Let us play a game of literary make-believe. Imagine that neither Shakespeare nor Dante nor Petrarch had ever existed. What would English and Italian be like today? For all the vastness of his influence, without Shakespeare English would be more or less what it is, since its development was made necessary by a set of socio-political conditions, beginning with the presence of a centralized state, of which literature was only a fairly secondary piece. We know well that Italian, by contrast, long lacked any such social and institutional support. Had Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio never existed, or had they been born in Campania or the Veneto, we would speak a different language today. The temptation is therefore strong to credit the dominance of Petrarchism with the merits, and above all the defects, of Italy’s literary language. And yet I am not sure that this idea, so often repeated in the twentieth century, is well founded. At most it seems to me a partial truth. I do not believe that the “rigidity” of Italian compared with other great national languages derives from the predominant position of Petrarch-inflected classicism in our literature. The reasons are far more complex and, in large part, extra-literary in nature.

It was above all the avant-gardes of the twentieth century that found in the Petrarch-Leopardi line – the line in which classicist lyric poetry is regarded as the summit of all poetry – the obstacle to be removed in order to widen the expressive possibilities of literature. The model invariably invoked is Dante, whose variety of themes and registers is seen as the healthy alternative to the stylistic and thematic narrowness of Petrarchan lyric. Obviously, oppositions of this kind are possible only by constructing a simplified, not to say caricatural, image of the parties involved. If one reads Petrarch and Leopardi at length, as scholars know but ordinary readers do not always realize, one finds a fabulous variety of themes, languages and stylistic registers, in prose and in verse. Like any other writer, Petrarch and Leopardi are the totality of their works, not one part (a selection of the poems) taken for the whole. And, above all, those two writers are not their imitators, followers, continuators and epigones, some brilliant, many mediocre or downright bad, who create a distorting lens through which their own models come to be read. But it is well known that, from Romanticism onward, literary movements have repeatedly set up straw men to knock down so as to present themselves as “the new order on the march”. Italians, moreover, love to split into opposing factions and wage war on one another. During his stay in Italy, Goethe was asked whether he belonged to Ariosto’s party or to Tasso’s, an opposition then more topical than the one between Dante and Petrarch. Goethe replied that Italians ought to be proud and glad to have two poets of such stature, instead of wasting their time quarrelling over which of the two was the better. A judgement that says much about the German cast of mind as about the Italian one. Ours remains, as ever, the country of Guelphs and Ghibellines, of belonging to a party, a category, a faction, a clan, a family before belonging to a national community.

However much it may have caged the national literary language within narrow limits, we should not forget that with Bembo it was Petrarch who became a normative model, alongside Boccaccio, whose language is certainly not lacking in empirical detail or in variety of themes and registers. In short, even without resorting to the usual invocation of Dante, abstractness and a want of purchase on the “real” do not seem to me original features of the Italian literary language. Still less so if we recall that, alongside the language put forward as national, there has always existed a body of literature in the dialects. Looking at the system as a whole, variety and flexibility are not wanting, even if they have shown themselves in a different way than in those countries where a national language established itself earlier than ours did.

The obvious underlying fact that sets the Italian situation apart from countries such as France and England is that Italian was for a long time a language spoken only in certain areas and, at most, within certain social strata of the country. It is the fact of being, for the majority of Italians, a written and not a spoken language that, in my view, shaped the character of Italian, far more than the dominance of the classicist lyric ideal running from Petrarch to Leopardi (which, incidentally, sits at the summit of Romantic aesthetics, whereas in classicist ones it is a minor genre). Manzoni’s laborious work of revision across the various versions of the Promessi sposi is there to prove it, still in the middle of the nineteenth century, even if today more than one reader would find the “expressionist” style of Fermo e Lucia and of the 1827 edition livelier than the neoclassical clarity of the 1840 one.

But what exactly is meant when people speak, as they sometimes do, of the “rigidity” of literary Italian, contemporary Italian included? The first thing that comes to mind, especially when comparing it with other languages, is its polysyllabic heaviness. Anyone who has tried their hand at translating from a foreign language has had to reckon at once with the extra-large dimensions of Italian, which create no end of problems, above all when translating poetry in closed forms. But in prose too the slowness of Italian often makes it hard to convey the speed and precision of the original without resorting to forms of compression and simplification, two procedures in which Italian translators are bound to become experts. At such junctures it is worth recalling that this feature, polysyllabic heaviness, is only in part original to Italian. Dante and Petrarch, who strictly speaking wrote neither in a national language nor in a dialect, were two great abbreviators. The frequency of apocopes, elisions and truncations in their texts shows that they were keenly aware of the problem, and that they solved it as all speakers do, namely by cutting syllables. This procedure sets every Italian dialect apart from Latin. It was the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with their obsession for classical antiquity, who artificially re-Latinized Italian, enriching it with countless terms but accentuating its polysyllabism precisely in order to distance it from the dialects. This tendency reached new heights once, after the Second World War, Italian became the spoken national language. Through a kind of anti-dialectal hypercorrection, elisions have tended to disappear, so that one sees more and more often forms such as “una altra”, “la avanzata”, and so on. When one stumbles on such forms, one has the impression of a language modelled on a grammar for middle school, perhaps for foreigners. The flavour is that of a written language in the worst sense of the word, that is, pedantically scholastic, musty if not mummified. To sum up, there are two other protagonists in this story besides Petrarchism: the humanists, with their fixations on Latin, and our contemporaries, who out of a dialect-phobic tic think that, as a rule, no elision or apocope should exist in the “correct” Italian of a cultivated person.

