The Outcast A Novel

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

FOREWORD BY DANIELA BINI

TRANSLATED BY BRADFORD A. MASONI

“A story of forbidden love and humorous misunderstanding, The Outcast is innovative, playful, and intellectually challenging writing by one of Italy’s greatest modern authors. These traits shine in Masoni’s new and much-needed translation. He has captured the ambiguous uncertainties and charming difficulties of Pirandello’s first novel, making it available once again to an English-language audience both to study and enjoy.”

—Michael Subialka, coeditor of PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America

A young wife in a nineteenth-century Sicilian village, Marta is deeply in love with her husband Rocco and pregnant with his child. But when Rocco discovers a letter written to Marta by a would-be suitor, he falsely accuses her of infidelity and banishes her from their home. Soon the whole village turns against the supposed adulteress, setting in motion a series of tragic events that culminates in the loss of Marta’s family home and business, as well as the deaths of her father and newborn child. Plunged into poverty and treated as a social leper, with practically nothing else to lose, Marta is determined to claw her way back into a society bent on excluding her.

The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello that combines elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics. This fresh English translation, the first in nearly one hundred years, showcases Pirandello’s deft play with language and his use of irony.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867–1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer who found his first mainstream success with the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal in 1904. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. Pirandello’s works include seven collections of poetry, seven novels, hundreds of short stories, and about forty plays.

BRADFORD A. MASONI is a writer, editor, and translator who specializes in literary modernism with a particular focus on the transition from nineteenth-century literary realism into modernism.

DANIELA BINI is a professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, where she chaired the Department of French and Italian for eight years.

Other Voices of Italy

314 pp 5 x 8 978-1-9788-3649-5 paper $27.95T 978-1-9788-3650-1 cloth $69.95SU

August 2023

Literature

“This new translation of Pirandello’s little-known early work sheds light on the repressive culture of traditional Sicilian village life, prefiguring themes that he would take up in his later fiction and drama. Masoni has done an excellent job in bringing to English-speaking readers this portrayal of a vanished world.”

—Susan Bassnett, author of Translation Studies and Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record

Table of Contents

Foreword, Daniela Bini

Translator’s Note, Bradford A. Masoni The Outcast About the Author About the Translator About the Contributor

140 pp 5 x 8

978-1-9788-3574-0 paper $24.95T

978-1-9788-3575-7 cloth $69.95SU

August 2023

Literature

“Oh, Serafina! is a bizarrely beautiful fable for the ages. Thanks to the deft work of translator Gregory Conti, this tale of industry, lust, mental illness, and ecological sensibility is a most welcome addition to the small but growing canon of Italian environmental literature available in translation.”

—Monica Seger, author of Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film

“Fifty years ago, Giuseppe Berto wrote his fable of ecology, lunacy, and love against the backdrop of the industrialized Italy of his day. But books, fortunately, outlive their occasional contexts. In Gregory Conti’s flawless translation, Oh, Serafina! shines as a tale that belongs even, if not especially, to our own time.”

—Federica Capoferri, coauthor of Badlands: Il cinema dell’ultima Roma