5

Polylingual Writing and the Politics of Language in Today’s Italy*

Loredana Polezzi

1. The Language Question

The complex network of relationships connecting language and nation is one of the characterizing traits of contemporary society. That nexus has deep historical roots and carries a heavy load of cultural and more direct political implications. In the case of Italy, language and nation are linked, if possible, by particularly intricate connections, as eminently demonstrated by the centuries-old debate on the questione della lingua. In spite of its long history, this language question is far from irrelevant to debates about today’s Italy, its cultural make-up, its internal and external representation, and its political construction. After all, as noted by Gramsci, every time the “language question” raises its head, what is really at stake is some form of reconfiguration of cultural hegemony within the nation.1

In recent years, a series of political skirmishes have been fought precisely around matters of language. These range from the recurring polemics over the inclusion of a growing number of children from immigrant families in Italian schools, to the proposal that dialects should have a formal role in education (and all teachers should be fluent in the dialect of the area in which they teach), to the amendment of the rules regulating the eligibility of songs for the Festival di Sanremo, which now allow for the submission of texts written in dialect (though not in foreign languages), to the proposal that all shop signs written in extra-European languages should be banned (and the parallel suggestion that local dialects would be perfectly acceptable in this context too).2 Many of these proposals have been instigated by one party, the Lega Nord, but they have, in effect, involved all political forces in what is a rather sterile yet significant debate on the role of language—or, better, languages—in contemporary Italy. We might be tempted to classify at least some of these initiatives as far-fetched boutades, or examples of involuntary political humor, and indeed this is the tone in which they are often reported by the media, especially outside Italy. Yet things are not so simple. It is indicative, for instance, that in this type of context dialects are routinely labelled as “ethnic languages” by government ministers and local administrators; or that bans on the use of foreign languages have a strong exclusionary impulse that aims to purge Italian streets of what is perceived as an undesirable “alien” presence. Once we take this into account, the symbolic codes and ideological stances behind such gestures become much more sinister, and the same is true of the practices they point toward. Additionally, the reformulation of the question of language and nation attempted by the Lega, however clumsily, is managing to occupy the public space and to impose its discursive distortions on the Italian political debate relating to these topics. A curious reversal of positions seems to be taking place, in which the Italian left (or what is left of the left), once characterized by internationalist tendencies but also by a national aspiration which managed to incorporate a clear stand against nationalist ideologies, now finds itself defending the myth of national unity together with the equally elusive entity that is a standard Italian language, usually sharing this territory with the “new” Italian right. As a result, language and the politics of language can be seen as a significant example of the way in which in today’s Italy left-wing politics is losing discursive as well as symbolic ground, being forced to reformulate its values negatively, in reaction to agendas set by others.

Next to this specifically Italian scenario, we can place a broader “language question” that has been acquiring increasing prominence in a number of disciplines. This question focuses on the connections between language, culture, and identity, and also, crucially, on the mobility of these notions and their relational or performative nature. It has been circulating in an interdisciplinary field that connects cultural studies with literary studies, history, anthropology, linguistics, translation studies, philosophy, and other areas within the humanities and social studies. In this context, notions of translation, on the one hand, and of transnationality, on the other, have become newly visible in intellectual debates. In spite of all the caveats raised about it, the popularity of the idea of cultural translation is a macroscopic sign of that growing interest.3 The centrality of notions and practices of mobility, in connection with phenomena such as globalization and neocapitalism, has also brought about a shift in various areas of the humanities toward “culturalist” and “transnational” approaches. Examples of this trend can be seen in recent re-readings of notions of cosmopolitanism, both in their refutation of the monolithic image of national cultures (as well as, importantly, national audiences) and in that of an equally all-encompassing monoglossia of the nation.4 Contemporary models speak instead of individuals who are “more than ever, prone to articulate complex affiliations, meaningful attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, people, places and traditions that lie beyond the boundaries of their resident nation-state”5—and also to multiple languages, I would add. In the literary field, a similar widening of horizons can be seen in the various reformulations of comparative literature that go under the label of World Literature,6 as well as in the new ways of approaching the history of literature discussed in volumes such as Linda Hutcheon’s and Mario Valdés’s Rethinking Literary History (2002), or, within Italian Studies, in Rebecca West’s article “The Place of Literature in Italian Cultural Studies” (2001). It is with this theoretical and methodological shift in mind, but also with the political implications of the questione della lingua in our sights, that we might want to rethink the role of language and nation in Italian Cultural Studies.

