‘The Long Crossing’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni

As far as deceptions go, the one described in this story is perhaps among the most trivial. It’s a classic tale: people desperate to escape poverty entrust their lives to a smuggler. Having paid him for a passage from Sicily to America, after eleven torturous days on a boat, they are put ashore. “Are you sure it isn’t some other place?” one of them asks – not because the landscape looks wrong, but simply because the long crossing was so incomprehensible: “neither roads nor even tracks across the sea…it was left to the Almighty to steer the ship without error between sky and water to its destination”.

Did the travellers ever arrive? In a sense, they did.

Originally published in Italian as ‘Il lungo viaggio’, 1973. Collected in The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2014

‘Philology’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni

A Sciascia paperback, The Wine-Dark Sea turned up in my dad’s bookshop a decade or so ago, among the boxes salvaged from a house clearance in the part of France where my dad now lives. The Homeric title and Sicilian setting were enough to get me to start leafing through. There are few greater pleasures in reading, in the search for literature in whatever new form it might be hiding, than the bolt from the blue, of picking up something unknown and realising, after a few pages, then a few more, this is it. In Sciascia, the dark force that lurks behind language has a material, even brutal presence. His stories, even the ones without any violence, are like crimes in which the satisfaction offered by successful detection is precluded from the outset.

“‘Do you think it comes from the Arabic?’
‘Very likely, my friend, very likely…But the study of words is far from being an exact science.’”

In ‘Philology’, two men discuss the origins of the word mafia. It quickly becomes clear than one is a mafia boss and the other his associate. I say nothing more, for fear of giving too much away. Everyone in Sciascia’s fiction knows when to shut up, or should do.

First published as part of the collection Il mare colore del vino, Adelphi, 1973; English translation The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2001

‘The Long Voyage’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

The summer holidays, travel for some across the sea, always makes me think of Sciascia’s ‘The Long Voyage’. Irony delivered without sentimentality. The money to be made out of other people’s dreams, the power of those dreams to drive thousands of people from their home to strange lands, in this case post-war America, the land of Cockaigne. Bristling with tall and wild tales of of the riches to be found there. A loss of love for home, affection for it starved out of you. The tragedy of this. The success stories that filter back from overseas to fuel those dreams, and more besides. If only we could here the voices of today’s migrants with such clarity, such simple storytelling, the universal and timeless motivation, what it is to be human, to want better, no matter what, to survive, but all of this wrapped up as human comedy. Which it is, until it isn’t.

In an Italian mountain village I once met an old woman who has never seen the sea despite living less than 30 kilometres from it. Nothing ever good comes from it she told me. I know what it look like, I’ve seen the Titanic, she said. Which probably explains her opinion. Also the fact that both her sons disappeared into America, letters home drying up in the years before they both died there.

Dreams bind us, yet we grope around in the dark pursuing them. Others prey on us for money. Desperate people both.

‘The Long Journey’ is a small tragedy, but sits alongside, is sibling to much bigger ones, and the summer reminds me of this story which gives me pause, as I pack my bags for my holidays.

First published as ‘Il lungo viaggio’ in L’Unità, October 1962. First published in English translation in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, Penguin, 2019) – picked by Wayne Holloway. Wayne is a writer/director living in London. He has published two novels, Bindlestiff and Our Struggle, both with Influx Press. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.