rome, Venice, and Florence, but this, too, changed in her final years, when, with a pension from the government, she was able to settle with her sister in Rapallo. She died there in 1998.

  In both her fiction and her reporting, Ortese’s style is an arresting mixture of realist detail and an almost surreal tone, with a strong underlying moral and social sensibility. In a preface to a new edition of Neapolitan Chronicles, brought out by Adelphi in 1994, Ortese said of the writing that it “tends toward the high-pitched, encroaches on the hallucinatory, and at almost every point on the page displays, even in its precision, something of the ‘too much.’” This may be particularly true in “The Involuntary City,” in which the smells, sounds, and sights of the place possess these very qualities. Near a mattress on the floor in one room, the narrator says, “there were some crusts of bread, and amid these, barely moving, like dust balls, three long sewer rats were gnawing on the bread.” The voice of the woman who lives in the room “was so normal, in its weary disgust, and the scene so tranquil, and those three animals appeared so sure of being able to gnaw on those crusts of bread, that I had the impression that I was dreaming.”

  Similarly in a talk (never delivered) written in 1980 she says: “If I had to define everything that surrounds me: things, in their infinity, or my feeling about things, and this for half a century, I could not use any other word than this: strangeness. And the desire—rather, the painful urgency—to render, in my writing, the feeling of strangeness.” In all the stories of Neapolitan Chronicles, people and places that should be familiar are not; in the 1994 preface she talks about her own “disorientation” from reality. This disorientation is literal in “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” when the nearly blind Eugenia finally puts on her eyeglasses: “Her legs were trembling, her head was spinning, and she no longer felt any joy … Suddenly the balconies began to multiply, two thousand, a hundred thousand; the carts piled with vegetables were falling on her; the voices filling the air, the cries, the lashes, struck her head as if she were ill.” And strangeness, or estrangement, is precisely one of the themes of “The Silence of Reason,” in which the narrator arrives at the house of one of her former colleagues and, when no one answers the bell, stands staring through the glass panes of a door into a dark room whose features only gradually, and painstakingly, come into focus, recognizable but different and, ultimately, alienating.

  Although no writer can be said to be “easy” to translate, Ortese’s style presents some particular difficulties. Her sentences can be convoluted and complex. The language can sometimes seem repetitive and, as she says, “high-pitched” and “feverish,” qualities that can be off-putting. The metaphors are sometimes bewildering. There are many topographical references to the city of Naples that we didn’t try to explain, but we have provided some basic information about the writers mentioned in the final chapter.

  Neapolitan Chronicles was first published by Einaudi, in the Gettoni series,* and was originally titled Il mare non bagna Napoli, or Naples Is Not Bathed by the Sea. That title, chosen by Ortese’s editors at Einaudi, Italo Calvino and Elio Vittorini, comes from a line in the story “The Gold of Forcella,” and was intended to signify that although the sea is one of the most beautiful and animating features of Naples, it offers the suffering city no solace or relief. Neapolitan Chronicles is another title that Ortese was considering, and it seemed to us a more apt description of the book’s contents. The text is based on the 1994 Adelphi edition, and includes the preface and an afterword that was also part of that edition.

  For both of us, this was the first experience of co-translating a work of literature. Rather than each being responsible for a number of stories, we divided them, arbitrarily, for a first draft, and then traded. We continued sending the stories back and forth, with discussions in notes, and sometimes in person, until the manuscript was ready.

  The role of the translator in a work of literature is much discussed and debated. Some believe that at best the translator is invisible; others say that he or she is, inevitably, a traitor to the original text. Still others claim that the translator is the creator of an entirely new work of literature. As for us, individually, we fall respectively at different places along that continuum.

  Whatever the role of the translator, the work of the translator, like the work of the writer, is apparently a solitary endeavor. Yet translating and writing are profoundly collaborative acts across time and texts, involving an ongoing, cacophonous conver
sation among writers and translators.

  We have not only been part of this greater conversation; we have also carried on a conversation with each other for more than twenty years. The decision to challenge and explore our own process as translators by collaborating on a text in this way and seeing what came of it was interesting, informative, surprising, and above all, delightful. Having another person’s ideas and point of view during the practice of translating was both intriguing and invaluable. By the end of our project, we could not have said who had written a given sentence or come up with a particular word. We had in essence merged into yet another translator, who was at once invisible, and at the same time, had a style all her own.

  Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee

  * The Gettoni series, initiated by Elio Vittorini, came out between 1951 and 1958, and included fifty-eight titles, eight by non-Italians. Gettone means “token” in Italian, and up until 2001 a metal token was commonly used in Italy for public telephones, and also for arcade games. The idea was that the books in the series would be affordable and would increase communication and a sense of playfulness through literature by reaching a wide and younger audience. Among the authors published in the Gettoni series were, besides Ortese, Italo Calvino, Lalla Romano, Marguerite Duras, Beppe Fenoglio, Nelson Algren, Leonardo Sciascia, Dylan Thomas, Mario Rigoni Stern, and Jorge Luis Borges.

  PREFACE

  The “Sea” as Disorientation

  Neapolitan Chronicles first appeared in Einaudi’s Gettoni series, with an introduction by Elio Vittorini. It was 1953. Italy had come out of the war full of hope, and everything was up for discussion. Owing to its subject matter, my book was also part of the discussion: unfortunately, it was judged to be “anti-Naples.” As a result of this condemnation, I said goodbye to my city—a decision that subsequently became permanent. In the nearly forty years that have passed since then, I have returned to Naples only once, fleetingly, for just a few hours.