La storia di Malta è spesso caratterizzata dai suoi rapporti con le forze politiche e culturali di altri paesi. Nei primi sessanta anni dell’Ottocento l’isola si era trasformata in una specie di estensione della vicina Italia, un paese con cui Malta ha mantenuto intimi contatti in vari campi per vari secoli. Entro questi limiti viene valutata l’accoglienza mostrata dai maltesi nei confronti dei numerosi esuli italiani, tra cui Francesco Crispi. La loro attività giornalistica e letteraria, sempre ispirata agli ideali del Risorgimento, ha influito molto sulla coscienza maltese, alla fine pronta anche essa a impegnarsi in una lotta a favore dei suoi diritti nazionali. Il riconoscimento del maltese come lingua di cultura, il rapido sviluppo di una letteratura in maltese e la nascita dei primi gruppi politici sono aspetti dell’influenza dello spirito risorgimentale su Malta. Questo saggio cerca di illustrare la continuità tra storia italiana e storia maltese in un periodo di grande importanza per i due paesi, mettendo in evidenza l’efficacia dell’attività letteraria svolta come impegno politico.
Il saggio prende in esame la figura del Virgilio di Dante secondo l’interpretazione offerta da uno dei critici danteschi più autorevoli del nostro tempo: Robert Hollander, che nello studio Il Virgilio dantesco: Tragedia nella "Commedia" (1983) presenta Virgilio non più come simbolo della ragione umana, ma come una "tragedia" nella Commedia. Anche se Dante nutre tanta ammirazione verso il suo maestro, questo non gli impedisce di collocarlo per l’eternità nell’inferno. A differenza di altri personaggi pagani che vengono sottratti dalla dannazione eterna, fra cui Stazio e Rifeo, Virgilio non viene salvato da Dante. Questo aspetto rende, secondo Hollander, il Virgilio di Dante una vera e propria tragedia.
In this article I offer an Atlantic-world reading of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s life and poetry. Focusing on several important events in his biography and on how they contributed to the shaping of his poetics, I argue that Ungaretti can be fruitfully appreciated as an Atlantic poet, beyond the national confines of the Italian literary tradition. While Ungaretti’s oeuvre fits readily into a cosmopolitan ambience, the application of a specifically Atlantic-world paradigm to his works and days allows us to fully understand his famous claim of being a "docile fibra dell’universo." This allusive subjective claim suggests that from the onset of his career he saw himself as a citizen of the world, a self-conscious status that nicely captures the way he approached his writing and the way he understood human experience in general. Furthermore, it is on this basis that I would also like to suggest a cultural dialogue between his work and the spirit of the blues, inasmuch as his poems are often the extemporaneous product of a particular biographical experience that tends to trespass geographical continents to become universal.
One year after the publication of his first novel, Tiro al piccione, Giose Rimanelli published his second narrative, Peccato originale. Whereas Tiro al piccione handles the horrific wartime experience of its protagonist Marco Laudato and his Orphic journey through Italy’s Civil War, Peccato originale deals with the socioeconomic inferno of the postwar period that ultimately serves as a basis for immigration for many and helps to show clearly the problema del sud. The author, creating parallels between the peasant of Southern Italy and the condemned biblical character of Cain, shows that man’s "original sin" is not pride, but poverty, with all its cruelty, misery, and unspeakable attributes. Peccato originale is the story of the journey the poor must take in order to get out of their socioeconomic hell and enter a new world of geopolitical freedom.
In Calvino’s works, the best fruits of contemporary scientific and anthropological disciplines become transferred to the field of literature, and challenge existing generic conventions in different ways, thereby creating experimental hybrids between non-fiction and fiction. Clearly, Calvino’s stated preference for the short story derives from its flexibility, since it is simultaneously open to genres such as non-fiction and fiction. Furthermore, the short story does not exclude the novel. On the contrary, by using the short story the novel sews together a network of representations and possible parallel universes, thus shaping a kind of network novel. This form of network novel, consisting of real and possible worlds, seems to be the best way of sustaining an encyclopedic re-description of the world and its potentialities. Additionally for Calvino, the best representation of this interdependent multiplicity is the city; his work’s deepest impulse is a new cultural map ranging from the geographic and scientific to the economic and philosophic, instituting a re-representation of the world in the conditions of the new hyper-environment made of space and knowledge. The very idea of the network novel suggests both a map and a continuity between episodes and fragments, inhabited by a kind of a network human being who is capable of stitching together their own fragments and properly holding the multiplicity.