Taking the two distinct but nevertheless connecting premises I have just set out as my starting point, I would like to ask a series of questions focusing on language in today’s Italy. How can we read the nexus of language and nation in a way that does not fall into the trap of a binary opposition between nationalism and localism, and that avoids the naturalization of language into ethnicity, as well as the teleological model leading from the origin of the nation to its ultimate unity (for which read homogeneity)? How can a reflection on language avoid the exclusionary oppositions between standard and dialect, or between national and foreign, helping us to make both visible and audible a more inclusive notion of “Italy” and of “Italianness”? And how can such a re-reading of nation and language—or rather of languages, of polylingualism and of translation—help us to make sense of the contemporary map of Italian culture? If we take literary production as a testing ground on which to trace the multiple figurations of this “languages question,” we may also ask: what kind of map of contemporary Italian literature would emerge from this new geography of languages? And what would happen if, instead of the teleological unity which has remained at the core of Italian literary historiography, at least from De Sanctis onwards, we framed the discussion in terms of multiplicity, mobility, overlapping trajectories? Walter Mignolo, borrowing a formula first used by Sheldon Pollock, talks of this kind of approach to literature, culture and language in terms of “literary cultures in history,” suggesting that we discuss literary practices in a transnational landscape, and that we concentrate on how linguistic maps, literary geographies, and cultural landscapes are being reshaped in the twenty-first century.7 The invocation of a transnational context should not appear out of place in a discussion of language and nation. What the plurality of languages which populate the national landscape materially demonstrates is the porous nature, if not of national borders, at least of those constructs we label as national cultures. At the same time, that plurality is also reminding us of the productive and uncontainable nature of language which, as both Croce and Gramsci had already understood in their respective approaches to Italy’s questione della lingua, can never be reduced to a fixed, static model, and whose development can never be foreseen, nor established a priori by any national authority.8

Discussing “literary cultures in history” in the context of contemporary Italy requires a direct engagement with the plurality of linguistic expressions which characterizes that context, with the individual roles of those expressions, but also with the polylingual practices and self-translation strategies that allow writers (and their readers) to negotiate the complexity of Italy’s linguistic landscape. Both self-translation and polylingualism are terms I am using to highlight the nonbinary nature of such language practices. Polylingualism can encompass wider phenomena than bilingualism, whether between local and standard variants, or between different languages, one or more of which may be minority languages in the specific setting under consideration.9 Self-translation, in turn, is not limited to a sequential process in which a writer produces a text in one language and then transfers it into a second. Instead, both sets of practices underline the fluidity of language behavior, its ability to incorporate multiple codes, at times juxtaposing them, in other cases mixing them to create original hybrid forms of expression, or even disguising their presence below a deceptively homogeneous surface. Together, the two terms identify a range of practices that include the type of language switch Steven Kellman has labelled as “translingual imagination;” that is “the phenomenon of authors who write in more than one language or at least in a language other than their primary one,”10 but also go beyond it. Kellman’s definition still tends to maintain a rather self-contained notion of language, privileging the idea of a switch between such individually homogeneous territories. I am more interested, on the other hand, in the fluidity of language phenomena and in modes of writing for which the plurality and combination of languages represent essential, constitutive elements, markers of the composite nature of both individual and cultural identities, as well as of their ability to spill beyond national boundaries.11 Conceptualizing such polylingual writing practices in terms of self-translation also underlines the question of agency, the way in which the subject can sustain difference, heterogeneity, complex and fluid notions of identity and social interaction, by working with the complexity and fluidity of languages. At the same time, this kind of writing questions the assumed monolingualism of the audience, calling its bluff and asking the reader to perform further acts of translation—or at least be prepared to accept some of the opacities of the text, with their necessary implications.

In spite of all attempts to contain literature within national boundaries, the kind of polylingual writing I am describing is much more common than we might think, and the Italian cultural context, in all its complexity, is a particularly fertile ground for the study of this kind of phenomena. On the one hand, Italy’s ambiguous position in center-periphery models of world cultures makes the Italian case particularly impervious to the lure of simplistic binary models—and therefore all the more interesting.12 On the other, the inclusive, multiple readings of Italian literature embodied in the study of “literary cultures in history,” with its explicit political implications and its refusal of any autonomous visions of the literary field, is an agenda that could well fit within the remit of Italian Cultural Studies. In the rest of this chapter I will try to put these ideas to the test, first by re-reading, in their light, a fundamental essay in twentieth-century Italian literary historiography, Carlo Dionisotti’s “Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana”; and then by tracing the role of polylingualism and self-translation in the work of a small number of contemporary authors who are more usually associated with the double (and somewhat specular) antitheses between standard Italian and dialect, on the one hand, or national and foreign languages, on the other.

2. Rereading Dionisotti

In September 2009 the Corriere della Sera published an article devoted to the negative verdict expressed by a group of prestigious “italianisti italiani” (Italian specialists of Italian literature) on proposed initiatives relating to dialects to be included within the framework of the celebrations for the impending 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification. In it we read:

“Serious and dangerous” is how recent initiatives concerning the 2011 celebrations for the Unification of Italy and dialects have been defined . . . ; initiatives which “aim to call into question the unitary nature of Italian language and culture, in the areas of social life, communication, education.” Serious and dangerous, because our cultural tradition is “a fertile crossing between a plurality of experiences and the tension towards unification.”

