The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read online

  Giorgio Bassani

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  THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

  Translated by JAMIE MCKENDRICK

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction

  The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

  Notes

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  THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

  GIORGIO BASSANI was born in Bologna in 1916 to a Jewish family who returned to their home town Ferrara soon after the end of the First World War. He attended school in Ferrara and the Faculty of Arts in the University of Bologna. After graduating he became involved in anti-Fascist activities which resulted in his imprisonment in 1943. Released after the fall of Mussolini, he married and moved to Florence, with his wife Valeria, where they lived under assumed names. At this time, during the Salò Republic, a number of his relatives were transported to the Buchenwald death camps. Bassani settled in Rome, where his daughter Paola was born in 1945 and his son Enrico in 1949. Bassani worked as a teacher, a translator of Hemingway and Voltaire among others, and as a scriptwriter on films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Mario Soldati. He became editor of the international literary magazine Botteghe Oscure and later a fiction editor at Feltrinelli, where he was responsible for ‘discovering’ and publishing Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1956). Despite this unrivalled success, he was to leave Feltrinelli in a dispute when in 1963 he refused to publish Alberto Arbasino’s novel Fratelli d’Italia. Concerned throughout his life with civic and political as well as cultural issues, he was vice president of RAI television network and in 1965 became president of ‘Italia Nostra’, a national heritage organization.

  An extraordinarily versatile author, Bassani has won numerous prizes as poet, novelist, short-story writer and essayist. His Cinque storie ferraresi won the 1956 Strega Prize. In 1974 his fiction was collected together and published under the title Il romanzo di Ferrara. The four main collections of his poems have been widely acclaimed and were gathered together in 1982 as In rima e senza. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis won the Viareggio Prize and has sold more than a million copies in Italy alone. Three films have been made of his work, most notably Vittorio de Sica’s adaptation of the present novel in 1970. In his last years Bassani suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in 2000. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Ferrara.

  JAMIE MCKENDRICK, born in Liverpool, 1955, has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Ink Stone (2003). He has translated a number of Italian poets, including Valerio Magrelli, and has edited The Faber Book of Italian 20th-Century Poems (2004).

  Translator’s Note

  The text I have used for this translation is Giorgio Bassani’s Opere (I Meridiani, Mondadori, 3rd edition, 2004) which incorporates the author’s final 1980 revisions and so differs from the texts used for the other two extant translations by Isobel Quigley and William Weaver. My only departure from the final text is to restore the epigraph from Alessandro Manzoni to its place at the start of this novel where, for reasons which should become clear to the reader, it rightfully belongs. (In turning his six books into one inclusive work, Il romanzo di Ferrara, Bassani decided to set the epigraph at the head of the entire work, thus giving it even more prominence.) In note 2 to Part II, Chapter 5, I have included the one paragraph cut by Bassani of which I regret the omission.

  To preserve the linguistic variety of the novel I have retained most of the words and phrases and all of the verses in other languages as they are in the original. I have limited myself to translating, in the form of footnotes, those which belong to Hebrew or various Italian dialects. An Italian reader of Bassani would have a fair chance of guessing the meaning of the latter, whereas an English reader is likely to be more at sea. The endnotes translate and source lines of poetry in Italian and other languages, provide brief notes on some lesser known historical or cultural figures and also gloss some specific terms from Italian history.

  I have also retained most of the descriptive titles – Signora, Signorina, etc. – as they are in the original. It should be noted, though, in the case of Ermanno Finzi-Contini, that the term ‘professor’ in Italian is somewhat more vague and honorific than the English term ‘Professor’.

  I am deeply indebted to Stella Tillyard and Elizabeth Stratford for the multitude of improvements they have suggested. I would also like to thank Valerie Lipman, Giorgia Sensi, Luca Guerneri, Antonella Anedda, Peter Hainsworth, Vicky Franzinetti, Simon Carnell, Erica Segre and David Kessler for their help with particular difficulties.

  J.McK.

