The origins
Could it be that the bowels of Mount Etna are home to Vulcan, or that the proverbial Charybdis and Scylla still haunt the Strait of Messina? In the Mediterranean, everything begins with a legend, and on the largest of its islands this truth has remained unchanged since antiquity. If it's rumoured that sweet Arethusa found refuge in the port of Syracuse or that the fairy Morgana, now Fata Morgana, appears to those who believe in mirages, Sicily is also the birthplace of a strange troublemaker with a hundred thousand adventures, Giufà, who is said to be the legacy of the Muslim conquest where goddesses and other gods recall the time of Greek colonization. But there's another important rule: oral tradition always ends up giving way to written literature, a miracle that Sicily can claim to have witnessed in the 13th century.
At the time, Latin reserved the privilege of being used by men of the Church. As a sacred and therefore official language, it willingly delegated the power of poetry to French. Italian, for its part, has not yet won its letters of nobility, perhaps for historical reasons that taint it with a dubious reputation, or because the various local dialects have not helped it to achieve a salutary unity. Whatever the case, on the initiative of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, a polyglot emperor who, somewhat at odds with the papacy, perhaps had every interest in freeing himself from Latin and dreaming of a great national language, and under the aegis of Giacomo de Lentini, an official attached to his court who is credited with inventing the sonnet, a place of poetic experimentation was born, henceforth known as the Sicilian School. In this "Magna Curia", dialects merged and evolved with the contributions of participants from different backgrounds, resulting in an enriched language that relentlessly explored a favorite theme: fin'amor.
This linguistic adventure lasted only a few decades, barely surviving the emperor's death in 1250, but it nevertheless had a major influence on Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), as he acknowledged in De vulgari eloquentia, especially as it had affinities with Tuscan, which the "Father of the Italian language" would retain to become modern Italian. In a fitting turn of events, it is said that Petrarch (1304-1374), another "Crown" of Italian literature, would breathe new life into Sicilian letters with his Canzoniere, as confirmed by the fabulous poetic anthology, Les Muses siciliennes, published by Pier Giuseppe Sanclemente, pseudonym of Giuseppe Galeano, in 1645.
The second wind
But writers were not content to imitate. The 18th century truly marked a new golden age for Sicilian literature, all the more so for the audacity with which they used their local dialect, as in the case of Giovanni Meli (1740-1815), who produced an abundant body of work ranging from pastoral poems(La Bucolique) to satirical plays(L'Origine du monde, in which he sets out a series of theories, more or less haphazard, to explain the origin of mankind). The century soon saw the emergence of a new literary trend that had as much to do with Zola's naturalism as Dostoyevsky's realism: verism: Luigi Capuana (1839-1915), Federico de Roberto (1861-1927) and, above all, Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), recognized as one of the island's greatest authors.
The former, a veritable theorist of the movement, is also acclaimed for having opened the breach for regional literature, leaving to posterity a novel published in 1901, Le Marquis de Roccaverdina, but it's Un vampire which is enjoyed in French by Editions La Part commune. The second became famous for his vast chronicle of 19th-century Sicilian history, I Viceré, which became Les Princes de Francalanza in the translation proposed by Stock. Finally, who better than Giovanni Verga, a classic to be discovered by Gallimard, to describe Sicily, its traditions and its "vanquished" with such realism mingled with pessimism? Whether in the novel Les Malavoglia or the four short stories in the collection La Louve, each of his texts is one of those that cannot be forgotten.
