Giorgio Bassani

THE SMELL OF HAY

Translated by Jamie McKendrick

With an Introduction by Ali Smith

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published as L’odore del fieno 1972
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2014

Copyright © Giorgio Bassani, 1980
Translation copyright © Jamie McKendrick, 2014
Introduction © Ali Smith, 2014

Cover photograph © akg-images/ullstein bild/Max Ehlert.

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-93882-0

Contents

Introduction

Two Fables

Further News of Bruno Lattes

Ravenna

Les Neiges d’Antan

Three Apologues

Down There, at the End of the Corridor

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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

THE SMELL OF HAY

Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) was an Italian poet, novelist and editor. The Smell of Hay is the last in a series of six works collected together as Il romanzo di Ferrara. Other works in the cycle include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which received the Viareggio Prize and inspired an Academy Award-winning film adaptation by Vittorio de Sica, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Within the Walls (originally published as Five Stories of Ferrara), which won the Strega Prize.

Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator. His translations of Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles are already available as Penguin Modern Classics, and he is in the process of translating the rest of the Romanzo di Ferrara cycle anew.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There But For The, Artful and How to be Both.