Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Grazia Deledda’s “Il cane”
Translated by John Pope
John Pope is a Paris-based writer and translator. He has
published translations of Miguel de Unamuno, David Rosenmann-
Taub, and Bruno Doucey, and is currently working on a novel.
Grazia Deledda was born in Nuoro, on the island of Sardinia,
in 1871. She began writing poetry and short stories while
still a child, and published her first work at age nineteen. Her
apprenticeship continued until her early thirties, when she wrote
Elias Portolu, the first of the series of novels that brought her fame.
On the strength of books such as Racconti Sardi (Sardinian Tales),
Canne al Vento (Reeds in the Wind), and Cenere (Ashes), she won
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926. At her death in Rome in 1936,
she had published several collections of short stories, a translation
of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet into Italian, and some forty novels.
In Il Cane (The Dog), the final story of Deledda’s collection Il
flauto nel bosco (The Flute in the Woods, 1923), the narrator finds
a dog, takes a short walk with it by the sea, hopes to keep it, then
realizes it will not come home with her. Only at the end does she
fully grasp that she’s been deluding herself, projecting her hopes
and fears on both the dog and nature. With this apparently innocuous
incident, Deledda draws an indelible portrait of our tendency
to deform what we experience and to believe our own inventions.