Marianna Sirca

Jan Kozma’s translation of Marianna Sirca is the near-literal rendering of a novel written by Grazia Deledda (1871-1936), the celebrated Italian author from Sardinia who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. Almost all of Deledda’s stories treat the lives, loves, tragedies, and triumphs of the author’s native land – the remote, isolated, and often forbidding island of Sardinia.
This new translation includes an introduction that highlights the salient episodes of Grazia Deledda’s life and which situates Marianna Sirca both literarily within the author’s opera omnia and as part of the general literary trends of the early European twentieth century. Jan Kozma presents the homonymous protagonist, Marianna Sirca, as one of the great literary precursors of the liberated, independent, modern woman – an ironic twist, given the repressive culture in which Marianna lives. The translator also provides numerous explanatory foot-notes that elucidate particular arcane aspects of Sardinian life in the late nineteenth century.
Marianna Sirca is a 30-year-old woman of inherited wealth who lives in Nuoro, Sardinia. Because of her strong will and sense of independence, Marianna is the family “black sheep” – refusing to be married off to a distant relative in a social arrangement of convenience. Instead Marianna becomes involved with Simone Sole, a younger man who was a servant in the Sirca household in his youth and who is now an outlaw – wanted for banditry. Against the will of her entire family, the lovers plan to marry, but at Marianna’s insistence only after Simone “gets right with the law.” The novel traces the story of these two emarginated lovers through various twists and turns, ending with a typical Deleddan flourish that leaves the reader with a real awareness of Sardinian, social mores, values, attitudes, and tradition.