But what else can it mean to say that Italian is a less flexible language than the other great national languages of Europe? In the high registers of abstract speculation Italian seems no less well equipped than the other national languages. It is in the middle and low registers, those that reproduce and simulate speech, that the difficulties surface. The fact is that here the presence of the dialects is still decisive. To give life and credibility to a scene set in a specific place and time, especially a provincial one, “national” Italian, with no accent, is not always the best choice. The solutions are countless and depend on the poetics of the individual writer, but the use of dialectal insertions or of regional Italian is common practice, evidently because many feel that a neutral, accentless Italian would come across as inexpressive, artificial, unrealistic, since everyone knows that in real life no one speaks a hypothetical standard Italian. From this point of view Verga seems to be a more widely followed example than Manzoni.

I should make clear that this condition, a mirror of our linguistic history, is by no means a one-off. It is true that in English, a national language spoken by everyone for half a millennium, it is easier to pass from the sublime to the lowly without too many jolts, but stratification and stylistic frictions are not unknown there either. The vitality of contemporary literatures in English owes a great deal precisely to the use of non-standard varieties brought into play by postcolonial authors. We are not far from the interplay of national language, regional language and dialect in our own fiction. It seems to me that the difference, quite apart from the talent of the storytellers, is made not so much by the dialect and the regional variety in play as by the “major” language, which in the case of English is the global language and in the case of Italian a national language of middling size. One of the problems is that Italian translations of postcolonial authors generally fail to reproduce their complex linguistic interplay in the slightest, flattening their style into a monolingual translationese in which some regionalism timidly peeps out here and there. One example will stand for all: the disastrous translation of the finest long poem in English to appear in recent decades, Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Not that there is any easy solution to these problems, of course; but if one decides a priori, for commercial reasons, that the plurilingualism of those authors cannot be reproduced and that one may as well use a neutral, middling Italian, one will never arrive at a translation that shows us what is happening in the original, linguistically and therefore culturally. The ever-growing mass of translations from English, especially of fiction, published and read in Italy suggests a stylistic averageness that does not exist in the originals. This, unfortunately, creates a model of success to which many of our novelists in search of global success tend to conform, perhaps unwittingly.

Plurilingualism and hybridization, then, are available to anyone who wants variety, or even just a patina of local colour. It is a well-established tradition, at least since the days of Pascoli, and certainly not a provocative practice, so much so that authors like Camilleri have used it to produce best-sellers. That is no reason to demonize neoclassical clarity or to treat it as an antique. There are some poets of real worth who have tried to rework this tradition using Italian as it has taken shape in recent decades. I think of the work of the Roman poets connected with “Prato pagano”, from Valerio Magrelli to Claudio Damiani to Roberto Deidier, or of that of the Paduan poets of “Scarto minimo”, such as Stefano Dal Bianco and Mario Benedetti, not forgetting Umberto Fiori, who reached a similar horizon by a different road.

Certain traits in the character of the Italian language are independent of choices of poetics. Italian too is capable of flexibility and brevity, which are not given by any monosyllabic nature of the language but must be sought through its idealizing and abstracting capacity. As an example one may cite a passage (lines 8-11) from John Keats’s “To Autumn” (1819)

to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

recently translated by Deidier (2019)

e ancora, ancora

Fiori tardivi sbocci per le api

Convinte di restare sempre al caldo,

Ché ogni cella d’estate ha traboccato.

As in a thousand other cases, the Italian translator faces the problem of compressing the original (especially when, as here, English pentameter is rendered in hendecasyllables) without losing the sense and while keeping a fluid movement. Literally, those English lines mean: “to put forth more buds, / and still more, late flowers for the bees, / until they think the warm days will never end, / for Summer has made their sticky cells overflow.” Deidier has omitted several details, recovering them in a single word or a generalizing turn of phrase that holds them. The Italian lines lack the descriptive minuteness of the English, yet in a certain sense nothing essential is missing from those hendecasyllables. Traditional Italian verse says the thing in this way. Fewer details, more idealizing synthesis. In short, Deidier has drawn on the qualities of the Italian language instead of rowing against them. It is not the only possible solution.

