Literature and the Italian language in the twentieth century

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As a fairly “heavy” reader of literary works, in the sense that I devote a good deal of time to this fine activity, I have often wondered whether or not the Italian language poses a particular “problem” for the writers who use it, a problem that would be present to a lesser degree in other languages. Since I am by no means an expert, mine is only an impression, unsupported by theoretical assumptions. And yet foreign friends often confirm the feeling. Observing, for example, that reading Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, from 1913, certainly demands of today’s native readers some effort of semantic comprehension and aesthetic adjustment, owing to words now obsolete, to shifted linguistic registers and to grammatical developments, but noting at the same time that such efforts are minimal compared with what essentially endures of the language and its resources, and certainly not enough to spoil the full enjoyment of the work for a reasonably cultivated reader. Well, my impression is precisely that in Italian those efforts must be multiplied, and not a little. Without going back to 1913, novels and short stories of the 1950s and 1960s appear to me today so full of differences from the current language that they engage me as a reader far more than the English, German or French counterparts are engaged by their own literature. But does this impression have any foundation? And if it does, what does it consist of? In the distance, so I was told at school, between literary language and spoken language in our country? Would the reasons therefore be essentially historical? And is this perhaps why writers of stature, Gadda or Landolfi, but the list is long, felt the need to make the Italian of their works intentionally artificial? And might a weak awareness of the need for a close hand-to-hand struggle with language, for a constant drive to innovate, be one of the causes of the sharp drop in quality (another impression of mine, of course) of the Italian novel?

With some trepidation I put questions of this kind to a friend and colleague, Stefano Giovannuzzi, who has made the study of contemporary literature (Italian and comparative) his profession; and he, most kindly, instead of inviting me to “drop it”, undertook to organise the dossier that follows. I thank him warmly, as I thank Edoardo Zuccato, Federico Fastelli, Giovanna Lo Monaco and Francesco Brancati for their contributions. I wrote these lines before reading the dossier, certain that once I have read it I will understand much more about all this than I do now: whatever the answer to my impression may be.

Luigi Cimmino

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