Translation: Extract of Malaria by Giovanni Verga

Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Malaria, 1883

This is Bora Mici's original translation of the beginning of the short story Malaria by Giovanni Verga. Verga was a proponent and practitioner of Verismo, or Italian Naturalism, a 19th century literary movement, which often focused on the lives of the poor and how their character and habits were inadvertently informed and determined by the environment in which they grew up or lived. Naturalist authors used a positivist sociological framework in order to bring to light the close relationship between the individual and society. Verga was also very interested in the relationship between the individual and the natural environment since he often wrote about rural settings. This particular passage shows how Sicilian farmers live and breathe the malaria that haunts their land and daily existence. 

Malaria extract, by Giovanni Verga

And you think you can touch it with your hands—like the replete land that smokes there, everywhere, all around the mountains that encircle it, from Agnone to Mongibello with its snowcaps—stagnant in the plain, like the sweltering July heat. The scorching sun and the pale moon are born and die there, and the Pleiades, that seem to navigate in an evaporating sea, and the birds and the white daisies of spring, and the burnt summer; and the ducks pass by in long, dark rows through the overcast autumn, and the river shimmers as if it were metallic, between wide, abandoned banks, white, threadbare and pebble-strewn; and at the bottom, Lake Lentini, like a pond, with its flat shores, without a single tree, without a boat, smooth and still. The rare oxen, chest-deep in mud, begrudgingly go to pasture on the pebbly riverbed in their hirsute hides. When the herd’s sad bell rings, the yellow wagtails fly away in the silence. They too are silent. And the shepherd himself, who is also a feverish yellow and white from the dust, blinks for a second with his swollen eyelids, lifting his head in the shadows of the dry reeds.

It’s that the malaria seeps into your bones through the bread you eat, and when you open your mouth to speak as you are walking along the suffocating dusty, sunny roads, and your knees give, or you let yourself fall onto the saddle of your trudging mule with your head leaning forward. Lentini, Francofonte and Paterno try in vain to clamber onto the first few hills, like lost sheep scurrying from the plane, and to line themselves with orange trees, vines and evergreen vegetable gardens; the malaria gets hold of the inhabitants on the empty streets and nails them to the doorways of their houses, whose plaster is crumbling under the sun. They feverishly shiver there under their greatcoats and the blankets thrown over their shoulders.

Down there in the plain, the houses are rare and melancholy looking, along the sun-worn streets, standing between two piles of smoking fertilizer, leaning against the faltering make-do shelter, where the horses are waiting for their next shift with listless eyes in front of empty troughs.—Or you can find it on the lake’s shore, where the inn’s decrepit wooden sign hangs on the doorway, in the large, sad, empty rooms, and the innkeeper who snoozes on the threshold with his head bound in a handkerchief, looking out, every time he wakes up, for whether a thirsty passenger is arriving. Or on the white wooden boxes, topped off by four spindly and gray eucalyptuses like feathers, along the railroad tracks that split the plain into two, as if with an ax, where the machine flies by, whistling like the autumn wind, and fiery sparks glow at night. —Or finally, here and there, on the perimeter of the plots, marked by a recently cut shaft, and the rooftops shored up from the outside, the broken shutters, in front of the crumbling barn, in the shadow of the tall straw piles where the chickens sleep with their heads under their wings, and a donkey lets his head fall with his mouth still full of straw, and a dog lifts up his head suspiciously, and hoarsely barks at the stone that is detaching from the plaster; from the lizard that crawls, to the leaf that shakes in the still countryside.

In the evening, as soon as the sun goes down, dried up men appear in the doorways under poor straw hats and in wide canvas underpants, yawning and stretching their arms; and half-naked women with dark shoulders, breastfeeding pale and already exhausted children. Who knows how they will become dark and tall, and how they will roll around in the grass when winter returns, and the courtyard turns green once again, and the blue sky, and all around, the countryside smiles under the sun. And who knows where they are and why all those people rush to the lonely small churches for Mass on Sunday, surrounded by the hedgerows of prickly pears, ten miles around, as far as one can hear the broken bell ring in the never-ending plain. However, God has also blessed this land of malaria. In June, the ears fall to the ground under their weight, and as the plowshare turns the soil in November, the furrows smoke as if they had blood in their veins. So it is only natural that those who plant and harvest fall to the ground like mature ears because God has said: “You must earn the bread you eat with your own sweat.” So that when the feverish sweat leaves someone stiff on their cornhusk mat, and there’s no longer any need for sulfate or eucalyptus tea, they load them onto the hay cart, or across a donkey saddle, or on a ladder, whatever works, with a sack on their face, and they take them into the little solitary church, under the prickly pears with their thorns, but whose fruits no one therefore eats. The women cry in a circle, and the men look on while smoking.