Interviewing Giulio Ferroni, the journalist asks: “Why is it deemed dangerous to call into question this unitary dimension? After all, one of the great scholars of literature who followed De Sanctis, Carlo Dionisotti, had already expressed doubts on ‘De Sanctis’s theocracy’ and on its historical architecture.” To this, Ferroni replies:

According to Dionisotti, we have a variety of centers which nevertheless tend towards a common discourse: each one of these centers compares itself to the others. Dionisotti was energetically asserting his family links with the Risorgimento and in his depiction of history and geography he never cast any doubt on that tradition: for him, as he looked at Italy from London, where he was living, the attention paid to local variants was an integral part of a European horizon.13

The reference here is to Dionisotti’s most famous article, “Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana,” a text that is often evoked in connection with questions of language, literature, and the Italian nation. The article was written in 1949 and published for the first time in 1951, in the British scholarly journal Italian Studies. Dionisotti later included it in a 1967 volume by the same title, where it sits between a piece on the “inheritance of Croce” in Italian literary studies and one on the history of the Italian language. In his “Premessa e dedica” to the volume, Dionisotti frames his own work in the context of the Italy which emerged from World War II, stating on the one hand the imperative need to “remedy, as much as we could, the destruction of everything around us and within us” and on the other, the necessity of querying any homogeneous constructions of Italian culture: “We had always believed in unity, and hence in one history of Italy and one history of Italian literature. Yet we had also always held doubts about that unitary structure, which in our times had proved itself so unfit, and therefore about the corresponding history of Italy and of Italian literature that had been produced during the Risorgimento.”14 As a consequence, he asserts the impossibility of

a resurgence of the Risorgimento tradition of Italian literary studies, except perhaps inasmuch as such studies might be recalled from the first lunar circle of the poetic heavens . . . down to the earthly flowerbed of Italy’s linguistic and literary unity. And it goes without saying that, today, that small plot can only be seen from the height of the achieved unification and within the general perspective of other languages and literatures.15

What is striking here, and also in the article as a whole, is the modernity of Dionisotti’s position, in spite of the fact that he is using a lexicon and a conceptual framework which may initially sound rather alien to either contemporary literary theory or cultural studies. The central question posed in the article is the dialectic of unity and fragmentation which Dionisotti places at the core of the development of a notion of “Italian literature” and of any attempt to trace a history of it. So his central question is “if and to what extent the unitary line along which the historical development of Italian literature is normally traced might be acceptable.”16 Dionisotti answers the question on the one hand by refuting both the teleological interpretation of national literature and the myths of origin which accompany it; and on the other, by proposing a more fragmented or polyphonic and polycentric view of that evolution. In privileging a spatial, geographical model over the more commonly adopted chronological and teleological vision of the literary history of Italy, he stresses the complexity of multiple lines of development in which local, national, and international (which, it should be noted, means strictly European for Dionisotti) vectors intersect. Often, he maintains, that intersection is due to the work of “emigrants and expatriates,”17 starting from the first and foremost of them, Tuscans like Dante and Petrarch.18 What he delineates is a “panoramic view of Italy, of its culture and literature which is profoundly and variously fractured,” but also “a view which extends beyond the boundaries of Italy.”19 This multifocal perspective lends a strong comparative feel to Dionisotti’s approach and corroborates the already mentioned intent of reading Italian literature “within the general perspective of other languages and literatures.” Dionisotti’s language and his European frame of reference may seem quite limiting today, but his project resonates with contemporary theorizations in ways which are surprisingly current. There is a striking air of familiarity, for instance, between his geographical mapping of literary development within Italy and further afield, across Europe, and Walter Mignolo’s recent call for a spatial approach which would stress the development of world literatures across the whole of modernity, from the inception of the colonial era to the moment of neo-capitalist globalization in which we are inscribed.20

His spatial approach also allows Dionisotti to adopt an original position on the question of language, as well as on the connection between language and nation. Dionisotti can be quite negative about dialect. He speaks of the emergence, after the death of Petrarch, of a “dialect literature in the true sense of the word, that is knowingly based on the use of a language of inferior standing,”21 and talks of phenomena of “dialectal degradation.”22 Yet he also identifies in Italian writers as well as in their readers a strong “linguistic polyvalence,” described as “almost the co-existence of two nationalities: a municipal and native one, with its dialect, so incongruous and yet capable of adhering to the things, interests, attachments of everyday life; and an Italian one, entirely ideal, obtained at the cost of a laborious and fragile linguistic transposition.”23 Dionisotti is here recognizing the constructed nature not just of national culture, but also of its association with a national literature. And he is assigning to dialect and standard language a complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, role. The connection between these different forms of expression is achieved by Italian writers through an act of self-translation, described by Dionisotti in terms of a conscious gesture of idealistic adherence to the nation. Yet the different modes of expression at their disposal are not presented as mutually exclusive, nor as teleologically oriented toward a desirable and definitive resolution leading to national monoglossia. Rather, they coexist, feed each other, and form the basis for the evolution of original forms of production—just as the same is true of influences coming from other national traditions. The polylingual nature of the Italian literary tradition and its permeability to multiple influences are important corollaries of its polycentrism, but Dionisotti underlines that these are creative components of that tradition, not just disruptive obstacles to its cohesive development. The stress is on the evolving nature of language, on its complexity, and on the productive role of contact between different idioms. Next to De Sanctis’s vision of an Italian literary history which starts with the thirteenth century, “since at that point we find the first documents of the literary use of the new language, and which then continues to adhere to that usage, without paying too much attention to the survival and reappearance of the use of a different language,”24 Dionisotti therefore sets the image of a “panoramic view of Italy, of its culture and literature [as] profoundly and variously fractured,”25 even in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And if in De Sanctis “the thread of linguistic tradition is lost from the start, and a different one takes its place, that of the moral and political history of Italy,”26 in Dionisotti, instead, language, like geography, remains central to the vision of a composite map of Italy whose study must include, for instance “more precise details about Latin culture and literature all over Italy in the fourteenth century. As well as of the presence and resistance of so-called dialect traditions, that is to say, not Tuscan.”27 Rather than supporting the idealized relationship between (the history of) Italian literature and the process of national unification, Dionisotti here seems to stress the need for the study of what is actually produced by a given society, whatever the language it may be written in. Without wishing to push my interpretation too far, turning Dionisotti into some kind of “culturalist” ante litteram, this is a position that has many points of contact with recent calls for a multilingual as well as multicultural literary history, capable of looking beyond the nation-building functions of the national language and the accompanying premises of ethnic and linguistic singularity.28

What remains central for Dionisotti, even in this more fragmented map, is however the importance to be given, through geography and history, “to those conditions which, throughout space and time, constrain and exalt the life of men.”29 These words close the 1951 article, in which De Sanctis’s work had been praised as “the coherent and dramatic picture of a literature which is alive in the life of a human community across the centuries, . . . the inheritance left by those men to following, distant generations, part of a common effort, of the dialogue of the present with both past and future, of which it is both the result and the antecedent.”30 De Sanctis’s vision, according to Dionisotti, was eminently coherent with the experience of the Risorgimento, but not with that of subsequent generations of Italians, including his own.31 And it is significant that the Premessa to the volume in which the article was later reprinted, written in 1967, should end on a different note, not a heroic one, but one of subdued hope: “What remained was the hope—to which I found myself hanging on—of a different new Italy, freer and also better articulated, more faithful to its own Medieval and Renaissance traditions, to what, thanks to her, had become the common heritage of European civilization.”32 This is the Italy Dionisotti is writing about (in Italian, for Einaudi), and treating as a project worth believing in, from his de-centered position as an expatriate who nevertheless remembers the debt he owes to the formative years he spent in Turin, one of the not-so-peripheral centers of polycentric Italy.

3. Polylingual Writers in Today’s Italy

Dionisotti’s treatment of the history of Italian literature effectively stops with D’Annunzio and Verga, while his account of literary historiography is firmly rooted, as already mentioned, in the cultural and political geography of post-war Italy. If we now consider today’s map, taking into account contemporary developments in both the literary field and the way we conceptualize it, the polycentrism, the polylingualism, and the permeability of the national landscape to transnational perspectives become all the more evident. Writers and readers in today’s Italy act in a context that combines the awareness of a prestigious as well as complex national tradition with impulses deriving from an increasingly global cultural market, from the re-positioning of Italy and its culture within a post-colonial horizon, and from the growing mobility of both cultural agents and cultural goods. The role of Italy within this wider map is in itself complicated. Italy is at once an integral part of the West (understood as a cultural, economic, and political center) and one of its peripheries.33 It is a country with little memory of its own colonial past, yet also one that is increasingly part of evolving post-colonial geographies. It is a space characterized by substantial internal and external mobility, by multiple displacements whose intersecting trajectories further complicate the boundaries of Italian cultures and make them impervious to effective policing (should anyone wish to carry it out). Tracing the personal routes of a small number of contemporary writers and the different ways in which they may be considered part of Italian literary and cultural production—or of Italy’s recent contribution to “literary cultures in history”—highlights the way in which the connections between language, culture, and nation continue on the one hand to demand attention, while on the other, they can only be accounted for effectively through readings that refuse to adopt the fiction of “easy” singularity and homogeneity.

A suitable starting point is the work of Luigi Meneghello. Like Dionisotti, Meneghello was an ex-centric Italian who, having left Italy for the United Kingdom after World War II, mostly wrote from the dislocated perspective of the expatriate (dispatriato, in his own terminology),34 or by positioning himself, within Italy, in the provincial periphery of Malo, the small village of the Veneto region where he grew up. Meneghello’s language is equally dislocated: a polyphony of standard Italian (which he magisterially orchestrated in a variety of registers and moods), local Malo dialect, and other national languages (mostly, but not exclusively, English). All of these idioms are treated with both huge respect and total irreverence. Each language variant is twisted and turned into the phonetic or semantic codes of the others (so the English “tough” is transformed into “taff,” for instance).35 This is conscious manipulation, occasionally even mistranslation, exercised by the writer in order to gain, precisely, that ability to “adhere to things” of which Dionisotti had spoken in his discussion of the “linguistic polyvalence” characterizing Italian culture. Most of Meneghello’s work can be read as a testimony to personal translation, or “transportation”:36 political, cultural, intimately personal. And each language he uses is appropriated and then turned into a unique form of expression to which the reader is meticulously introduced, yet will only get partial access, in ways that are reminiscent of George Steiner’s idea of idiolect as the ultimate building block of communication: a basic unit of currency which makes every exchange an act of translation.37 As a result, and only apparently paradoxically, Meneghello’s use of dialect could never offer a model for ethnic essentialism and petty localism, just as his voice never lends itself to rhetorical grandiosity. His idiosyncratic rendition of interpersonal communication defies any exclusionary, identitarian uses (or abuses) of language, while at the same time explicitly acknowledging the constructed nature of Italian as a national language and its constant dialogue with both infra- and inter-national influences.

