INTRODUCTION
IN 1948, when Natalia Ginzburg, then a young editor at the publishing house Einaudi, received a letter from Elsa Morante, whom she’d met briefly once, asking her if she would consider reading the manuscript of her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (Lies and Sorcery), Ginzburg was deeply flattered and accepted immediately. She already sensed that Morante was going to be “the greatest writer of the century.”
When the manuscript arrived, Ginzburg recalled during a 1985 interview, she read the eight hundred pages “in one sitting and I loved it immensely; but I don’t know if I clearly understood its importance and greatness at the time. I only knew that I loved it and that it had been a long time since I’d read anything that filled me with such vitality and joy. It was an extraordinary adventure for me to discover, among those chapter titles that felt so nineteenth-century, that the novel was actually describing our own time and place, our own daily existence with lacerating and painful intensity.”
Italo Calvino’s response was equally enthusiastic: “While at first Lies and Sorcery appears to be an elaborate game of fairy tales, it is actually a serious novel, full of living human beings, and though not obviously a social polemic, the narrative desperately and successfully penetrates to the bone, exposing the painful condition of humanity and its class structures, never forgetting for an instant our present-day situation.”
Morante’s husband, the novelist Alberto Moravia, with whom she had a complicated but devoted relationship, called the book “genius.”
Set vaguely during the belle epoque, Lies and Sorcerychronicles the trials and tribulations of three generations of Sicilian women. The story is narrated by the youngest, Elisa, a recluse whose self-isolation often lures her into a state of semi-madness. In her delirium, she evokes ghosts from the past, all insistent on telling her their often fantastical stories, full of striving self-aggrandizement and petty melodramas. What emerges from these tales of woe is a searing dissection of the vanity of aspirational existence in a stratified society, and a brutal illustration of how desire, disappointment, and trauma are passed down through familial relationships and reinforced by social structures. The characters Elisa draws for us do not evolve or change; their stories allow for no progress or possibility. The novel is a stunning depiction of humanity’s eternal stagnation.
If there is a glimmer of hope, it lies in the act of writing.
Morante began Lies and Sorcery during World War II, part of which Morante and Moravia, both half Jewish, had spent fleeing the Fascists and the Nazis. Though in many significant ways the novel is autobiographical, recalling Morante’s own childhood and family history (Elisa an obvious alter ego of Elsa), the writing style rigorously rejects the spare neorealist sensibility that was prevalent in postwar Italy. Morante claimed that there was nothing real about realism; rather, it promoted a dishonest detachment.
Though Fascism is nowhere overtly considered in the novel, Morante’s narrative is, as the critic Sharon Wood writes, very much about “the moral and intellectual squalor of the petite bourgeoisie, the very class that decades later was to provide a bedrock of support for Fascism.” Describing her exile and flight during the German occupation of Rome, Morante observed, “The people we had to be afraid of were the middle classes, teachers, civil servants—the prejudice was with them, they would have reported us to the Gestapo.” Lies and Sorceryexplores how class-based, patriarchal social, political, and cultural structures—including literary production—mold and fashion the individual imagination, not only enabling movements such as Fascism but making them inevitable, rising and flourishing again and again like fungi.
Morante was an extremely ambitious writer, in the sense that she wanted to change literature itself. In Lies and Sorcery, she challenges the form of the novel by reinventing it. She mimics, melds, and transforms the styles of popular romantic fiction, epic poetry, opera, tragic myth, the epistolary novel, the feuilleton, the picaresque, the heroic adventure novel, the psychological novel, so that her narrative becomes a steamy concoction of new ways of storytelling.
From the first page of Lies and Sorcery, Elisa creates a meta-narrative, directly addressing the reader as she guides us through the mechanics of her storytelling; her goal is to show us that whoever has control of the story, has control over us, both in fiction and in reality; and that, in fact, the line between fiction and reality is itself an illusion. Elisa’s self-professed unreliability alerts us to the notion that the entire enterprise of writing fiction involves manipulation of the reader and the ongoing possibility of betrayal. Morante anticipates the postmodernist belief that truth is in the eye of the beholder and that our perception of our ever-shifting reality is governed by social conformity. Elsa/Elisa challenges readers to question their own assumptions—about gender, class, race, etc.—as well as their own conception of what is real and what is true. The real world, Morante suggests, is just as unstable as the imaginative worlds we build.
