Stories for a Year is a new digital project building the first complete English translation of Luigi Pirandello’s 244 short stories. While various stories have been published in English in journals, anthologies, and volumes of selected stories, nearly half of Pirandello’s short stories have never been translated into English at all. In addition, most of those that have been previously published are now out of print and difficult to locate. To this end, the Editors of Stories for a Year, Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, seek proposals from translators for new renditions of Pirandello’s stories in English. Our digital edition uses a collaborative model, and the editors will work with translators to identify stories that are “available” for translation – that is, stories that have not already been translated and that are not already “in the works” by another translator collaborating with our project.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1934, Pirandello was a global phenomenon: he traveled the world staging plays, his works have been widely translated and published in European languages but also far beyond, and his famous critical essay On Humor has become a mainstay of the theoretical imagination of modernism. Throughout his career Pirandello was engaged in writing short stories, aiming to craft one for every day of the year. They span a wide range of themes, addressing issues like the socioeconomic disparities in Sicily and the European south, gender, and typical modernist questions of identity, relativity, and the existential quandaries of modern life. They have engaged readers across contexts and given rise to numerous creative responses, including multiple filmed adaptations, such as the Taviani brothers’ award-winning masterpiece, Kaos. Thus, while the author’s death cut his project short of its initial goal, his corpus of stories has nevertheless been a source of fascination and inspiration ever since. Today, the time is ripe for a long-overdue project to establish a complete translation and scholarly edition of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year, bringing them to an English-language audience as Pirandello intended them to be available to his own readers.

We seek expressions of interest from any qualified translator with an desire to contribute to this growing online collection of Pirandello’s work. All translations will be assessed in a process of editorial review, but we request prospective translators contact us in advance. We are working to avoid duplicate translations of stories in an effort to more efficiently cover the whole span of Pirandello’s vast short story corpus, and we will work with translators to help identify stories in need of translation and to ensure multiple translators do not work on the same stories.

Translation proposals accepted on a rolling basis. Email the Editors at: pirandellointranslation@gmail.com