  Introduction

  If you were to tell someone who had never read The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that it’s an extraordinary study of first love, you might just be taken on trust. If you claimed Giorgio Bassani combines such a story with a subtle portrait of the artist in his youth, a kind of Künstlerroman, you might be straining credibility. – Another Proust perhaps? But it doesn’t end there. The book is also one of the great novels of witness to the dark years of the mid-twentieth century. For informing both of these interwoven stories, shadowing them, is the fate of a small community of Jews in Ferrara, to which the narrator and his beloved Micòl belong, leading up to and following the 1938 Racial Laws in Italy. The book does indeed find a way to represent this double maelstrom, the personal and the public, the individual and the historical, from which the narrator emerges as a grief-stricken survivor, but a survivor committed to memorializing, in the most durable form he can, the exact features of his experience.

  Memory is at the heart of the novel, and the heart’s own memory is put to the fore in the epigraph from Alessandro Manzoni: ‘… what does the heart know? Just the least bit about what has happened already.’ We are told in the Prologue that the main events of the novel are recounted by a narrator looking back some twenty years and impelled by his sense of loss. Within the story itself, after a mere few weeks of absence from the Finzi-Continis’ house, the narrator already suffers anxiety concerning ‘those sites that belonged to a past which, though it seemed remote, was still recuperable, was not yet lost’. Throughout we sense the inexorable need of the narrator, and through him of Bassani himself, to recover the full import of what he has lived through. Ever further away, and harder of access, the past continues to exist in all its vividness. That the novel is (at least in part) fiction does not for Bassani represent an obstacle to truth-telling, rather it enforces a deeper obligation to accuracy. He speaks tellingly in an interview of having ‘written and rewritten every page [of his work] … with the intention to tell the truth, the whole truth’, and this remark seems especially apt for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

  Writing did not come easily to Bassani. It was, by his own account, an arduous process, alternately urged on and put off by long bicycle rides. In this novel the narrator’s bike is rarely absent, and yet no trace of the struggle of composition remains. Effectively Bassani began, as he continued, a poet; and though prose became his essential medium he kept faith with that beginning. Never ‘poetic’ – by which we usually understand vague and decorative – his prose was always poetry by other means. There is a constant tact and luminous exactitude in all his writing. And especially in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis the reader encounters that rare thing in the novel: a shaped conception that lyrically heightens every element of the story. Bassani himself tells how several stories were resolved by comprehending the images that underpinned them: in one, for example, he saw two spheres moving on conflicting axes, in another parallel lines receding into the distance. This discloses something distinctive about his imagination, a kind of geometric faculty. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis itself may be seen a
s a series of circular forms, circles within circles, and circles which overlap.

  Most of his novels and stories were written in Rome but were almost exclusively set in, or rather centred on, Ferrara. Although he was born – he claims ‘accidentally’ – in Bologna in 1916, it was Ferrara, a small, ancient city in the Po Valley, that was his imaginative heartland, his patria and matrix. Bassani’s first foray into fiction refers to the unnamed Ferrara ominously as ‘A City of the Plain’. (To evade the Racial Laws, this was published in 1940 under the pseudonym of Giacomo Marchi.) Another early story merely calls Ferrara ‘F’. It seems as though his image of the city needed gradually to mature both as actual location and as imaginative entity, almost as a character, before he allowed it to assume its proper name in his fiction. In 1973, more than a decade after the publication of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, he began to see that his short stories, two collections of them, and his four novels all formed parts of a (hexagonal) composite whole, and with this in mind they were adjusted and assembled into a single inclusive work: Il romanzo di Ferrara, The Novel of Ferrara.

  Although as free-standing as the other novels, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1962) is a central work within this sequence of interconnected narratives. Leaving aside the short stories, the other novels include The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (Gli occhiali d’oro, 1958), a short masterpiece which charts the friendship between Bassani’s young Jewish narrator and a homosexual doctor, both of whom are pushed to the margins of an increasingly intolerant Fascist Ferrara; Behind the Doors (Dietro la porta, 1964), a dark, uneasy tale of schoolboy friendship and betrayal; and The Heron (L’airone, 1968), a chilling study of post-war bitterness and malaise. None of these stories, written in this (for Bassani) astonishingly productive decade, needs the buttressing or support of the others, and yet they share a restricted historical period (essentially that of Italian Fascism and its post-war submergence), a civic setting and a number of central characters. Among these characters, the first three novels, including the present one, also share an unnamed first-person narrator, who is, I think we are meant to assume, a version, but an earlier version – with all the fictive latitude that word implies – of Bassani himself.

