And the Word was Made Ink-carnate: From Oral to Written to Published Literature in Italian America - Martino Marazzi*
This essay dates from 1861. In the beginning was the end. In the final pages of Salvatore Scibona’s acclaimed novel by the same title, The End, an old Italian woman who emigrated “for love” from the Roman countryside to Ohio in the 1890s seals the epic with a stream of consciousness which reads like a letter to her beloved. Many things and thoughts pass through her mind, including the following: “here is what we call a mother tongue. Think of the physical tongue of your mother. Think of your father’s kisses on that tongue and how the kisses precede you into the world./ My dear, I have never heard spoken since a word in my mother’s tongue. My darling, I forsook it for the promise of you.”1
I’m proposing here that we look at the books and all the various items on display in the current exhibition and now, this website, as testimonies to a unique phase of dynamic balance between a before and an after. They are, at the same time, the result of an arrival and a point of departure – individually and historically. They are the product of a subtly shifting expressiveness. The tongues and kisses of Scibona’s female character looking back at the defining years of her life belong to the complex dimension of mass migration, a tsunami sweeping away people’s lives, transporting them elsewhere, metamorphosing their culture and inner being with the energy of a centrifugal force.
“Mass migration” includes local histories, global economics, wars and persecutions, risks and dreams, poverty and opportunity, uprooting, distance, crushing toil, circadian cycle of hope and despair — and language caught in the midst, clenched to, as it were, a raft, a complex system of cyberlogic daily dismembered and benumbed, striving to somehow reconfigure itself.
Real life, and real spoken words, precede — at least from the point of view of personal histories — the social and cultural landscape rapidly refashioned by the Italian American communities over the other side of the ocean. I believe that if we assume, for the sake of our analysis, a hypothetical typology comprised of three inter-related stages — Speaking, Writing, Publishing — we could better approach a dynamic that has linguistic trauma as one of its epicenters.
Speaking. – Let us start, then, by trying to briefly look at how Italians used their spoken language in the U.S., keeping in mind a sort of caveat: because in fact the actual and obvious weight of the oral dimension can by and large be inferred from written sources, so that if and when we discuss orality, it’s as if its improvisational dynamism has been muffled and long gone already. Nevertheless, its vitality gleams through whatever written documents we have available. These are fragile sources, better conveyed by some form of sound recording and/or visual reproduction. I’ll try to make do.
Some among the shrewdest early observers of the Italian “colonies” worldwide (Amy A. Bernardy, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Renzo Nissim, et al.) concur in their keen attention to the fleeting traces of the pliable, unheard-of, innovative use of the venerable Italian language in the new contexts of immigration. The language of Dante combusts with the different linguistic materials of the many distinct Italian dialects, and with the languages of arrival — whether they be English or, in Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese, French (in and all around Paris and the French Midi), and later German. Bernardy even fantasized, as early as 1911, about the day when the future historian would have the full catalogue of the colonial written documents at his or her disposal — a corpus inscriptionum (much like the one that scholars of ancient Rome religiously leaf through) made of street signs, posters, flyers, commercial ads, and the like. (Some of these can be found, along with books, among the ephemera that are part of the Periconi collection.)
Sometimes, even a simple letter can suffice. That’s where lettera-ture comes from, after all: letters, either mailed back to the motherland, or just plainly and carefully written in longhand. Here are two examples. I was struck, only months ago, when i came across a large, elegant sign painted on the wall of a stone house in a minuscule village to the north of Lake Maggiore, deep in the Alps. This is a region from which laborers and impoverished landowners started emigrating very early in the 19th century. Many made it to the West Coast of the U.S., which, to make a long story short, explains the birth of the wine industry there. Giuseppe Leoni, a returning immigrant, limited himself to writing down his full name in big capital letters, adding only his arrival point, and the source of his acquired wealth: “Califorgna” — just like that, with a “gn.” The painted sign on the entrance wall of his house, built with the money of emigration, marks his proud homecoming: it’s a strong proclamation of success, attached to its tangible result, and a self-evident declaration of an identity that is spatially and chronologically defined by the migratory experience. The elemental phonetics highlights the Italian-ness of his American dream: despite the supposedly intense period spent in the remote West, and the equally committed effort at establishing the geography of his nostos (homecoming), he adopts with the utmost clarity the grapheme commonly used in Italian for the palatal sound: that “gn” sign is a sort of minimal cultural and linguistic slip; it visualizes in a way acceptable to an Italian-speaking person the foreignness of a not familiar name.
The corpus of the immigrants’ epistolary literature represent another enormous and inexhaustible body of evidence. Every researcher in this field has amassed distinct primary sources. Among my favorites I count the postcards sent in both directions, in part because of the relationship they dramatize between the verbal and the iconic, and furthermore because of the added layers of tenderness, self-vindication, and mischief that can be frequently extracted by a later third party (a contemporary reader) taking into consideration the distance between the sender and the addressee, and the imbalance between their different levels of knowledge.
The carefully written mailing card sent to Civiasco, a village of northwest Piedmont, on New Year’s eve, 1901, by Severo ***, a resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is addressed to his friend Florinda Zatti. The verso bears a touching photo of Third Avenue at Cooper Square, with Cooper Union to the left and the Third Avenue Elevated in full motion, speeding north and south. underneath it, commerce and human traffic. Severo has marked a cross on the upper right of the avenue, next to where he lives on East 11th Street.
He refers to the “terza avenida,” betraying a familiarity with Spanish: after all, we are informed, a “Carlo” who’s close to both correspondents has decided to stay in Barcelona, despite the fact that “io avreba stato molto contento che avesse venutto dove in poco tempo potteva guadagnare molto danaro” (which very roughly translates as I wood had had very happy that he had cum where in a short time he cood earn much money). here, too, the orthography is revealing; there are some mistakes (like in “avreba [i.e., “avrebbe”] stato,” instead of “sarei stato”), due maybe to Severo’s recourse to an uncommon tense; some forms reproduce “correctly” the dialectal pronunciation and grammar (anca te = “anche tu”, i.e. you too; poi = “puoi,” i.e., you can); and above all, it is fascinating to observe that there is not a single punctuation mark, as if such a brief message was meant mostly in its continuous entirety, almost like the prolonging in ink of a fast and fact-laden street conversation, and thus as if it was not concerned with internal prose rhythms and logical hierarchies, once it starts with the formulaic salutation, “Cara Florinda,” it proceeds in an uninterrupted flow all the way to Severo’s signature and address, followed by the only minuscule, but visible, period.
Is Severo Florinda’s fiancé? It is tempting to think he might have been; but as far as we know, we can only say that he’s ensconced downtown, bewildered by modern urban bustle, and that he is very aware of the economic opportunities around him. He sends wishes; he keeps in touch and promises a real letter in the future. He addresses his female friend with the intimate “you” form. he most probably left Italy for economic reasons, leaving his relationship with Florinda at an uncertain standstill. She needs to be reassured, but he can’t (or doesn’t feel he can) seriously commit himself. His card has an energetic pull, but manages to waddle in a typically mascu- line airiness. Here’s an atom in the very middle of American capitalism, at the beginning of the twentieth century. His shout back to his familiar hilltown2 must have been read by Florinda with a mixture of puzzlement and pride, hope and concern. What was this guy actually saying? What was going on in his mind? Are we (and she with us) witnessing the slow formation of a linguistic fault line?
The spoken word is subject to interpretation just like the written word. Examples like the above are not that dissimilar from the spirit of what scholars of Italian American history consider the master narrative of the Italian immigration to the U.S., the autobiographical account of Rosa Cassettari3, where the contagious alertness of this Milanese peasant, turned Chicagoan informer to the benefit of the local school of social work, in many instances lets us glimpse into a performative enactment of her bilingual identity. Rosa’s words, no matter how filtered by the professorial editing of her interlocutor Marie Hall Ets, usually resort to Italian bits when at their most spontaneous or emotional. Whenever we hear her speaking Italian, albeit in a flash, we sense that we are entering a particularly charged territory of her memory. And above all, it’s the interplay, the negotiation between the two codes, that really counts, the movement back and forth. There is not one language on one side, and another language on the other side; rather, there is a conscience which operates linguistically on a moving ground.
Writing. – immigrant writers transport such a dynamic to a different, one could say a much higher, degree. And I’m referring here more in general to a conscious use of artistic expression. That is, writers, artists and intellectuals can be more effective to the degree that they tap into the shared needs and codes of their community. