Lettere a Marta Abba

Italian edition In spring 1994, Princeton University Press announced its publication of the English-language edition of Luigi Pirandello's letters to Marta Abba, a young actress who in the last years of the playwright's life became his confidante, inspiring muse, artistic collaborator, and, to his profound despair, the unattainable object of his love. Written between 1925 and 1936, these powerful and moving letters to Abba are the only source that reveals the true story behind the hopeless passion that had secretly consumed Pirandello until his death. Presenting the first translation of these writings in any language, the English edition contains a selection of 164 letters. The press now offers the Italian-language edition, which comprises 552 letters, nearly the complete set of the known documentation in the original language. The Italian volume contains a useful scholarly apparatus and appears in a new easy-to-read format. The hundreds of letters Pirandello wrote to Abba during these years reward the reader with the unique experience of living in intimacy with a profound poet of human pain. They are also filled with glimpses of this major artistic personality at some of his most distinctive moments--such as the awarding of the Nobel Prize and his meetings with Mussolini. The letters, however, are foremost an authentic confession of Pirandello, without the mask of his art, telling the story of his real-life tragedy. Benito Ortolani is Professor of Theatre at Brooklyn College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the founder and editor of the yearly International Bibliography of Theatre, and the author of The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (Brill/Princeton).