A remarkably different and possibly even more intricate personal and linguistic history is the one of Giose Rimanelli. Often discussed both as an Italian and an Italian-American writer, Rimanelli found mobility already inscribed in his family history, since his mother’s, his father’s, and one of his grandfathers’ lives were marked by migration to and from the Americas. His own life and work also revolve around travel. Born in Molise, he escaped village life as a young man and journeyed north, only to be forcibly enlisted in the troops of the Repubblica di Salò (a story he told in Tiro al piccione (1953), his first and most well-known novel, based on the autobiographical account of a war fought on the wrong side).38 He later moved to the United States, where he continued to write mostly in Italian, but increasingly also in English. Rimanelli’s work presents a number of classification problems, both in terms of genre and of language. It also, and at least partly as a result of its linguistic complexity, begs the question of whether it belongs to a specific national tradition. In a classic history of Italian literature there would be space only for his Italian books, and especially for his early novels, such as, precisely, Tiro al piccione. Here Rimanelli’s voice, though already individual, is still firmly placed within recognizable literary trends and linguistic traditions. While it is significant that contemporary critics should already note, in this first novel, the existence of a questione della lingua (usually framed in negative terms, as an unresolved tension between dialect and standard, or literary, Italian),39 it is in his later writing that Rimanelli’s polylingualism emerges as a key constitutive element of his work. This is eminently the case with the extreme pastiche of Benedetta in Guysterland: A Liquid Novel (1993), a book that, according to Fred Gardaphé, “demonstrates that one culture could not satisfy Rimanelli,” and which Anthony Tamburri has described as “the amalgamation of two socio-cultural experiences—the Italian and the North American—which, in turn, constitute Rimanelli’s status as a truly bicultural (as well as bicontinental) writer.”40 Next to his novels stand Rimanelli’s multiple self-translations, self-fashionings, and auto-fictionalizations in works such as Familia. Memoria dell’emigrazione (2000), a volume which defies generic attribution (it mixes biography, autobiography, essay, literary criticism, poetry) and which was published in Italy, by the Molise-based publishing house Iannone. Equally complex are his collections of poetry, where Molisano, Latin, Provençal, Italian, English, and other languages sit side-by-side in composite arrangements, often creating a patchwork effect on the page.41 Rimanelli’s most recent books thus consciously occupy multiple spaces—yet they tend to be classified either as Italian-American (written in English, therefore not Italian) or as regional (due to the perceived predominance of dialect). These classification issues underline the fact that, in cases such as Rimanelli’s, reception also becomes a double or multiple process, tracing its meandering paths from the United States to Italy and back again (or vice versa).42 The circumstances applying to both the production and the reception of works by an author like Rimanelli call for a transnational perspective capable of overcoming the limitation of both the national model of literary historiography and the one based on the notion of hyphenated literatures, demanding instead a more fluid and flexible understanding both of literary and of language trajectories.

A different geography is the one inscribed in the work of Fabrizia Ramondino and in its interpretation. What stands out in this case is the question of critical appropriation and of the predominance, within it, of local, national or transnational perspectives. In Italy Ramondino is often perceived as a Neapolitan writer or, more precisely, as part of the new generation of Neapolitan authors who emerged in the 1970s and found their background in the social and political movements of those years. Yet the story told by Ramondino’s writing, by her use of languages and by her self-translational practices is at least partly a different one. Italian, in its standard form and often in highly literary tones and registers, is the backbone of her writing, but its surface is tessellated with multiple insertions and acts of translation. Ramondino used “Portoquino” (a form of Majorquino), Castilian, German, French, Neapolitan, and other language variants from the Campania area.43 To this already-complex map we then need to add her attention to the way in which language variants relate to class and gender. Ramondino directly linked her sensitivity for languages to her early experiences of travel and to her sense of being at once deeply rooted and “unhomed,” of belonging to different places and yet remaining in a condition of “unbelonging.”44 Never sure about the place she could call herself a native of, or rather imperviously sure that she was a native of multiple places and tribes, but ex-centric to all, Ramondino felt like a foreigner in her own home:

I therefore do not feel safely at home in Naples—or in other countries and cities, for that matter—as if I belonged to a remote and scattered ethnic minority. . . . I believe the reason for many misunderstandings might lay in this: I did not have one mother tongue, but two: my mother’s Italian, that of a Neapolitan lady of cosmopolitan bent, and the Majorcan language of my nurse, a peasant from Sa Pobla, a village “so poor it did not even know what war was.” So, as well as in cities and countries, I have not felt safely at home in languages, and social classes too.45