Primo Levi is best known as a Holocaust survivor whose works are considered to be indispensable contributions to the literature of testimony about Nazi genocide. In trying to draw politically-relevant insights from Levi, readers have generally focused on his analysis of the extremes of human deprivation in his Holocaust writings. This article considers Levi more broadly as an analyst of the various forms of human agency and argues that his novel of partisan warfare, Se non ora quando? (1982), presents a vision of virtuous republican political agency. Levi's partisan novel dramatizes the fraught relationship between civil and military values in order to investigate what it takes for a republic to be founded and maintained in a world of risk. Considered against the backdrop of Levi's own short-lived experience as a partisan, relevant writings from republican theorist and fellow Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt, and the early Eighties presidency of ex-partisan Sandro Pertini, Levi's novel is revealed to be a text that speaks (however ambivalently) to a republican tradition of endorsing citizen soldiers and affirming the worth of political foundation.
Giuseppe Garibaldi’s novel Clelia o il governo dei preti (1870) is an exposition of the Italian hero’s strong anti-clerical sentiments in the form of a historical novel. Even before its publication in Italian, the novel was translated and published in England and the United States. The study examines how the source text was appropriated by the anonymous translator to suit the ideological agenda of radical anti-Catholic Protestant groups in Britain and America in the second half of the 19th century. The translation is considered within the historical context of Garibaldi’s celebrity status, the fortunes of his memoirs and literary works and the anti-Catholic campaigns in Britain and the US in the 19th century. The translation strategies adopted by the translator to rewrite Garibaldi’s novel according to the propaganda requirements and the sensibilities of Anglo-American Protestant readers particularly hostile to the Catholic Church are analyzed from the perspective of Lefevere’s view of translation as rewriting and its relationship with ideology, as well as Venuti’s identification of domestication as an ideological translation strategy.
The article considers primarily Montale’s fourth book, Satura (1971), and interrogates the connections between the new direction of Montale’s poetry and the scientific and philosophical trends of the 1950s and 1960s. To describe Montale’s late work as postmodernist is to measure the self-conscious distancing of his poetics from the writing of the first three volumes: the poetic voice of Satura explores the dialectic relationship between modern and postmodern. The common postmodernist annulments – the end of ideology, the end of history, the end of authorial presence, the distinction between high and low culture – all play a role in Satura’s composition. The article includes a discussion of Cesare Vasoli’s Tra cultura e ideologia as an important source to explain Montale’s suspension of poetic output as a symptom of the political and philosophical disillusionment he experienced during the years of the reconstruction and the economic boom. Using the latter text as a guide, the article analyzes one of the most hermeneutically complex poems of Satura, ‘Dialogo’.
Il racconto del viaggio in Sardegna di Carlo Levi, pubblicato nel 1964, porta per la prima volta nell’opera dello scrittore a mediare due differenti tipologie della memoria, quella arcaica e quella contemporanea. L’esperienza del viaggiatore si forma sulla capacità che egli ha di ascoltare e guardare gli episodi della sua esperienza sull’isola, confrontando il carattere di un patrimonio arcaico con la consapevolezza dell’intelligenza contemporanea. Il libro di Levi non è né un romanzo né un reportage, ma il ritratto non statico di un insieme di personaggi e luoghi, che si dispongono consapevolmente o inconsapevolmente a essere raccontati. Il saggio analizza le caratteristiche di questa narrazione formata da racconti o frammenti di racconto.
