In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a small community’s hike to an old church becomes a sacred portrait of the pastoral in Grazia Deledda’s short story “On the Mountain.” On a cool day portending rain, our protagonist observes and participates in this exhausting climb through the fields, the woods, and finally the mountain. We can almost smell the petrichor and wet leaves of the forest, and see the ashen expanse of the clouds above the moss-covered boulders (and the Mediterranean Sea makes a brief but memorable cameo). But Deledda’s genius is not merely in the exquisite imagery of this journey; it’s also in how her attention to detail manipulates narrative time. One afternoon feels like an arduous and prolonged pilgrimage through the wilderness. Through sensory parallels and contrasts, nature almost becomes an extension of the old temple; and once their day ends, time immediately accelerates as the spent travellers descend the mountain under a newly cleared and vivid sky.
It’s a morning in August. In the vast sky, closed in by the thin broken lines of the mountain chain, turned turquoise in the distance, glide ashen clouds, like herds of fog, which vanish on strips of still limpid azure. We are on a trail that leads to the mountain, before it reaches the woods. During the night, it rained: the earth, humid but mudless, has taken on dark tobacco-colored hues; it is lined in serpent-like channels of flowing rivulets, and rows of stones that seem made of slate.
Great granite boulders, naked, burnt by the sun, end the trail. No trees yet: just huge thickets of mastic, and fields of ferns, their dentelated leaves turned yellow by the hot sun.
The people climb the trail slowly, in groups, or alone.