  The Prologue to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis begins with a visit to an Etruscan cemetery at Cerveteri, and the novel proper in Ferrara’s Jewish cemetery at the Finzi-Continis’ lavish and histrionic tomb. Cemeteries and gardens alternate through the narrative, the former almost spectrally superimposed on the latter. Only in the Prologue and Epilogue (and once in the middle) does the narrator allude to the fact that nearly all of its protagonists will be murdered in German death camps, without a gravestone to recall their existence. Yet the story continually broods on what passes away and what remains, on time itself, and builds a memorial out of ruination.

  Within the novel Bassani makes a number of references to the remarkable history of the Jews in Ferrara. Their presence there is first documented in 1227. In the 1490s, under the powerful d’Este family which ruled Ferrara for three hundred years, the city welcomed and benefited from the influx of Spanish Jews and, early in the next century, of persecuted German Jews. The latter group especially, as Bassani mentions, retained something of their distinct identity. This period of tolerance came to an end when in 1598 the city fell under the control of the Papal Legations and the community was forced within the Ghetto, a triangle of streets – Via Mazzini, Via Vignatagliata and Via Vittoria – which are central to the novel. Apart from a brief respite under Napoleon (1797–9) and again in 1848, the Ghetto remained as such until the Unification of Italy in 1859. The emancipation of the Jews at that date marked a new era of hope and optimism for the community which would come to a sinister and largely unforeseen close in 1938 with the introduction of the Racial Laws.

  According to Bassani, before the war there were about seven hundred and fifty Jews living in Ferrara, of whom one hundred and eighty-three were deported to German death camps, mostly under the puppet Salò Republic in 1943. Bassani elsewhere recounts an event which foreshadowed this disaster. On 28 October 1941, after a rally commemorating the March on Rome, a Fascist mob, largely composed of students, broke into the Temple in Via Mazzini at Ferrara, the oldest synagogue still in use in Italy. They attacked the rabbi and his family in their apartment and then broke into the two synagogues or ‘Schools’ housed on separate floors. They destroyed the furnishings and ritual objects, the chandeliers, the marble banisters, the paving stones, the big cupboards holding the scrolls of the Torah, even the cases with the prayer shawls, or tallitot. Although this event is not mentioned in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it nevertheless reverberates throughout, and may account for the extraordinarily vivid and moving evocation of the Italian synagogue early in the novel and for the focal recurrence of the Temple throughout.

  The description of the Temple reveals another aspect of Bassani’s unique gift: his architectural sense of space and his visual acuteness. (A formative friendship for the young Bassani was with his tutor at Bologna University, the great art critic Roberto Longhi.) This too is related to his ‘geometric’ imagination. But in Bassani space is always faceted by time, and description is never uncoupled from the narrative movement, slowed down as it may be, towards what will occur. Even stylistically, in his prolonged sentences, often interrupted by parentheses, we sense a counter-impulse to slow time down, to savour as much as is humanly possible of its fullness, before it pushes on towards a vanishing point of loss and destruction. Here his instinct as a novelist is very like the tennis games he describes in the Finzi-Continis’ garden, which continue on past dusk into the darkness with a stubborn refusal to abandon the joy of playing.

