Moscardino

A small masterpiece, Pea’s lyrical autobiographical novel paints a fiery and intimate portrait of an old man through the bold brushstrokes of his grandson. The passions and tensions between the old eccentric and his brothers play themselves out in mythical sketches before a vivid backdrop of the hills of Lunigiana. Moscardino, the first novella of his tetralogy, Il romanzo di Moscardino, is anarchic and haunting. Pound conducts Pea’s vernacular song, allowing images to flow from the land, the flesh, and beyond.This is just announcin’ that Italy has a writer, and it is some time since I told anybody that ANY country on earth had a writer. Like Confucius [Pea] knocked ’round and done all sorts of jobs. ...What’s it like? Well, if Tom Hardy had been born a lot later, and lived in the hills up back of Lunigiana, which is down along the coast here, and if Hardy hadn’t writ what ole Fordie used to call that ‘sort of small town paper journalese.’ And if a lot of other things, includin’ temperament, had been different... that might have been something like Pea’s writin’—which I repeat is good writing... Writes like a man who could make a good piece of mahogany furniture. — Ezra Pound, 1941 (from his Radio Speeches)

...when the phantasmagoria of Pea's prose momentarily lifts in order to reveal almost Cézanne-like notations of local landscape, we hear the old miglior fabbro turning out sentences as splendid as any in Joyce. —Bookforum

Moscardino is a lovely book, printed and bound with grace by Archipelago. —Ralph: Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the HumanitiesNovelist, poet, and playwright Enrico Pea (1881–1958) spent his youth traveling. He lived for years in Alexandria, where he struck up a friendship with Ungaretti. He published Moscardino in 1922.
Translator: Ezra Pound’s work as a translator stretched from Confucius and Li Po to the troubadour poets to Paul Morand and Enrico Pea. His interest in "regionalism" most likely attracted him to the work of Pea.The Signora Pellegrina went into mourning at once, she put on black silk, put a black hem on her nightgowns, lowered the blinds, and lit a lamp on the wide linen-cupboard.
She was of high lineage and had come in for the shares of two sisters who had gone into convents and passed away early, but her husband had been a poor hand at guiding the domestic economy and had left little either of her good heritage or of his own. He had been honorary physician to the Confraternity of the Misericordia, and High Chamberlain of the Church of San Lorenzo; he had had, therefore, a magnificent funeral.
The Signora Pellegrina showed no signs of grief at his passing. She said: Well out of it; you are.
Then she assembled her three sons and called Cleofe, the general servant who had come from the mountains, to act as witness:
You are all three grown men.
Your progenitors are no longer. Divide what is left.
The clothes I have on are my own. Don’t grumble if I wear silk.
After that she forgot to talk, as if turned mute.
My grandfather was the youngest of the Signora’s three sons.