As a result of this multiple and uncertain belonging, Ramondino’s writing is highly polylingual and adopts a variety of strategies to verbalize cultural change, intersection, and transformation, both at individual and collective levels. As noted by Rita Wilson, for Ramondino “writing represents a struggle to symbolize a new social and geographical configuration, a form of cognitive mapping which is not the establishment of fixed borders but the recognition of a world in flux.”46 Reading Ramondino in this way complicates her position as a regional, national, or international writer, but also highlights how her complex cultural profile is directly related to her language practices (as a reader, as a writer, and as an intellettuale). In a context such as the Italian one, where the relationship between dialect and national language remains a contentious issue, refusing an oppositional, binary model and stressing, instead, complex polylingual practices such as the ones adopted by Ramondino (or, indeed, by Meneghello and Rimanelli) is potentially disruptive and therefore all the more important. It stresses, among other things, that there is and there has always been heterogeneity in “Italian culture,” but it also reiterates that heterogeneity is a constitutive element of a national construction, not the denial of its historical existence.

A specular argument can be made by turning the vector of mobility in the opposite direction and looking at recent writing in Italian by authors whose identity is marked by mobility toward, rather than out of, the national space. Here an examination of language practices highlights the way in which much migrant writing exploits the possibilities offered by polylingualism and self translation in order to trace new cartographies of the self and also of Italian cultures. For some of these authors Italian is a learnt language (though, it is worth noting, not always an ex-colonial one). For others it may be part of a bilingual or multilingual education. In either case, most of them do not produce writing modeled on the idea of a homogeneous, monoglossic Italian language—nor do they produce work which could be classified, simplistically, as “deficient,” lacking the fluency of the “native” writer. On the contrary, those authors who actively choose to adopt Italian as their language of expression aim to exploit, as writers do, all its multiplicity. In the case of Tahar Lamri’s I sessanta nomi dell’amore (2007), for instance, this means intersecting multiple register and variants of Italian, including regional ones, with influences taken from the Arabic tradition. In Amara Lakhous’s Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (2006), the use of regional inflections also plays a role in re-writing and at times parodying elements of the Italian literary tradition, starting with Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957). In using local accents, these writers also effectively expose the fallacy implicit in any political appropriation of vernacular variants as essentialised markers of ethnicity: “dialect,” as they demonstrate, is just as learnable as any other form of language.

A further example of polylingual practice and cultural self-translation is that of authors such as Cristina Ali Farah and Gabriella Ghermandi: writers whose personal biographies are inscribed with mobility and multiple cultures, but for whom the Italian language cannot be identified with the experience of migration. In the two novels published in 2007 by Ghermandi and Ali Farah (Regina di fiori e di perle and Madre piccola, respectively), the figure of the story-teller as intercultural interpreter plays a central role, as the female protagonists take up the challenge of speaking across (apparently) separate cultures and reminding us of their intricate histories of reciprocal implications. For Ghermandi and Ali Farah, Italian is the language of the mother (or the father), rather than an adopted language, yet their mixed heritage means that this is also an idiom inhabited by other presences, other voices, other traditions, and their writing is distinctly polyphonic in texture as well as in structure.47 Ghermandi explicitly addresses the Italian literary tradition, since her book can be read at least partly as a response to Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (1947), one of the few Italian colonial novels to have achieved success and continuing visibility. At the same time, her rewriting of Flaiano foregrounds Ethiopian voices and Ethiopian artistic traditions, adopting orality and storytelling as a narrative strategy. Ali Farah, on the other hand, uses a variety of registers and modes of communication—also often privileging orality—in order to convey the specificity of each voice within her narrative. Both authors produce novels that have the ability to speak to multiple traditions and to renew the Italian language from within while also inflecting it with external influences. Those traditions and influences are not simply juxtaposed, or contrasted in a fictionalized clash of cultures, but rather coexist in works that are eminently “Italian” although (or, perhaps, precisely because) they are also transnational.

What the examples I have sketched provide is a route to and through polyphony that is constitutive and not necessarily “schizofrenic” (unlike the image of bilingualism sketched by Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, in a well-known self-portrait).48 In the work of these and other polylingual writers, national spaces are not entirely self-contained, and voices, languages, traditions, as well as people are recognized as both mobile and inherently dishomogeneous. It may be tempting to ask whether all or some of this is “Italian literature.” In any kind of “purist” formulation this is probably an unanswerable question (and also one which I would not really be interested in answering), but what I have described is certainly part of “Italian literary practices in history” and, as such, it should be part of Italian Cultural Studies. Seen from this perspective, the small but only apparently trivial political diatribes on language and nation which periodically resurface in today’s Italy can also be denounced as inherently misguided: there is no absolute positive or negative value to be attached to “local vernaculars,” “national standards,” or “transnational polylingualism” understood as essentialized entities. Rather, each position, each variant, and each writing strategy gains its value from the uses we make of it, from its connections to communities, from the political goals it is attached to. And each choice may even be read differently from different positions—though those readings will never be entirely free-floating since, as Hutcheon reminds us, any history of the nation is told strategically, with political goals in mind, and with one eye to the past and the other to the future.49 The polylingual nature of Italy, the acts of self-translation inscribed in its cultural history and geography, are a fact of that history and of that geography, as are the mobility and heterogeneity of its inhabitants. If we are interested in cultural practices, these facts have to be part of our horizon, precisely at the point where they take us away from the fiction of the homogeneous nation and into its constitutive differences, which are both infranational and transnational. This acknowledgment does not undermine the possibility of national identification, or, more precisely, of an inclusive model of national identification. On the contrary, it is the fiction of homogeneity that does so, by proposing the constant possibility of further reductionisms, further localisms, further exclusions, and making space for localistic jingoism on the one hand and the rhetoric of nationalism on the other.

