Teverino

A New Translation

By: George Sand

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Two French travelers — a couple organized, as couples of their class and time were organized, around the careful maintenance of a social position that requires continuous management — are moving through the Italian landscape when they encounter Teverino. He is young, Italian, a singer of natural gifts entirely uncultivated by formal education, a wanderer for whom property and its obligations do not exist and to whom the question of social position is simply irrelevant. He has nothing. He owes nothing to the system that their position requires them to sustain. He moves through the Roman Campagna with the ease of someone for whom the landscape is home in the way that a life organized around ownership has never quite managed to make anywhere home.

George Sand published Teverino in 1845 — between the political novels of the early 1840s and the pastoral trilogy that would follow the failed revolution of 1848 — and it is the purest of her many versions of the argument she had been making since Indiana: that the human reality of someone excluded from the social order's categories of worth is more serious and more interesting than the social order's reasons for excluding them. Teverino is in the tradition of the Romantic natural man, but Sand renders him with the honesty of a writer who had no interest in idealization: his freedom is real and costs him something real, is not the innocence of a life without difficulty but the specific freedom of someone whose exclusion from the social world is also his liberation from its demands.

The woman's response to him — the recognition of something in his existence that her organized life does not contain and cannot provide — is handled with the psychological precision that Sand's best fiction always brought to the inner life of women in constraint. It is not simply attraction. It is the encounter with a form of being that answers something she has not previously known she was asking.

Set in the Italian landscape that the French Romantic imagination had always associated with the possibility of a different life, rendered with Sand's characteristic attention to the relationship between place and human freedom — and concentrated in the novella form with the compression that the argument, here, exactly requires.

The natural man in the landscape that made him. The woman who recognizes what she sees. The question the recognition leaves open.