In questo saggio si analizza la ricerca tematica e stilistica della poesia di Rocco Scotellaro, che, in tutta la sua opera recentemente sistemata, e fin dagli esordi, si dimostra autore perfettamente consapevole del rapporto tra tradizione e innovazione. A partire dalla traduzione/riscrittura di un’ode oraziana e dalle letture del liceale viene indagato il rapporto stilistico con diverse fonti antiche (Euripide, Virgilio, Orazio) e moderne (Leopardi, Carducci, Pascoli e d’Annunzio) al fine di rintracciare un possibile "sistema". Il poeta utilizza innanzitutto la citazione lessicale come prestito spesso usato in diminutio, poi, acquisito l’universo di pensiero delle fonti di riferimento, adotta metodicamente il rovesciamento della tradizione attraverso una sorta di risposta a distanza dove la fonte entra di fatto come sottinteso significativo. Si tratta di una retorica alta e profondamente consapevole che introduce il nuovo sullo sfondo della tradizione attraverso l’ironia tragica: e infatti dalla tragedia antica e moderna derivano prestiti assai pregnanti. Nell’incontro tra elemento alto della tradizione ed elementi mitico-favolistici della cultura popolare, sia sul versante più prettamente retorico sia sul versante dei temi, si annida la vera novità della poesia scotellariana, una sorta di "reinvenzione" del classico destinata ad avere, sebbene silenziosamente, largo seguito nella post-modernità.
Per individuare la chiave di lettura del libro di Carlo Levi viaggiatore in Sicilia, edito nel 1955, occorre capire la posizione che occupa il narratore-viaggiatore rispetto alle storie che ascolta e racconta, innestate sul filone principale della narrazione che nel tempo lineare egli vive e attraversa come personaggio del proprio viaggio. I tre tempi, coincidenti con i tre diversi viaggi in Sicilia dello scrittore piemontese, costituiscono altrettante fasi di un avvicinamento progressivo alla comprensione storica del presente reinterpretato attraverso il concetto, caro a Levi, di epica moderna. Nel saggio se ne discutono le caratteristiche e si analizzano le diverse tipologie descrittive e discorsive che formano l’intreccio narrativo.
Le prime traduzioni americane delle poesie di Rocco Scotellaro risalgono al 1953, quando il poeta era pressocché sconosciuto in Italia in quanto gran parte dei suoi scritti fu pubblicata postuma grazie all’interessamento di Carlo Levi e Rossi Doria. Nonostante i premi e i riconoscimenti l’opera di Scotellaro, ed in partricolare la sua poesia, è rimasta confinata in quella sorta di periferia culturale ben separata dal novero di autori "degni" di essere inseriti nelle antologie nazionali. Non così nel sistema culturale anglo-americano. Scotellaro fu infatti uno dei primi poeti italiani ad essere tradotto e presentato al pubblico americano e le sue poesie furono inserite in antologie e riviste accanto a quelle di Ungaretti, Montale, Saba e Quasimodo, solo per citare i più famosi a livello internazionale. Il presente saggio ricostruisce la presenza di Scotellaro negli USA e propone un’analisi delle traduzioni dei diversi traduttori che nel corso di mezzo secolo si sono cimentati con i versi del poeta lucano, evidenziandone l’approccio traduttivo e le strategie editoriali.
Nel descrivere la personale vicenda esistenziale e politica, Rocco Scotellaro, in modo non diverso da un ventriloquo, dà anche voce al popolo muto da cui proviene, immerso fino allora "nel buio dell’inespressione". Da una parte, per la sua trovata capacità di parola, se ne distacca, dall’altra, in equilibrio tra le pulsioni individuali e l’essere portavoce della comunità cui appartiene, assurge vichianamente a "universale fantastico" dei contadini del Sud e, in senso lato, l’interprete di tutte le genti di ogni Sud di ogni continente, di ogni mondo subalterno che vive la stessa condizione antropologica. "Distacco partecipe" potrebbe essere l’ossimoro che meglio riassume questa forza rappresentativa, che fa trasparire una dimensione corale e insieme qualcosa che la trascende. In ogni caso, dando voce alla "buia Lucania", Scotellaro è riuscito a sottrarla all’isolamento, facendole trovare nella parola il senso profondo della sua esistenza.
L’oggetto dell’analisi di questo saggio è la rima così come viene messa in atto in una delle raccolte poetiche di Carlo Levi: Bosco di Eva. Attraverso un close reading delle poesie si comprende l’importanza della metrica su tre livelli: quello strutturale, quello simbolico e quello letterario all’interno del gruppo di scrittori ‘antinovecenteschi’, intenti a un recupero della tradizione. Per quanto qui ci si concentri su un numero esiguo di testi, l’esame – così come viene suggerito dal metodo dell’hermeneutischer Zirkel – si intende valido per l’intero corpus leviano.