Notes

*I would like to thank the AHRC’s Diasporas, Migration, and Identities research program for its support to the workshop series “Mobility and Identity Formation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the ‘Italian Case,’” which allowed me to pursue the work developed in the present article.

1. “Whenever the language question comes to the fore, one way or another, it means that a number of other issues are emerging: the formation and broadening of the ruling class, the need for closer and safer relationships between the elites and the mass of the people within the nation, that is the need to reorganize cultural hegemony”; Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 2346; on language and culture in Italy during the twentieth century see also Tullio De Mauro, “La questione della lingua,” in La Cultura italiana del Novecento, ed. Corrado Stajano (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996). This and all other translations are mine.

2. On these topics, see, for instance: Salvo Intravaia, “Gelmini: ‘Dall’anno prossimo tetto del 30% per gli stranieri,’” La Repubblica, January 8, 2010, accessed May 3, 2010, http://www.repubblica.it/scuola/2010/01/08/news/gelmini_dall_anno_prossimo_tetto_del_30_per_gli_stranieri-1878519/index.html?ref=search; Silvia Fumarola, “Sanremo in dialetto. Via libera ai testi in lingua locale,” La Repubblica, November 14, 2009, accessed May 3, 2010, http://www.repubblica.it/2009/09/sezioni/spettacoli_e_cultura/sanremo-2010/sanremo-dialetto/sanremo-dialetto.html?ref=search; Francesco Merlo, “Negozi, cinese e arabo cancellati dale insegne,” La Repubblica, April 24, 2010, accessed May 3, 2010, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2010/04/24/negozi-cinese-arabo-cancellati-dalle-insegne.html. I will not attempt to draw a strict distinction, in my discussion, between language and dialect. As should become clear, the opposition between the two is in many ways spurious. Where appropriate, I will opt for the more flexible notion of language variants.

3. On the notion of “Cultural Translation,” see the debate hosted by the journal Translation Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (2009), vol. 3, no. 1 (2010), and vol. 3, no. 3 (2010).

4. For the reference to monoglossia, see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

5. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, “Introduction: Conceiving Cosmpolitanism, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.

6. See, in particular, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. De Bevoise (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004); David Damrosh, What Is World Literature?, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London and New York: Verso, 2004).

7. Walter Mignolo, “Rethinking the Colonial Model,” in Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), see especially pp. 162–68; on related topics, see also Mignolo’s “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging and (Trans)nationalism,” Modern Languages Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1996): 181–96.

8. See Gramsci 2342–46, and Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Palermo: Sandron, 1902). Gramsci, in particular, stresses that historical grammar can only be comparative in nature, since “language facts, like all other historical facts, cannot be confined within national boundaries, strictly speaking” (2343). As for any normative grammar, this is always “a ‘choice,’ a cultural directive, that is, always an act of national cultural politics” (2344). However, the development of a national language is marked by “a complex of molecular processes” and any intervention on it can not be considered decisive: “what that language might become cannot be foreseen nor dictated” (2345).

9. I am using polylingualism in a way that is in many ways synonymous with multilingualism. I prefer the first term, however, because it seems to avoid associations with more popular but also tainted words such as multiculturalism.

10. Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), viii.

11. A more useful notion is perhaps Rainier Grutman’s concept of heterolingualism—a co-presence of idioms that can take multiple forms: “In principle, texts can either give equal prominence to two (or more) languages or add a liberal sprinkling of other languages to a dominant language clearly identified as their central axis. The latter solution is much more commonly encountered, and the actual quantity of foregrounded linguistic material varies wildly”; Rainier Grutman, “Refraction and Recognition: Literary Multilingualism in Translation,” Target 18, no. 1 (2006): 19.

12. The reference here is to hierarchical models of literary production and diffusion, such as, in particular, the one presented in Casanova.

13. All quotations are from Paolo Di Stefano, “Ferroni: ‘Studiare il dialetto ci porterebbe fuori dall’ Europa.’ La nostra migliore narrativa si è sempre mossa con uno sforzo unitario,” Il Corriere della Sera, September 29, 2009; on the enduring legacy of Dionisotti’s article, see for instance Francesco Erbani, “Viaggio tra scrittori e poeti d’Italia. Asor Rosa: ‘Cosí è nata la Letteratura’,” la Repubblica, August 27, 2007, accessed May 3, 2010, http://www.repubblica.it/2007/08/speciale/altri/2007letteratura/asor-rosa/asor-rosa.html?ref=search.

14. Carlo Dionisotti, “Premessa e dedica,” in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 12.

15. Ibid., 13.

16. Carlo Dionisotti, “Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana,” in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 30.

