The Italian reading room
Luigi Pirandello
Born in Agrigento in 1867; died in Rome in 1936; awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. Best known for his plays, he wrote short stories all his life and gathered them as «Novelle per un anno». «La giara» dates from 1909.
Pirandello’s novella of 1909: don Lollò Zirafa’s great new jar is found broken, and Zi’ Dima the mender seals himself inside it with his miraculous putty.
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences | Dictionary words | Words met once |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| La giara | The Oil Jar | 3153 | 309 | 813 | 56% |
The end of the shelf
3,153 running words in 309 sentences, from 813 distinct dictionary words. It is the longest tale on the Italian shelf, and in the room's reading order it is the last step and the dearest: it asks 356 dictionary words the seven tales before it did not. Of its 813 words, 366 appear in no other author's tale here.
That is not a reason to avoid it; it is a reason to come to it last. The reading order prices every step, and by the time a reader reaches this one they hold 1,989 dictionary words counting its own.
A Sicilian farm's own words
The tale is set on a farm in Sicily at the olive harvest, and it speaks like one. 7 of its dictionary words carry the room's «Sicilian» tag. These are they, with the room's own glosses:
| Word | The room's gloss |
|---|---|
| don | Don, title for a gentleman (Sicilian) (n., m.) |
| favata | sowing of broad beans, bean crop (Sicilian) (n., f.) |
| incignare | to use for the first time, to break in (Sicilian) (v.) |
| onza | onza, old Sicilian gold coin (Sicilian) (n., f.) |
| palmento | wine-press shed (Sicilian) (n., m.) |
| scapare | scaparsi — to rack one’s brains (Sicilian) (v.) |
| zio | uncle; zi’ — honorific for an old man (Sicilian) (n., m.) |
Sentences, and the past tense
For all its vocabulary the tale is not long-winded: 10.2 words a sentence, fewer than Collodi's 15.4 or De Amicis's 15.2. It is told, like everything on this shelf, in the passato remoto: counting only forms that can be nothing else — «fu», «furono», «ebbe», «ebbero», and the «-ò» of verbs in «-are» — it has at least 67, about 21.2 in every thousand words.
Reading him in the original
Every word is glossed where it stands — the Sicilian ones too — and an English line sits under each sentence until you ask for it. «La giara» is part of the library, at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house; its page carries its opening sentence with its English. «Cappuccetto Rosso» is free, entire, and needs no account, if you would rather read the room before you buy it.
A note on the printing
The text is set from the Bemporad printing of 1928, which is modern Italian. Where a word is printed in a form a modern dictionary files differently — the «j» of an older spelling, say — today's spelling is given beside it, and the ledger lists every such form.
All eight Italian tales · Carlo Collodi · Luigi Capuana · Edmondo De Amicis · the shelf, counted