Viscusi, Robert

English

Stony Brook University - SUNY

Differentia: Review of Italian Thought Number 3 Combined Issue 3-4 Spring/Autumn Article 45 1989 Poeti italo-americani edited by Ferdinando Alfonsi and The Hidden Italy edited by Hermann W. Haller Robert Viscusi Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia Recommended Citation Viscusi, Robert (1989) "Poeti italo-americani edited by Ferdinando Alfonsi and The Hidden Italy edited by Hermann W. Haller," Differentia: Review of Italian Thought: Vol. 3 , Article 45. Available at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/vol3/iss1/45 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Academic Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Differentia: Review of Italian Thought by an authorized editor of Academic Commons. For more information, please contact mona.ramonetti@stonybrook.edu, hu.wang.2@stonybrook.edu. BOOK REVIEWS 389 spective, the use of metaphors of "illumination" and "disclosure," both in Heidegger and Wittgenstein, to con-note the happening of sense. An authen-tic, "transcendental" Aesthetics can be thought without referring to any "art" whatsoever; its questioning concerns comprehension and experience them-selves. Garroni' s readings of Kant, Heideg-ger and Wittgenstein are provoking and original and different from the philosophers of "weak thought," explicitly criticized in a section of the book. His discourse is always well articulated and controlled and in its conclusions even passionate. Its dif-ficulties are related to the nature of the questions it raises: it states that paradox and sense are the two insepar-able faces of the human condition; it stresses the necessity, for an authentic comprehension, of radical movements of de-familiarization; and puts into question the certainties of knowledge in general. Garroni has returned to the prob-lems discussed in Senso e paradosso on various occasions, among which we would like to recall his long essay on "Aesthetics and Literary Criticism," published in the fourth volume on the Letteratura Italiana edited by Alberto Asor Rosa (Einaudi, 1987). PIETRO PEDACE New York University Poeti italo-americani I ltalo-American Poets Antologia bilingue I A Bilingual Anthology Ferdinando Alfonsi, ed. Catanzaro: Antonio Carello Editore, 1985 The Hidden Italy: A Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry Hermann W. Haller, ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986 On the crowded subway, making my way to the prison to teach Black and Puerto Rican inmates how to write, I think of the fable of the shoemaker who struggles to make shoes for the oppressed while his own go barefoot over the stones (Daniela Gioseffi, in Alfonsi, 217) Cintin no'l va a Ii sagris, pai pafs dal Friul, a sunin li ciampanis, no i viulfns pal Friul! Co al jot in plassa un puor pierdut in tal Friul ghi da la so giacheta dongia ii clfpit di un mur, co al jot un dai puors ch'a van soj pal Friul content ghi da ii so cour sotil seil ch'al ven scur. "Adio mari, adio pari, jo i vai via dal Friul, e i vai via ta la Merica, l'aligria dal Friul!" Treno, ti l'as puartat viers ii mar azur, ah se malincunia via dal Friul. [Vincent doesn't attend the feasts of the Friulan town, the bells are ringing, and the violins are not playing in the Friuli! When he sees in the square a poor soul lost in the Friuli, he gives him his jacket, near the small warm wall, when he sees one of the poor souls go by lonely through the Friuli, he gives him happily his own heart, under the darkening sky. "Good-bye, Mother, good-bye Father, I am leaving the Friuli, I am going away to America, the happy land of the Friuli!" Train, you took him to the blue sea, oh what a gloom, far away from the Friuli.] (P_ier Paolo Pasolini, in Haller, 266-67) DIFFERENT/A 390 The novel has a liking for families. It prefers houses, it likes generations that trace their melancholy back through recollected conversations, scenes that require drapes in the backdrop, a pianoforte shawl supporting twenty photographs in silver frames, a phono-graph, a wall of paintings, a secret place behind the hill. This is part of what it means to say that the novel is a bourgeois form. There is more to it than that, of course. The novel also likes readers who will pay the price of a visit to the docto r to buy a book that will only be read one time by any given person, a person who can dispose of two or three days in the space of a single week to pass with his or her feet up on the couch while following the narrative. Occasionally reaching for the finger-food, th e hot chocolate. The novel also likes people who are tired of all of this, the villa, the couch, the car, and wish to make it all more in-teresting by engaging in sexual trans-gressions, by dreaming of unusual deaths. These must be among the leading