Carlo Levi riporta in questo libro l’esperienza del suo viaggio in Unione Sovietica nel 1955. Con la prospettiva del pittore e gli strumenti dello scrittore Levi propone un quadro a tinte neutre della società sovietica. I toni della rappresentazione si accendono nella descrizione dei singoli individui e ogni qual volta ritrova nella realtà sovietica delle analogie con la realtà delle sue esperienze passate. I motivi ricorrenti lungo le linee narrative che compongono l’intreccio sono il paesaggio e la visione d’insieme, l’evocazione del passato e la descrizione allegorica dell’incombere del tempo, il legame tra realtà lontane, il raggiungimento di una nuova dimensione e la compressione dello spazio.
Si analizza la capacità di Carlo Levi di impiegare, all’interno dei suoi scritti di carattere più marcatamente politico, alcune espressioni peculiari al fine di risvegliarne la memoria storica, da un lato, e dall’altro di considerarne la piena attualità. È il caso, ad esempio, dei concetti di fascismo e antifascismo, di autonomia e resistenza, di coscienza e umanesimo, tutti utilissimi per fissare, prima di tutto con se stesso e molti anni prima di Eboli, le coordinate della sua dimensione morale e civile. Dimensione che non passa dalle secche dei codici e dei programmi usati dalla politica in quanto sistema di pratiche, perché carica, invece, di uno spirito che, finanche su un piano lessicale, rivede, approfondisce e modifica continuamente il suo livello di comprensione e di interpretazione. Nella riflessione dello scrittore piemontese, anche a distanza di decenni, il ruolo della coscienza, dell’autonomia e della resistenza permane immutato perché immutato è, purtroppo, il mondo senza vita dell’amministrazione, del moralismo e dell’ideologia fascista cui egli si oppose sempre con decisione.
Language programs in the US frequently invoke the notion of heritage in order to spark student interest in language learning. The idea is that acquisition of a particular language can connect a student to their past in ways that can empower them and give them a richer appreciation of their own ethnic background. This article addresses this ‘appeal to heritage’ approach to the promotion of language learning, in relation to Italian. I discuss the disconnect between the language of the classroom on the one hand and true Italian-American linguistic heritage on the other. My purpose is to facilitate an informed discussion of linguistic reality, which is that many members of the Italian diaspora descend from ancestors who were monolingual dialettofoni. I argue that the facts of linguistic diversity in Italy and dialect heritage in the US should be central to any discourse which aims to promote the learning of Italian as a gateway to our students’ pasts. While there is no question that knowledge of Standard Italian gives access to Italy, which in turn can give access to the Italian-American student’s heritage culture(s), it is necessary to formulate a more precise understanding of the link between ‘knowledge of Italian’ on the one hand, and ‘Italian heritage’ on the other – a link which is much less direct than is often suggested.
The influence of standard Italian on the minor Romance languages spoken in Italy (i.e. the Italian dialects) permeates all aspects of their grammar. In this article, I provide an example of the way in which Italian prosody can affect dialects, a poorly studied type of influence. I show that a speaker may have a range of options available when speaking ‘dialect,’ including forms that are influenced by Italian to a greater or lesser degree.
A millenary ethnic and cultural history of Italic settlements, Latin hegemonic contact, followed by isolation and external punctuations prior to unification in 1861 under one territorial and legal state created a diverse metalinguistic complex in the Italian peninsula, albeit reflected in extraordinarily rich expression in the arts and sciences as recognized in global society today. In the historicist approach, the role and effects of unity under one state over the last 150 years is recognized in contrast with the prior highly fractured situation as ‘many little states’ under varied (and lingering foreign) influence, including new linguistic (French) and ideological hegemony. The theme of this article deals specifically with the ontology of Italian ‘linguistic identity’ from a human perspective, that personal and group identification that brings us together or divides us in post-modern society toward the quest for linguistic rights as human rights. Owing to the unifying effect (largely achieved) of the Italian language in public schools since unification, the questione della lingua may rise again as an issue. The question is critically revisited in the historical background of Manzoni, the Italian umanesimo and Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia.
