Agostino (9781590177372) by Alberto Moravia
“You always treat me like a baby,” Agostino said all at once, not even he knew why.
The mother laughed and patted him on the cheek. “All right, then, from now on I’ll treat you like a man. Will that make you happy? Now go to sleep . . . it’s late.” She bent down and kissed him. With the light out, Agostino could hear her getting into bed.
“Like a man,” he couldn’t help but think to himself before falling asleep. But he wasn’t a man, and many unhappy days would pass before he became one.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
IN THE book-length interview he granted to his friend, the writer Alain Elkann, Alberto Moravia described Agostino as “the hinge that connects Gli indifferenti with my later works.” Written in one month in 1942 on the island of Capri, the novel marked a return to form both in his own and in critical estimation. He felt that it recaptured the “spontaneous, necessary quality” that had characterized his debut novel, Gli indifferenti (translated as The Time of Indifference), whose success had initially proved difficult to repeat. Published in 1929 when Moravia was twenty-one years old, the novel was reprinted four times before it came out in a second edition in 1934. By contrast his next long novel, Le ambizioni sbagliate (The Mistaken Ambitions, 1935), on which he had labored for seven years, was a disappointment, aggravated by the censorship of the Fascist regime, which instructed the newspapers not to review the novel and confiscated his next, La mascherata (The Fancy Dress Party, 1941).
Agostino was first published by a smaller house, Documento, in 1943 and then brought out in a revised edition the next year by Bompiani. In 1945 it was awarded Italy’s first postwar literary prize, the Corriere Lombardo. It is indeed a “hinge” or transitional work, certainly in terms of his career: the publication of La romana (The Woman of Rome) two years later would establish his international reputation, and his works began to appear in translation. The themes of Agostino indicate a broadening of the author’s focus—although his gaze remains resolutely centered on the bourgeoisie—and a deeper engagement with the themes of poverty and social injustice. In his conversations with Elkann, Moravia described the work as “the story of a childhood vacation, but . . . also the story of Agostino’s encounter with modern culture, and its premise is the work of two great unmaskers, Marx and Freud.” While his interest in Freudian psychology was already apparent in Gli indifferenti, his exploration of class conflict heralds a new era in his writing as part of the general movement in Italian culture known as neorealism. Moravia collaborated closely with the most important postwar film directors, and many of his works, most prominently La ciociara (translated into English as Two Women), were adapted for the big screen.
But it is the stylistic transition in Agostino that most interests me as a translator. Although he tired of the attention it garnered, Moravia’s prose stood out from the beginning as spare and brutal, especially by comparison to the high literary manner that prevailed in Italy during the early years of the century. His champions and critics alike pointed to what they considered his unadorned style. In one of the first reviews of Gli indifferenti, the novelist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese praised Moravia as having “a very beautiful art of writing because it is cleansed of frills, the exact opposite of the vexing lack of originality, the false and toxic ’beautiful writing,’ that had reduced prose to tattoos with acid.” These same features were dismissed by more traditional critics, most famously the great philologist Gianfranco Contini, who called Moravia’s prose “a gray and neutral koine of the capital city, the zero-degree language of a Pirandello stripped of gesture.”
Contini and others acted as gatekeepers of a literary tradition rooted in the courtly love poetry of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany. Its strictures were such, in the most extreme instances of the Renaissance, that not a single word could be used that was not found in Petrarch or Boccaccio. In as linguistically fragmented a country as Italy, with its many regional and even local dialects, writing in “pure” standard Italian was a daunting challenge for writers from outside the Florence-Rome matrix. For the modern novelist, starting with Manzoni, the challenge was to transform an essentially lyric medium into a flexible, contemporary prose adapted to the needs of narrative realism.
In a recent book-length study of Moravia’s style, Gianluca Lauta documents the more conventional aspect of his prose as well as its distinctiveness. He argues that the often criticized blandness of Moravia’s dialogues is shaped by the intellectual emptiness of his bourgeois characters: “On the one hand, Gli indifferenti participates in the collapse of the grand classical style, on the other, it comes close to the superficial dialogues, typical of salons, that had been used in lowbrow novels for at least two centuries.” Comparing the edits that Moravia made from the first to the second editions of Agostino, Lauta notes his “clear intention to use the most appropriate word, even to the detriment of perfectly acceptable forms.”
The idea that Moravia was engaged in “invisible writing” or tearing down the edifice of classical Italian is not entirely borne out by a close analysis of Agostino. I would say instead that he is turning the literary tradition on its head, adopting the conventions of courtly love poetry but for more earthly ends. Like many a forlorn poet, the narrator suffers the afflictions of unrequited love, but the object of his affection, scandalously, is his mother. Rather than seek to elevate her, like Petrarch’s Laura, he is intent on debasing her, repeating, like a mantra, “She’s only a woman.” In his eyes her body takes on distorted proportions, and exudes, after her indiscretions with the young boatman, an “acrid, violent animal warmth.”