  Throughout the novel the Jewish community is presented as both united and divided. In addition to the shadowy group that attend the Fanese synagogue, there is the already mentioned distinction between the two synagogues within the Temple: the German ‘School’ with its stolid, Homburg-hatted congregation and the more operatic and volatile Italian ‘School’. There are also linguistic differences which can be seen even within the Finzi-Contini family itself: in the uncles and grandmother who speak a peculiar Hispanic-Veneto dialect, the Professor with his courtly scholastic Italian and Micòl who, on matters close to her heart, abandons Italian for Ferrarese dialect. And there are also the social divisions which keep the very wealthy Finzi-Continis, perhaps against their will, aloof from the congregation. The narrator despairs of explaining these complexities to his Gentile friends and yet the novel achieves this feat with spectacular success.

  Politically, too, this community is seen as divided. Bassani is unsparing in his account of these divisions which cut across it in unpredictable ways. The narrator’s father, like many of his Ferrarese co-religionists, and for that matter like so many fellow Italians, is an enthusiastic Fascist, and unjustly finds Professor Ermanno’s anti-Fascism yet another snobbish taint. Bassani’s refusal to portray a folkish and homogeneous community is an important part of his contract with memory. He insists on their ‘normality’ in the light of a brutal reality that would have them abnormal, or even sub-normal. They have a categorical specialness forced upon them. A figure like the narrator’s father, for example, is certainly flawed but no less lovable for his quirks and failings – despite his deluded views, we can sympathize with him when the narrator self-righteously takes him to task on that account. Though Bassani himself was a militant anti-Fascist, and was jailed in 1943 for his activities – an experience he refers to, only once and laconically, in the novel – his morality never submits to a black-and-white historical overview. Such a view stands accused in the person of Giampi Malnate, even if the accusation is tempered with affection. (It is one of the story’s crueller ironies that the Communist Malnate should in the end die fighting for Fascism on the Russian Front.) Yet nothing that these complexities introduce alleviates the novel’s grief at the loss of this community.

  Just as the Jews of Ferrara are far from unified
, so also other social divisions beyond that community mark the narrator’s consciousness. He is aware of his exclusion, not on grounds of race but of class, from other groups within the city and the country. In the Prologue, he notes the camaraderie of the working-class girls who, arms linked, block the road in a small Lazian town, singing. They have a carefree, erotic presence that challenges the older narrator, and leaves him as an outsider, a bystander, an admirer. Something of the same thing can be found in the digression on vertigo, as he prepares to scale the garden’s wall. Here, he remembers his childhood admiration for the fearless workers – farm-workers, builders, labourers, ‘frog-catchers and catfish anglers’ who venture up and down the steep climb of the Montagnone fortifications. As a child, he feels threatened by them, by their rough hands and wine-dark breath, and both repelled and attracted. Among several deftly drawn portraits, the foul-mouthed Tuscan girl, who queens it over her coconut shy in the travelling circus and is so taken by the manly Malnate, exerts a magnetic attraction for the narrator. The comic and grotesque figure of Perotti, doorman, coachman and chauffeur of the Finzi-Continis, is another signal presence. He is the employee who seems to have acquired a sinister control over the family, and casts a shadow over the idyllic house and grounds. Only when the narrator begins to fathom Perotti’s tense, vicarious pride in the Finzi-Continis’ possessions is he accorded a flicker of appeal. Though the novel’s milieu is mainly upper middle class, Bassani brings a psychological definition and credibility to every character he portrays.

  In keeping with the ethnic variety within Ferrara’s small Jewish community, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is dizzyingly multilingual. Apart from its original Italian, the uncles’ curious dialect and the frequent phrases in Ferrarese, we encounter Malnate’s Milanese, words and phrases in Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, German, as well as English and French. Bassani’s use of these background languages never serves as linguistic display, but rather as an exact record of a uniquely complex community which, at one point, he describes by the Latin phrase ‘intra muros’ (literally ‘between walls’ or cloistered, but here with the sense of being within a ghetto). This phrase is picked up in Inside the Walls (Dentro le mura), the first book of his Novel of Ferrara, a collection of short stories. Also within The Garden of the Finzi-Contini walls are ever-present and more than structural. They, the walls of the city, its towers, bastions and its underground, tomb-like arsenals begin to gather an increasing symbolic freight. There is a very real sense in which for this community the Racial Laws of 1938 meant the walls were closing in.