17. Ibid., 32.

18. Ibid., 34.

19. Ibid.

20. Discussing possible models for a global colonial and post-colonial perspective on literary history, Mignolo claims that “Periodization has to be double-sided—spatial and not only temporal,” adding that “If periods have to be maintained because they are helpful in certain ways, they will be spatial more than temporal”; Mignolo, “Rethinking the Colonial Model,” 169.

21. Dionisotti, “Geografia,” 35.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 38.

24. Ibid., 28.

25. Ibid., 34.

26. Ibid., 28.

27. Ibid., 33.

28. See Linda Hutcheon, “Rethinking the National Model,” in Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. On current debates concerning multilingualism and multiculturalism in contemporary literary historiography and, in particular, on the case of Catalan studies, see Stewart King, “From literature to Letters: Rethinking Catalan Literary History,” in New Spain, New Literatures, ed. Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), 233–44; of direct relevance here is his discussion of the work of Jordi Rubió i Balaguer.

29. Dionisotti, “Geografia,” 45.

30. Ibid., 29.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 15.

33. On Italy’s position in the geopolitical and cultural map, see Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

34. See Luigi Meneghello, Il dispatrio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993).

35. Luigi Meneghello, I piccoli maestri (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998), 49. This kind of manipulation is even more in evidence in Il dispatrio and in those works which foreground local dialect, such as Libera nos a malo.

36. In his “Note” to Libera nos a malo, a book revolving around the relationship between Italian and dialect and their respective roles in the formation of personal identity, Meneghello defines this process as a form of “transportation” of dialect into Italian; “Note,” in Libera nos a malo (Milan: Mondadori, 1986), 283-84. Giulio Lepschy has described this same work by Meneghello as “an ‘Italian’ book, written ‘in Italian,’ which belongs to Italian culture (and, through it, to European and international culture), and at the same time endows it with new and original elements . . . as long as we remember that the Italian cultural and linguistic tradition is pluri-lingual and pluri-stylistic.” Lepschy, “In che lingua?,” in Per Libera nos a malo: A 40 anni dal libro di Luigi Meneghello, ed. Giuseppe Barbieri and Francesca Caputo (Vicenza: Terra Ferma, 2005), 22. In the same article Lepschy also briefly notes the peculiar process of self-translation used by Meneghello (ibid., 20–21).

37. See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

38. Giose Rimanelli, Tiro al piccione (Milan: Mondadori, 1953; reprint Turin: Einaudi, 1991). The novel was written under the influence of authors such as Pavese (who also read Rimanelli’s manuscript, as did Calvino and Vittorini, and recommended it for publication).

39. In his “Introduzione” to the Einaudi edition of the novel, Sebastiano Martelli, for instance, comments on what he perceives as a “lack of fusion between linguistic codes (popular standard, regional Italian, dialect, literary language), something which is after all in line with the uneven “creolization” typical of our neorealist prose.” Sebastiano Martelli, “Introduzione,” in Tiro al piccione, by Giose Rimanelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), xxii; the reference to creolization is taken by Martelli from Maria Corti, Il viaggio testuale (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 97–98.

40. The quotations are from Fred Gardaphé, “Preface,” in Benedetta in Guysterland, by Giose Rimanelli (Montreal: Guernica, 1993), 18; and Anthony J. Tamburri, A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 65. Both Tiro al piccione and Benedetta in Guysterland had a complex genesis: the first was initially written in 1945, re-drafted in 1949, and eventually published only four years later; the second was written between 1961and 1972, but only published after twenty years. When it finally appeared, Benedetta in Guysterland was Rimanelli’s first full-length fictional work in the English language.

41. See for instance Giose Rimanelli, Moliseide: Songs and Ballads in Molisan Dialect (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) and Giose Rimanelli, Gioco d’amore. Amore del gioco: Poesia provenzale e moderna in dialetto molisano e lingua (Isernia: Cosmo Iannone, 2002); it should also be noted that Rimanelli’s poetical work includes a substantial number of actual translations.

42. This also raises, by the way, the issue of the critic’s position. In my case, as an Italian national working in Italian Studies in the United Kingdom, I am noticeably de-centred from both the perspective of the “italianisti italiani” and that of Italian-American Studies.

43. For suitable examples, see in particular: Fabrizia Ramondino’s Storie di patio (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), Taccuino tedesco (Milan: La tartaruga, 1987), and Guerra d’infanzia e di Spagna (Turin: Einaudi, 2001).

44. I use the terms “unhomed” and “unbelonging” in the sense in which Irit Rogoff introduces them in her Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual, where she speaks of, among other things, a “commitment to strangeness, to unhomedness.” Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 6.

45. Fabrizia Ramondino, Star di casa (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 8.

46. Rita Wilson, Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000), 98.

47. In her “Postfazione” to Ghermandi’s novel, Cristina Lombardi-Diop similarly describes the book as “a choral novel.” Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Postfazione,” in Regina di fiori e di perle, by Gabriella Ghermandi (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), 259.

48. See his autobiographical article: Tzvetan Todorov, “Bilingualism, Dialogism and Schizophrenia,” New Formations 17 (1992): 16–25.

49. Hutcheon, “Rethinking the National Model.”

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