Born a hundred years ago, the daughter of a revolutionary passionaria and a famous criminal lawyer, the youngest of the family, Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) grew up with wild freedom in the narrow heart of the old city of Catania, in Sicily, under the permanent threat of Etna.
She had many lives – even beyond death. Theatre and film actress, resistance fighter, screenwriter, writer, literary icon and feminist.
For ten years, at the end of the 1960s, stopping everything, locked away, she filled in black ink with a Bic pen, with military discipline, the burning pages of The art of joyhis somewhat cursed masterpiece which has now become a classic of Italian literature.
A baroque hymn to freedom, insubordination and the power of literary speech. A journey through the century coupled with a genuine inner experience. Modesta, the heroine of Goliarda Sapienza’s book, is in a way “her Double without fragility”, sums up well Nathalie Castagné, translator and biographer of the writer.
Living with Modesta was also a bit like having a child, he writes in GoliardaAngelo Pellegrino, who was the writer’s companion for the last twenty years and who today dedicates to “Iuzza”, as all her friends called her, a beautiful book of memories, moving, lively and sensual. In 2015 he had already given us some pages of memories, Goliarda Sapienza as I knew her (The Tripod).
Here, he uses his meeting with a young Spanish photographer who is interested in the writer as a pretext. Faced with this “incomprehensible curiosity”, the cult of which she has today become the object, Angelo Pellegrino, who is addressing Goliarda Sapienza here, takes the opportunity to tell his story, to revisit the places of their complicity – notably Rome and Gaeta, the village on the Tyrrhenian coast where the writer died.
He recalls the years of being rejected by the major Italian publishing houses, which had published some of Goliarda Sapienza’s previous works. “It remained in formaldehyde for twenty years, locked in the safe in my office.” But “after the death of a writer, miracles can happen.”
However, it took the dedication and tenacity of Angelo Pellegrino. The phenomenal success of the translation of the book in France allowed the rediscovery of Goliarda Sapienza in Italy — and throughout Europe. In a way, this posthumous publishing enterprise allowed Angelo Pellegrino to continue living for many years with the writer, whose smile, he remembers, “was the warmest and most solar ray of sunshine that one could imagine.”
A renaissance that continued through several posthumous publications, including these Mirrors of time which have just been published, a selection of “letters and notes” dating from the 1950s to a few months before his death — all testimonies of his passion and intensity.
Love, activism, cinema and glamour, depression, suicide attempts, financial difficulties, prison stays. A romantic life and dark areas that he does not hesitate to highlight Lives, Deaths and Rebirths of Goliarda Sapienza, the biography dedicated to him by Nathalie Castagné, who is also the French translator of all his work since The art of joy (Viviane Hamy, 2005; Le Tripode, 2015).
An essential book that explores “all facets of the ever-surprising — and little convenient — person she was.”
Goliarda
★★★1/2
Angelo Pellegrino, translated by Nathalie Castagné, Le Tripode, Paris, 2024, 200 pages
Mirrors of time
★★★
Goliarda Sapienza. Letters selected by Angelo Pellegrino, translated by Nathalie Castagné, Le Tripode, Paris, 2024, 320 pages
Lives, Deaths and Rebirths of Goliarda Sapienza
★★★1/2
Nathalie Castagné, Seuil, Paris, 2024, 400 pages