The way was paved for the emergence of a writer who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Luigi Pirandello, born in Agrigento in 1867, first tried his hand at verismo in his first novel, L'Exclue (1901), which was certainly not a landmark. Financial vicissitudes forced him to devote himself all the more seriously to his love of letters. From this research and dogged work emerged a personal style, described by some as "pirandellism", and works that retain a contemporary freshness despite the passage of a century. For those fortunate enough not to know him yet, reading the Complete Short Stories, published in Quarto by Gallimard, or the novel Feu Mattia Pascal (Flammarion), about a man thought to have committed suicide who decided to take advantage of the situation to invent a new life for himself, will reveal the fascinating interplay of mirrors in which Pirandello excelled. Although he didn't come to it until he was in his fifties, and saw it as a waste of time that distracted him from his passion for storytelling, it was the theater that definitively established him as a major author. In this field, he was supported by the poet and playwright Nino Martoglio, who staged his first plays in 1913. Pirandello finally decided to create his own company a decade later, thus confirming the literary splendor of the interwar period, in which Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, for example, took part with his 1921 unvarnished description of this lost generation in Vie de Filippo Rubè (collection L'Imaginaire). This discovery would not be complete without reading his collection of short stories Les Belles, and the pamphlets he wrote against fascism during his American exile(Goliath, 1937).
The Second World War dispersed populations for a time, but did not stifle the inspiration that stirred Sicilian writers. The post-war years saw the revelation of the talent of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, whose only novel, Le Guépard, became a mythical film under the watchful eye of Luchino Visconti. But success was posthumous and hard to come by. The text, which uses Garibaldi's arrival as a historical backdrop, was praised by Aragon but judged retrograde by Syracuse-born Elio Vittorini (1908-1966), an intellectual who, since the publication in 1941 of Conversation en Sicile (collection L'Imaginaire), a thinly veiled denunciation of fascism, enjoyed a certain influence among his peers. It took all the energy of Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani to make Le Guépard available to its public and accepted as a harsh critique of the elites, a move rewarded by the 1959 Strega Prize, two years after Lampedusa was returned to the earth.
That same year, Sicily received its second Nobel Prize for Literature in the person of Salvatore Quasimodo, born in Modica in 1901, a distinction that was only half applauded by Italian critics, as the poet also had his detractors. An autodidact turned Hellenist, marked by the distinctive rhythm of his island crossroads of civilizations, Quasimodo's Italianermetismo was not always well understood, although in his second period, following the upheaval of the war, he turned to a more social and universal theme. This freedom of form was also explored by Stefano d'Arrigo (1919-1992) in Horcynus Orca, which runs to several thousand pages and tells the simple story of a sailor's return to Messina in 1943. This assumed complexity, a favorite subject of study for many scholars, is reminiscent of another feat, James Joyce'sUlysses.
Diversity and strength of the 20th century
Of course, we'd still have to mention Ignazio Buttitta (1899-1997), a poet who evoked the harshness of his native region in Sicilian, Vitaliano Brancati (1907-1954), a writer who died early and suffered a brutal political awakening, which he evoked in The Lost Years, Gesualdo Bufalino, who won back-to-back Campiello Prizes for The Plague Sower and the Strega Prize for The Lies of the Night. Bartolo Cattafi (1922-1979) is a Sicilian poet who emerged from the "Linea Lombarda" literary movement, a stylistic movement that rejects emphasis in favor of direct, graphic and simple phrasing. The collection Eau de Poulpe, translated into French, includes 55 poems worth discovering. Another important author is Giuseppe Bonaviri (1924-2009), who enjoyed reviving local legends with his pen, but the spotlight is on another eminent Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia, who was born in Racalmuto in 1921. The son of a miner, as he liked to recall, Sciascia became the schoolteacher in his native village in 1949, but fate had a Roman career in store for him, followed by a foray into politics. He evokes the mafia in Le Jour de la chouette, the Inquisition in Mort de l'inquisiteur, corruption in À chacun son dû and justice in Le Contexte. Never one to shy away from polemics, denunciations or sarcasm, the writer paints a highly personal portrait of his country through allegories and police procedurals, a fascinating approach for anyone interested in Italian politics.
Those who prefer the intrigue that is the spice of crime novels can, without offending him, turn to the work of his friend and compatriot Andrea Camilleri (1925-2019). Is it even necessary to introduce the man who sold tens of millions of copies worldwide of his stories featuring his emblematic character, Superintendent Montalbano? Camilleri's work was not only imaginative and well-documented: a virtuoso of language, he enjoyed mixing Italian and Sicilian vocabulary and syntax.
