The Reprisal by Laudomia Bonanni
Sara Teardo (Princeton University), Susan Stewart (Princeton University) and Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University) present the writer Laudomia Bonanni (1907 – 2002) and her posthumous novel, La rappresaglia, recently translated into English by Sara Teardo and Susan Stewart (The Reprisal, University of Chicago Press 2013).
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The Reprisal
In the cold, bitter winter of 1943, the hostile German army occupies central and northern Italy, and groups of partisans flee to the mountains waging a guerrilla war against the former ally and their Fascist collaborators. In a small village in Abruzzo, a band of Fascist misfits fearing attacks from their fellow villagers, flees to an abandoned monastery, where they intend to wait for “the dust to settle.” The first day, they capture a woman wandering in the woods and hiding weapons on the pack of her donkey – weapons probably destined to partisans. As they soon find out, the woman, nicknamed La Rossa, is in the last stages of her pregnancy. Tried as an enemy by an improvised war tribunal and accused without decisive proofs, the woman is convicted and sentenced to be executed after her child has been born. La Rossa proves to be a difficult prisoner, chastising her custodians and haughtily retorting all their comments. Her only interlocutor is a young seminarian who visits the monastery one day and decides to stay in an attempt to help and convince the woman to save her soul. As days pass, tension amounts among the characters and relationships grow stronger. When Christmas arrives, the men are shown at their most human. But La Rossa’s labors take everybody back to reality. Another trial is requested before the death sentence is confirmed and carried out. This tragic, absurd and ill-fated event will leave an indelible mark in everyone’s life.
ONLINE: neh.gov
Laudomia Bonanni
Laudomia Bonanni was born on December 8th, 1907 in L’Aquila, and died in Rome in 2002. Trained as a schoolteacher, like her mother (who named her Laudomia after a character in a historical novel by Massimo D’Azeglio), at the age of seventeen she began to work in various villages in the mountains of her native Abruzzo region. There, she was first exposed to the harshness and isolation of rural life, and experienced the impact of the struggle against contingency on children; her work would eventually be a testimony of that experience. Her first publications were in the field of children’s literature. For instance, the protagonist of her 1939 colonial novel, Men, avventura al Nuovo Fiore, is a young girl.
After joining the fascist party, she was appointed to the Juvenile Court in L’Aquila in 1938. Her initial enthusiasm for the Fascist party was due to the fact that the fascist government implemented a much needed system of general education. However, during the war she moved away from Fascism and towards the so called “reformist socialism”.
She worked in the juvenile justice system as a lay judge for more than twenty years, and published a number of articles about this intense experience.
In 1948, when she was forty, her short stories Il fosso (The Ditch) and Il mostro (The Monster) were awarded the “Amici della Domenica” prize. The following year, they were printed with two other stories in the volume Il fosso, by the important publishing house Mondadori, and the small collection of stories was highly praised by critics. In 1954, another collection was released, Palma e sorelle (Palma and her sisters), followed in 1960 and 1964 by two novels, L’imputata (The Accused) and L’adultera (The Adulteress), both awarded literary prizes.
Bonanni retired from teaching in 1966 and moved to Rome to be closer to the literary élite, in the pursuit of a life devoted to writing. But the lack of success and critical attention progressively worsened her acute depression and she temporarily withdrew from the literary scene. After this hiatus, she published a collection of essays in 1974, Vietato ai minori (Forbidden for the Under-aged), stemming from her service in the Juvenile Court, and in 1977 another collection of stories, Città del tabacco (Tobacco City). In 1979 and 1982, her last two novels appeared, Il bambino di pietra (The Stone Baby) and Le droghe (The Drugs), which did not get the attention she hoped for. She discontinued her collaboration with newspapers and magazines and in 1985 when her publisher, Bompiani, asked her to revise her last manuscript, La rappresaglia (The Reprisal), she refused and went into a prolonged seclusion until her death in 2002. La rappresaglia has since been edited by Carlo De Matteis and printed posthumously in 2003 (L’Aquila, Textus publisher).
Sara Teardo
Sara Teardo teaches Italian at Princeton University. A graduate of Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari, Italy, and Rutgers University, she is a specialist of Italian contemporary literature with focus on the role of women on the cultural scene in the aftermath of World War II. In this period, more than ever before, women’s presence in Italian literature has been massive. They were both target of a growing production of popular genres (romance novels, fotoromanzi, women’s magazines), and active protagonists of the post-Fascist literary rebirth. Sara Teardo’s studies have highlighted the many intersections between “high” and “low” literature, looking at how the female audience was incorporated into the new social and historical context.
Susan Stewart
Susan Stewart is a poet and critic and Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also directs the Society of Fellows in Liberal Arts. Her most recent books of poems are Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and appeared in Italian translation in 2006, and Red Rover, which appeared in Italian with Jaca Books in 2008. She is also the translator of Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini and co-translator of Milo De Angelis’s Theme of Farewell and After-Poems. Her many books of criticism include The Poet’s Freedom, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, and On Longing. A former MacArthur Fellow, Stewart has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Laura Benedetti
Laura Benedetti is the Chair of the Italian Department at Georgetown University. She graduated from the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and holds a Masters from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Georgetown as the first Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture she taught for eight years at Harvard, where she became the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities.
Laura Benedetti is the author of over sixty articles, encyclopedia entries and reviews which span seven hundred years, from Boccaccio to Elena Ferrante. From 2000 to 2010 she wrote the annual entry on Italian literature for the Encyclopedia Britannica Year in Review, highlighting Italy’s most recent narrative and poetic production. She has also published the edition of Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s 1554 Discorso dei romanzi (with Enrico Musacchio and Giuseppe Monorchio), a monograph on Torquato Tasso (La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la Gerusalemme Liberata), the proceedings of two conferences (Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, with Julia Hairston and Silvia Ross) and The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in 20th-Century Italy, which won the 2008 Flaiano International Prize. Her translation of Lucrezia Marinella’s Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please, complete with an introduction and notes, was published in 2012 as part of the series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe,” making this important volume available to the public for the first time after its original edition in 1645.
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