Moravia drives home the clash between the language he has inherited and the reality he is depicting through other borrowings from Renaissance poetry. The mother is often presented as “wrapped” in an air, an article of clothing, or even the sheets, heightening her inaccessibility. Agostino’s fetishistic evocation of her clothing—the wet bathing suit pressed against his cheek, the negligee in which she stands before her mirror—is the inverse image of the courtier’s attachment to his beloved’s veil, glove, or handkerchief. And in words that evoke this same tradition, Moravia uses the adjective antico—which today signifies “ancient” or “old” but archaically meant “former”—to describe the mother’s lost dignity and the son’s lost innocence.
The obsessive, even grating repetition of certain words and phrases is rooted, I believe, in the same subversive impulse. It was Moravia’s severe critic, Contini, who coined the expression “monolinguism” to define Petrarch’s paring down of poetic language to a few rarefied terms. Moravia’s select vocabulary is of another and indeed opposite nature. Agostino is torn between feelings of “attraction” and “repulsion.” His confused, in-between state is captured by another frequent word, “murky” (torbido), with strange and visceral undertones. The sexual goings-on that Agostino is slowly becoming aware of are oscuri (dark, mysterious, or obscure), denoting, in simplified form, the Freudian unconscious. The only way out of his confusion, he is convinced, is to become a man, a wish he voices in a dreamlike state at the beginning and the end of the novel.
These repetitions forge disquieting links between the characters. The mother’s “awkwardness” is echoed in the ungainliness of the boys. The image of the sheer negligee on the prostitute at the brothel is superimposed on the wrinkled nightgown the mother is wearing when she comforts Agostino. The bluntness of these parallels, combined with the word pictures Moravia creates of the mother before the mirror, the boat on the sea, or the stream through the cane-brake, suggest a painterly technique. He observes visual detail like a portrait artist. Take the passage where Agostino spies on his mother from behind the door:
The mother, having removed her necklace and set it on the marble top of the chest of drawers, brought her hands together at her earlobe in a graceful gesture to unscrew one of the earrings. Throughout this motion, she kept her head tilted to one side and turned toward the room.
Or the gang of boys as they prepare to go skinny-dipping
Against the green background of the cane, their bodies were brown and white, a miserable, hairy white from their groins to their bellies. This whiteness revealed something strangely deformed, ungainly, and overly muscular about their bodies, typical of manual laborers.
The bluntness of his repetitions, on the other hand, reminds me of the bold outlines that were popular in the social realist paintings of postwar Italy, particularly in the work of Renato Guttuso. Guttuso was in fact a close friend of Moravia’s and painted two portraits of the novelist. He also illustrated the Bompiani edition of Agostino.
In translating the novel I have tried to preserve the repetitions, though it has not always been possible, especially the adjective “obscure,” whose many nuances no single word could seem to capture. A particularly vexing issue was how to refer to the boat that figures so largely in the story, the pattino, not to mention the structure of Italian beach culture in general, both then and now. A pattino, also known as a moscone, looks like a paddle boat but is propelled by oars rather than foot pedals, and is used not only for sunbathing but also by lifeguards to rescue people.
For the central figure of the mother, the Italian language has an ambiguous expression, la madre, which could be translated as either “his mother” or “the mother.” I generally opted for the later, in keeping with the archetypal importance she assumes in Agostino’s eyes, using “his mother” only where the Italian was more explicit or greater intimacy was suggested. The little black boy, Homs, is referred to throughout as il moro, “the Moor,” which in erudite Italian can be used for a person of African origin (or a dark-haired male). To avoid introducing a note of linguistic violence not present in the original, I chose to refer to the character mostly by his name.
In closing, I would be remiss not to mention the previous translation of Agostino by Beryl de Zoete (Secker and Warburg, 1947). Once I had completed my first draft, I compared the more troubling parts against her earlier version. Where our divergences were too great, I went back to the Italian. On the whole, her work is very beautiful, perhaps too beautiful, often smoothing out edges Moravia had left rough, and with an occasional misinterpretation. She seems to shy away from the more coarse passages, reluctant, for instance, to translate the pubic hairs sprouting from Sandro’s groin. The first chapter, oddly, is divided in two. Without being privy to the correspondence between the translator and the editor—and who knows, perhaps the multilingual Moravia himself also weighed in—it is hard to know who is responsible for these decisions.
—MICHAEL F. MOORE
REFERENCES
Giuseppe Antonelli. “La Scrittura invisibile.” Alberto Moravia 2007. A cento anni dalla nascita. (http://www.uninettuno.tv/Video.aspx?v=i29)
Gianfranco Contini. Letteratura dell’ Italia unita 1861-1968. Firenze: Sansoni, 1994.
Louis Kibler. “Moravia and Guttuso: A la recherche de la realite perdue.” Italica 56, 2 (Summer 1979), 198-212.
Gianluca Lauta. La scrittura di Moravia: lingua e stile dagli Indifferenti ai Racconti romani. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2005.
Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann. Life of Moravia. Translated by William Weaver. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Italia, 2000.
Eileen Romano. “Cronologia,” in Agostino. Alberto Moravia. Milano: Tascabili Bompiani, 2009.
Alberto Moravia, Agostino (9781590177372)