Editors’ Note to the 1937 Omnibus Edition of Stories for a Year

How to cite this work:

Luigi Pirandello. “Editors’ Note to the 1937 Omnibus Edition of Stories for a Year.”  Translated by Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025. [1]

The collection of short stories by Luigi Pirandello was given the title Short Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) by the Author himself. With this title he had already declared his intention to offer the reader “a short story a day, for a whole year.” Now, even if there will never be 365 stories; even if, of the twenty-four volumes that had originally been planned for the work, no more than the first fifteen could be published; this title, Short Stories for a Year, will remain as it is, by the express wish of the Author. He trusted it would seem legitimate to anyone who, not ill-disposed, might consider that the work had been carried on as far as his strength had allowed, with the desire to fully keep his promise.

That said, let us highlight the merits of this most recent edition, which are chiefly these: to gather into just two dense and clearly printed volumes not only all the stories contained in the fifteen volumes of the standard edition, but all the stories written by Luigi Pirandello; and to present them, for the most part, once more and definitively revised by the Author himself.

For the most part, but unfortunately not entirely, for even this work of revision, to which the Author had lately dedicated himself, could not be completed all the way to the end. But already five volumes (in fact seven, counting Berecche and the War and the last one, A Single Day, which Pirandello would not have revised any further) had undergone this new, careful and affectionate scrutiny of his, not without significant changes, that often went beyond the merely formal or stylistic.

To make the nature of the revisions evident, each of the two volumes in this present edition includes, as an Appendix, an account of the most noteworthy variants.

The first contains as many as eight of the original volumes, three of which—A Prancing Horse, The Lonely Man, and The Fly—were definitively revised (the others being: Black Shawl, Naked Life, In Silence, All Three, and From Nose to Sky).

The second, currently in preparation, will contain the remaining seven volumes, two of which—Donna Mimma and The Trip—were revised. In addition, it will include a supplement of more than twenty short stories published in periodicals or in the early collections issued by the Author and later never reprinted by him. All of these are extremely interesting from a historical point of view, and quite a few are also interesting for other reasons as well.