reasons that so few novels, in either Italian or English, give back what the poems cited above reflect. In the Amer-ican Gioseffi, a frame of attention to the suffering of the American city, not merely the broken glass along the wall of the immigrant-made-good, not just how they got to Long Island but why, instead, they might choose not to go there. In the late Pasolini, leaving Friuli rendered in thorny Friulan, not salable at Feltrinelli as the dialect of narrative. Professors Haller and Alfonsi, that is, in their anth ologies have con-structed basic reference points for the study of those branches of Italian liter-ature that do not yet have places in the academies. Alfonsi has entered a vast jungle of unknown and perhaps un-knowable bibliography, cutting away with an energetic Bowie knife, and has found over four hundred poets, pre-senting a poem or two or three by one hundred of these. Every poem appears in two languages, those written in any Italian language (Calabrian, Sicilian) being translated into English, those in English translated into Italian (never Sicilian). The bibliography is an excel-lent place to begin the encyclopedic work necessary for a comprehensive feel of the literary ground in Italian America. The poems and the transla-tions open a large arena of expression so far removed from ordinary literary conversation, in Italy or in America, that one feels, upon first surveying it, large and complex emotions . It is an undiscovered nation, this Italian America, full of versions of Italy not well understood in the centers of cul-tural production in that country. There is much work to be done in charting this new territory. One is pleased to find it there, relieved to see that so much and such complex experience has not gone without its chroniclers . One is also saddened to see how little basic effort has been expended before this on the project. Alfonsi has few pre-decessors, and none half so ambitious. Here are dozens of poets without biog-raphies, bibliographies . Where will we go to study them? Which of us will do this work? On what plan? These are questions that need, that demand, an-swers. Alfonsi's book, by its very exis-tence, puts these pressing questions on the agenda . Hermann Haller enters the tradition of his subject at a point rather further along in the cycle. He is not forced to invent the very parameters of his theme . Indeed, the relationship among the various languages of Italy is the oldest and most persistently argued question in Italian literary history, and Haller introduces this anthology with a masterful overview of the long debate upon the languages of writing in Italy. Nonetheless, despite the antiquity of its theme and despite the unfailing BOOK REVIEWS richness of the scholarly bibliographies that support this enterprise at every turn, Haller's is a revolutionary book, particularly in the English-speaking world. He makes it possible for us to enter the worlds of Campanian, . Friulan, Piedmontese, Venetian, Milan-ese, Romagnol, Roman, Genovese, Ab-ruzzese, Apulian, Lucanian poetry, to go among the variants and shadows that exist between these, and to do so in the lines of great poets and others less than great but always interesting, never banal. Haller' s translations stress accu-racy, extremely important when the texts in question are written in lan-guages few readers are likely to have studied, and they make it possible for a person with a reasonable background in standard Italian to begin to explore the pleasures of the great non-Tuscan trad-itions in Italian writing. Both of these books deserve a wide readership. Haller's anthology, because of its vast range, its impeccable scholar-ship, its superb introductions, has al-ready begun to have a wide impact, inspiring readings of Italian dialect poetry in this country and finding a place in the curricula of college depart-ments of Italian. Such a shift of em-phasis has also begun to occur in Italy, and it deserves particular attention in the United States , where very few per-sons of Italian origin derive from families that do not speak a dialect, where the historical specifics of our identities begin not in Tuscany but in Friuli, Bari, Caltanisetta-outside, off center, difficult places with difficult languages, where , nonetheless, our re-comprehension of who we have been must recommence. Such a new under-standing ought to help us decipher, not merely the languages, but the diverse experiences Alfonsi ' s poets record . ROBERT VISCUS! Brooklyn College/CUNY 391 

Poeti italo-americani edited by Ferdinando Alfonsi and The Hidden Italy edited by Hermann W. Haller

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Poeti italo-americani edited by Ferdinando Alfonsi and The Hidden Italy edited by Hermann W. Haller

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