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    The Professor and the Siren
    The Professor and the Siren
    The Professor and the Siren
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    The Professor and the Siren

    By Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa and Marina Warner

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    An NYRB Classics Original

    In the last two years of his life, the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote not only the internationally celebrated novel The Leopard but also three shorter pieces of fiction, brought together here in a new translation.

    “The Professor and the Siren,” like The Leopard, meditates on the past and the passage of time, and also on the relationship between erotic love and learning. Professor La Ciura is one of the world’s most distinguished Hellenists; his knowledge, however, came at the cost of a loss that has haunted him for his entire life. This Lampedusa’s final masterpiece, is accompanied here by the parable “Joy and the Law” and “The Blind Kittens,” a story originally conceived as the first chapter of a followup to The Leopard.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNYRB Classics
    Release dateJun 17, 2014
    ISBN9781590177426
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      Book preview

      The Professor and the Siren - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

      GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA (1896–1957) was a Sicilian nobleman, the Duke of Palma, and the last Prince of Lampedusa. He was born in Palermo to an aristocratic family whose fortunes began to decline in the 1800s with the passage of laws breaking up large Sicilian estates. Lampedusa served as an Italian artillery officer during World War I and was captured by the Austrians and held briefly in a prison camp in Hungary. He remained in the Italian military until 1921 and spent the interwar years traveling through Europe and attempting to restore the family estate. During World War II, the Tomasi palace in Palermo was bombed and looted by Allied troops. In the last two years of his life, Lampedusa began writing and produced his great historical novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), as well as several short literary works, none of which were published during his lifetime. Two years after Lampedusa’s death, The Leopard won the Strega Prize and became a worldwide best seller.

      STEPHEN TWILLEY is the managing editor of Public Culture and Public Books. His translations from the Italian include Francesco Pacifico’s The Story of My Purity and Marina Mander’s The First True Lie.

      MARINA WARNER’s studies of religion, mythology, and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde, and No Go the Bogeyman. In 2013 she co-edited Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights. 

      THE PROFESSOR AND THE SIREN

      GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA

      Translated from the Italian by

      STEPHEN TWILLEY

      Introduction by

      MARINA WARNER

      NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

      New York

      THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

      PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

      435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

      www.nyrb.com

      Copyright © 1961 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan

      Translation copyright © 2014 by Stephen Twilley

      Introduction copyright © 2014 by Marina Warner

      All rights reserved.

      The stories in this volume were originally published in Italian in the volume I racconti, published in June 1961 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan.

      Cover image: A kouros, c.570 b.c.; Louvre / B. de Sollier & P. Muxel / The Bridgeman Art Library

      Cover design: Katy Homans

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

      Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 1896–1957, author.

      [Short stories. Selections. English]

      The Professor and the Siren / Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa ; translated by Stephen Twilley ; introduction by Marina Warner.

      pages cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)

      ISBN 978-1-59017-719-8 (paperback)

      I. Twilley, Stephen, translator. II. Title.

      PQ4843.O53A2 2014

      853'.914—dc23

      2013050864

      ISBN 978-1-59017-742-6

      v1.0

      For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

      Contents

      Biographical Notes

      Title page

      Copyright and More Information

      Introduction

      THE PROFESSOR AND THE SIREN

      JOY AND THE LAW

      THE BLIND KITTENS

      INTRODUCTION

      By the side of the path around the circular, volcanic crater of Lake Pergusa, near the town of Enna in the center of Sicily, a carved stone marks the spot where Proserpina, the goddess of the spring, was seized and carried off by Pluto into the underworld. "Qui, in questo luogo, proclaims the inscription. Proserpina fù rapita." This is the very place:

      ...that fair field

      Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs

      Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis

      Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

      To seek her through the world.

      (Milton, Paradise Lost, IV)

      I was giving a lecture in Palermo in 2011 and asked to see the entrance to Hades. My hosts from the university kindly drove me; it was early summer, the lush undergrowth was starred with flowers, and the tapestry of orchids, campion, arum, acanthus, clover, wild hyacinth, thyme, and marjoram was still green tender and damp. Next to the monument I found another sign, which pointed beyond the chain-link fence toward the cave from which the god issued forth in his chariot. Again, the use of the past historic declared the event’s definite reality. In a tangle of bushes and fruit trees, some rocks were visible, but the mouth opening on the infernal regions now stands in private grounds.

      Ovid tells us, in his Metamorphoses, that the young girls who were gathering flowers with Proserpina that fatal day were turned into the Sirens—the bird-bodied golden-feathered singers with female faces of the Homeric tradition—and then went wandering about over land and sea, crying out in search of their vanished playmate. In The Professor and the Siren, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, picks up these echoes when he evokes a passionate love affair unfolding by the sea in the ferocious heat of the dog days in 1887. However, in this late story, which was written in January 1957, a few months before his death, Lampedusa gives his immortal heroine the body of a fish from the waist down; in this he is following the more familiar northern folklore tradition of fish-tailed mermaids; of Mélusine, seal women or selkies; and of water spirits, called undines by the alchemist and philosopher Paracelsus. But both species share the special charm of an irresistible voice. In the case of Lampedusa’s mermaid, hers is a bit guttural, husky, resounding with countless harmonics; behind the words could be discerned the sluggish undertow of summer seas, the whisper of receding beach foam, the wind passing over lunar tides. The song of the Sirens...does not exist; the music that cannot be escaped is their voice alone.

      The Professor and the Siren is the only instance of fantastic fiction in Lampedusa’s scanty oeuvre, but enigmatic and brief as it is, it condenses many elements from both local and more distant folklore into a deeply strange, sometimes disturbing fable; in the manner of Giovanni Boccaccio and of The Thousand and One Nights, the tale encloses a visionary and magical adventure inside a naturalistic, quotidian frame story. In the outer frame, Paolo Corbera, a young journalist living a bit on the wild side, who comes from the same aristocratic Sicilian family—the Salina—as Don Fabrizio, the hero of Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, meets an aged fellow countryman in a dingy café in Turin in 1938. He discovers the old man is a renowned classicist and senator, Rosario La Ciura, a waspish misanthrope who is contemptuous of everything and everyone around him in the modern world. But the younger man is attracted by a quality of mystery and yearning

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