QUOTE : Although the earliest English translations of Giovanni Verga’s narrative writings had already appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was not until after his death that his reputation as one of the foremost novelists and short-story writers of the modern era was given fresh impetus in the English-speaking world. The writer who championed Verga’s cause was D. H. Lawrence, whose own translation of Verga’s novel, Mastro-don Gesualdo, was first published in New York in 1923, and in London two years later.