Goliarda Sapienza
The Art of Joy
Foreword. The Long Journey of The Art of Joy
If it’s true that every book has a destiny, then I myself certainly played a part in that of The Art of Joy, from the time I met Goliarda in 1975 through the editing of the novel that Goliarda delegated entirely to me. Her sudden death in 1996 subsequently bound me inextricably to that destiny since at that point, the responsibility of letting Modesta’s story — completed years earlier in 1976 — live or die was mine alone. Repeatedly rejected by major publishers in its day, the manuscript lay for decades in a chest in my office, awaiting more fortunate times. Those times never came. Until Goliarda died.
Then I had a thousand copies of The Art of Joy published at my own expense under the imprint of Stampa Alternativa. The year was 1998. Copies were sent to a number of critics and writers. The book was passed over in silence. I remember going each day to a Feltrinelli bookstore which kept two copies of the novel behind some other volumes high on a shelf hidden behind a column. Each time I asked myself: who on earth is going to buy it? One day I noticed that one of the copies was missing. I don’t know what I would have given to know the identity of that one lone buyer. After a time the other copy disappeared as well. It was astounding.
Three years went by and nothing more happened. Then, thanks to the enthusiastic interest of Loredana Rotondo, director of Rai Tre, a programme about Goliarda was created as part of the series Vuoti di memoria (Memory Lapses).
Entitled ‘Goliarda Sapienza, the Art of Living’, it was a melancholy but evocative production full of numerous testimonials, including mine. It was aired more than once, a rare occurrence, though scheduled at times that as usual were impractical.
The show was not in vain. It served to arouse the interest of the all-powerful distributors, ever sensitive to media support, who pushed the publisher Stampa Alternativa for a more sizeable reprint, which came out in 2003. This time a certain interest began to develop, more to do with morality issues than those of a strictly literary nature; this has always been the case with the critical fortunes of Goliarda’s work.
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Outside of Italy, The Art of Joy enjoyed a decidedly better fate. When the 1998 edition came out, I gave the novel to a young literary agent who dealt with German-speaking countries. She aroused the interest of Waltraud Schwarze in Frankfurt, who had a resourceful way of discovering little-known texts. The book thus came to be published in Berlin by Aufbau-Verlag. Or at least the first part came out: in Germany the volume was divided into two parts. But Waltraud Schwarze had meanwhile telephoned Viviane Hamy in Paris, an apprentice at Robert Laffont, a publisher known to be daring, recommending that she read a novel paru en Italie en 1998 dans une petite maison d’édition que personne ne connaît. Le texte est un peu bizarre, il fait 600 pages. Il va coûter une fortune en traduction, il y a peu de chance pour qu’il y ait plus de personnes qui le lise à l’étranger qu’en Italie, mais c’est vraiment merveilleux. That is, the text is a bit unusual, and it’s 600 pages. It will cost a fortune to translate, but it is really marvellous.