In Morante’s work there is a persistent tension created by the idea that mass delusion and self-delusion, which include storytelling and the imagination, are both humanity’s savior and its scourge. Kafka, Freud, and the Brothers Grimm are significant influences for her; and, as Tim Parks has noted, her work presages unique and unclassifiable writers such as Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. But perhaps her greatest influence is Cervantes. The jacket copy of the 1975 Italian edition, which Morante wrote, reads:
The supreme model for Menzogna e sortilegio was Don Quixote, while not forgetting, in a different way, Orlando furioso. In fact, just as those exemplary initiators of modern narrative marked the end point of the ancient chivalric epic, so, in the youthful ambition of Elsa Morante, this first novel of hers aimed to be the last one possible of its kind: to salute the end of the narrative and post-romantic narrative, in other words the bourgeois epic.
(trans. Sharon Wood)
Though Morante isn’t immediately thought of as a funny writer, this satirical novel, in keeping with the comparison to Don Quixote, is frequently hilarious.
By 1948, Morante had published a book of short stories and a children’s book, but she very much hoped that Lies and Sorcery would secure her literary reputation, placing her on an equal footing with Moravia, Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Carlo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the other renowned, predominantly male writers of her circle.
Although some reviewers were perplexed by the novel’s apparent ahistoricism and baroque style, it was generally well received and critically acclaimed. Georg Lukács praised it highly, and it went on to win the prestigious Viareggio Prize. Still, the book never achieved the sales and notoriety Morante craved.
But if Lies and Sorcery didn’t gain commercial success in Italy, Morante was thrilled when her publisher told her of American interest in the translation rights. Her novel, she hoped, would get a new life in another language and in a market with a far greater reach and scope. Exhilarated by the prospect, she signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace & Company without reading the fine print: there was no clause prohibiting editorial cuts, a practice not unusual at the time with works in translation.
In 1951, the novel was published under the title House of Liars, in a translation by Adrienne Foulke, with the editorial assistance of Andrew Chiappe. More than two hundred pages were cut in this version, causing Morante considerable grief, which persisted for the rest of her life. She called the translation a “mutilation,” a “massacre,” “unrecognizable,” and “hurtful.” She wrote letters of protest to Giulio Einaudi, her publisher, in which her distress is plain.
I don’t see how these foreign publishers fail to realize that the weight and complexity of a work, especially books that are not just light reading but written as works of art, do not come about just by chance but are the fruit of long thought and effort, and only the author can know its reasons and its aims. That is why allowing a book to be cut without the permission of the author damages that author morally and materially and thus becomes abuse punishable by law.
(trans. Marco Bardini)
The nature of the cuts in the English translation is seemingly random: a sentence here, a few paragraphs there, several pages extracted from the middle of this chapter or lopped off the end of that one. An entire chapter and a poem are missing. Marco Bardini’s essay “House of Liars: The American Translation of Menzogna e sortilegio” provides an excellent, detailed analysis of just how devastating the cuts were to the integrity of the novel. Even the jacket copy was offensive to Morante, who had always refused, under any circumstances, to be called by her husband’s name: “This long and distinguished novel . . . is the first work of Elsa Morante, who in private life is Mrs. Alberto Moravia.”
The novel made little impact on the American public. Sales were meager and reviews few. Still, Maeve Brennan, in The New Yorker, enthusiastically hailed Morante as “a young Italian writer of extraordinary emotional power.”
A new translation is long overdue. One could speculate on why it took so long, but Elena Ferrante’s championing of the writers who came before her and profoundly influenced her work—including Natalia Ginzburg, Anna Maria Ortese, and Alba de Céspedes—has led to a revival of her mentors’ work both in Italy and internationally. Elsa Morante, whose name rhythmically aligns with the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, surely a nod of homage, had a particularly profound effect on Ferrante’s formation as a writer. Ferrante first read Lies and Sorcery when she was sixteen. “There I discovered what literature can be,” she said in a 2014 interview. “That novel multiplied my ambitions, but also weighed on me, paralyzing me.” In a 2015 interview Ferrante reiterated the novel’s influence: “It’s the book through which I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value.”
A woman’s relationship to writing is at the heart of Lies and Sorcery. From one perspective, the novel is the story of a woman writer trying to find her literary voice against a backdrop of centuries of patriarchal oppression. Elisa composes this epic in the tiny room of her own where she has lived since she arrived at her guardian’s apartment, fifteen years earlier:
The vast majority of my time in this apartment was spent entombed in this small room. Like a contemplative monk, I kept company with my books and myself. I was estranged from all that went on in the nearby rooms; I had no social life or entertainment of any sort; and I was immune to the frivolities indulged in by even the most modest girls. You mustn’t, however, conclude that this lonely room was the refuge of a saint. No; rather, it was the refuge of a witch.
A witch with a pen.
Toward the end of the novel, in a chapter headed “Is the art of romantic seduction simply a matter of shoddy prose?,” Elisa’s mother, Anna, also finds herself a small room in which she can write to her heart’s content—letters to herself from her dead lover—finding some joy in her miserable existence and maintaining through her “shoddy prose” some level of deluded sanity. This chapter, which was cut in its entirety from the English translation, is a small tour de force and thematically crucial to the novel, showing how language, writing, and storytelling have the power to create our reality, for better or for worse.
Elisa’s (and Anna’s) desire and need to create stories, to understand who she is through writing—to, in a sense, write herself into existence—is the impetus behind the novel. Once she has established a Woolfian room of her own, how does she establish her voice outside that room? As a writer, Elisa inherits a set of literary conventions that offers the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast nothing but contempt, and, as a woman, Elisa is among them. She yearns to be part of a literary tradition that rejects her.
Elisa, in her room, with her pen, conjures storytelling powers to make herself heard. But this transgressive act causes her to see herself as she is seen by the patriarchy: as a witch, a gorgon, a medusa, a monster who dares to write her way out of silence, madness, and a living death. Elisa’s struggle is a struggle for the liberation of the imagination. Will she remain “entombed” in her room, tyrannized and controlled by the lies of her “ancestors,” members of the striving middle class who embrace the status quo, or will writing her story in the midst of the lies and her own self-delusion allow her to find her voice and sing?
Many critics perceive in Morante an animosity toward her gender, given her brutal depictions of how women function in the world, and she is often quoted saying that she wished she’d been born male. She would never have called herself a feminist, wary, like many in her generation, of any organized “ism.” But her entire body of work addresses female oppression in radical ways.
Ginzburg remarks in the 1985 interview that she was awed by the fact that Morante sent Lies and Sorcery to her, a young woman, instead of to her more established male colleagues at the publishing house. Often a mentor to other women writers, Morante understood how crucial a collective solidarity of women’s voices is to female empowerment. Despite Elisa’s deep desire to use her imagination to create a world in which she can idealize herself, her family, and her society, Lies and Sorcery itself repudiates any such seduction. “History is a history of fascisms,” Morante wrote, “more or less disguised.” Lies and Sorcery is a novel that rigorously and spectacularly tells the story of the female condition, which is, indeed, the human condition.
—JENNY McPHEE
RESOURCES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baldasso, Franco. Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022.
Bardini, Marco. “House of Liars: The American Translation of Menzogna e sortilegio.” In Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005.
Curaru, Carmela. “Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia.” In The Lives of Wives: Five Literary Marriages. New York: HarperCollins, 2023.
de Ceccatty, René. Elsa Morante: Une vie pour la littérature. Paris: Tallandier, 2018.
Ferrante, Elena. Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2016.
Folli, Anna. MoranteMoravia: Una storia d’amore. Milan: Neri Pozza, 2018.
Garboli, Cesare. “Introduzione.” In Menzogna e sortilegio. Milan: Einaudi, 1994.
Lucamante, Stefania. “The World Must Be the Writer’s Concern: Elsa Morante’s Visions of History.” In Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing: Rethinking Subjectivity, History, and the Power of Art. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015.
Moravia, Alberto, and Alain Elkann. Life of Moravia. Translated by William Weaver. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2000.
Parks, Tim. “The Dark in the Piazza.” The New York Review of Books. February 12, 2009.
Tuck, Lily. Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Wood, Sharon. “Models of Narrative in Menzogna e sortilegio.” In Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This translation was generously supported by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
It is my deep belief that all writing, all translation, is collaboration. I am profoundly grateful to my collaborators across time and space, alive and dead, all those I am aware of and all of those I am not. Edwin Frank and Sara Kramer of New York Review Books are dream editors, their touch magical and transformative. Copy editor Georgia Cool and proofreader Helen Graves continually dazzle me with their extraordinary expertise, patience, and care. Luca Passaleva read the manuscript several times providing invaluable insight and guidance—and we’re still married! Ann Goldstein’s camaraderie in the wonderful world of translation is a gift to me every day. The Passaleva-McPhee clan somehow manage to transform the most challenging endeavors into adventures and I am thrilled to be along with them for the ride.
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