Observations and discussions concerning the form and use of Italian and dialects in geographical and social space have a long tradition, beginning with Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and culminating in seemingly endless debates of the Questione della lingua up to the modern age. Numerous writers have expressed opinions concerning stylistic choices of language and dialects in their works. While these debates were aimed frequently at the question of what constitutes Italy’s standard language and how dialects and alloglot minority languages ought to be treated, fewer texts address individual perceptions of language practice and individual language histories. This gap began to be filled with Nencioni’s (1983) trailblazing linguistic autodiachrony, and by the narratives of other scholars of linguistics, such as Renzi (2002) and Francescato (1982). In addition, linguistic autobiographies written by students at Italian universities generally point to the continued vitality of Italian dialects in Italian society. This article focuses on linguistic autobiographies written by Italian-American students. Based on a small corpus of short linguistic biographies written in Italian linguistics courses, it aims at studying perceptions of evolving linguistic identities among Italian-American youth, with an emphasis on the second generation. The texts address changing linguistic behavior and attitudes, from childhood through adulthood, pondering exposure to Italian dialects, standard Italian, English and other languages. Despite differences among dynamically evolving individual identities, second-generation Italian-American youth tends to value non-standard varieties, particularly through the memory of their childhood dialects. They also appear to value multilingualism in the urban environment. Writing short linguistic autobiographies was considered a challenge by their authors and, despite their approximations, deliberate omissions and memory lapses, valued as a step toward greater language awareness.
In this article I discuss relationships between language use and identity among Italian Americans. I argue that the study of identities needs to abandon essentialist stances that are particularly common in research on Italian Americans, and approach identity construction as a process that takes place within concrete social practices enacted by specific communities. I provide a brief overview of the linguistic development of Italian Americans in the USA in order to provide a frame of reference to the discussion of the links between language use and identities. I then focus in particular on the following phenomena: symbolic uses of individual Italian words or expressions within talk in English, engagement with the heritage language in Italian-American families and storytelling, to illustrate how Italianness is constructed through those practices in different communities. I use these examples also to problematize the idea that knowledge of the heritage language is central to ethnic identification.
The majority of works on language in Italian immigrant communities in the USA concern immigrants of the 19th and 20th century migratory waves and their descendants. There is, however, a lack of studies focusing on the most recent influx of Italians who have migrated to the USA in the last 30 years. They have arrived in smaller numbers, yet in a constant stream and are adding to the ranks of the new generations of Italian Americans. The context of emigration of the two groups is notably different, as is their sociolinguistic background and their linguistic practices in the new context of arrival. The ‘new wave’ of Italians is intersecting with American society at large and with the Italian American community that preceded them, with which there is a complex relationship. This article focuses on this new wave of Italians, centering, in particular, on the symbolic practices enacted by a group of families who have recently immigrated to the USA, dealing with the language socialization of their American-born children. Drawing from interviews and ethnographic observation, it highlights new immigrants’ approach to language maintenance and transmission, and their symbolic practices relied on for identity performance. Identity is viewed through a constructivist lens, as negotiated and performed in interaction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005, 2008), and language maintenance strategies are analyzed through the perspective of language socialization (Ochs, 1993, 1998; Scheiffelin, 1990). This study expands the discussion on Italian immigrant identity in the USA to include its most recent arrivals and simultaneously broadens the scope of Italian diasporic studies.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages requires member states that have ratified and signed to support the survival and use of longstanding minority languages within their borders. While the Charter offers some guidance in the selection of qualified languages, its definitions are far from rigorous and leave considerable room for arbitrary selection. Moreover, the selections are left entirely to government entities of each state. The result in the case of Italy is that a very small collection of the nation’s plethora of languages has been deemed worthy of support. This article urges reconsideration of the decision-making process in light of the plurilinguistic reality of Italy and the Charter’s purpose of guaranteeing linguistic minorities the integrity of their voice.
Today, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has made written communication a prevalent form of daily interaction through e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and the like. As a consequence, languages (written and spoken) seem to be shaped more and more by the modalities of digital media and of an ‘instant communication response’ culture. Linguistic identity, or the use of language to portray oneself as part of a community, is being shaped as well by the same modalities. Traditionally, the way individuals and communities used specific forms of language in face-to-face (F2F) situations shaped perceptions of identity (personal and communal). Now, the question can be asked: Are these changing in the age of the Internet, when CMC has extended the concept of community in a global way? This article will look at this question as it concerns linguistic identity in Italy, assessing its implications in the light of the traditional sociolinguistic study of language as a conveyor of identity.