The same passage from Keats’s ode was rendered by Annalisa Manstretta (2018) as follows:

e sbocci fiori su fiori, anche se tardi,

anche se illudi le api di un’estate senza fine

traboccante di miele.

The compression procedure is present here too, even though the translation is in free verse. The last line is even more elliptical than Deidier’s, but it avoids the neoclassical patina of the “Ché” and of the inversion. Manstretta’s style comes closer to the fluency of ordinary language, yet in aiming at poetry she too felt the need to omit some details. An excess of detail in Italian lengthens the lines and waters down their rhythm, besides always carrying something prosaic with it. Carried over into Italian, Keats’s “clammy cells” sound implausible, as is shown by the versions that have kept them just as they are, for instance that of Silvano Sabbadini (1986), who translates: “perché l’estate ha colmato le loro celle viscose”. It is worth noting, moreover, that even in a context of literal rendering “o’er-brimm’d”, “ha fatto traboccare”, has become “ha colmato”, for obvious reasons of brevity.[1]

If we want to generalize, we might say that Italian is a “Platonic” language. Let me explain. Take a series of words like vetro, vetrino, vetrina, vetrinetta, vetrata. It is almost as if the conceptual baggage of Italian held the idea of a base object, glass (vetro), which the suffixes turn into a series of other objects made of glass. Linguistically, a mere change of size is enough to make them different things, related by the fact of being made of glass, which seems almost their essence. In English, a culture with a more pronounced empirical and pragmatic dimension, it is function that provides the linguistic distinction: vetro is glass, vetrina shop window, vetrino slide (which has several meanings, so that out of context one must specify microscope slide), vetrinetta cabinet, vetrata glass window or glass door or stained glass (window). It is function that defines the object, while the material it is made of often does not even appear, as one notices. Not essentialism but empiricism. Every language has its own character, and it is useless to insist on looking for monosyllabic speed and abundance of empirical detail where the distinctive traits are others. To be sure, with the Italian dialects the story is partly different, and this possibility is available to writers who wish to pursue it, on their own and by hybridizing it with Italian and perhaps other languages (as, for example, Giovanni Nadiani has done).

To round off what has been said above, I have already discussed elsewhere how, in my view, a generation of young poets has emerged in our poetry, such as the aforementioned Manstretta and others, in whom one senses a more natural approach to Italian.[2] Naturalness and flexibility no longer constitute the aim of a poetics that, in an anti-experimental key, recovers the low spoken register of the Linea Lombarda or neoclassicism, as with the poets mentioned above; rather, naturalness and flexibility are the underlying feeling toward the language from which these young poets set out, poets who do not form a group organized around a manifesto but come from different experiences, linked in my view by this new attitude. The language is no longer “a problem”, because one starts from what, for better or worse, is one’s own written and spoken language: Italian. Only by starting from these premises can the rigidity of a language that is too written and too scholastic dissolve into the fluidity of common usage, which for literature will be only a starting point, different from the perfect but somewhat funereal marbles of the past.

Notes

A necessary premise, though not a sufficient one. Other perils loom over poetry, always so hard to attain. I recently happened to translate a number of contemporary Italian poets into dialect for an anthology edited by Marco Bellini and Paola Loreto for RP Libri. It was a most interesting experience in many respects. From the closeness that only translation allows, I was able to feel first-hand how much distance still remains between the Italian poetic language and dialect. Each of the two has its strengths, but if I had to point to a danger for Italian poetry today I would say it is abstraction. The intellectualization of writing is so thoroughly taken for granted that one tends to slide into it without even noticing, believing that to generalize through abstract concepts means to universalize. In reality poetry, like all the arts, works the other way round: it seeks the universal through the particular. It individualizes, and in the emblematic individual it grasps the universal. To slip straight into the abstract without having grasped it in the particular, in the specific experience of an object, a material or psychological event, is a deceptive shortcut. Art must describe a chair for us memorably, as Van Gogh did in his masterpiece that, once seen, is stamped on the mind, not cobble together arguments about sitting as a conceptual abstraction, which can be worked out better in disciplines such as mechanics, physiology, medicine and the like. In this respect I believe that dialect poetry still has something important to show to poetry in Italian.
[1] For a more detailed analysis see John Keats, All’autunno, edited by Edoardo Zuccato, Mucchi, Modena, 2019.

[2] I refer the reader to the article, since I cannot repeat its details here: “Chiusa la questione? Riflessioni sulla lingua e la poesia italiana recente”, Versants, 65: 2 (2018), pp. 9-16.

Edoardo Zuccato teaches English literature at IULM University in Milan. He has worked on Romantic and contemporary poetry and on translation. He has translated numerous English poets, both Romantic and contemporary, and is the author of five collections of poetry, four in dialect and one in Italian.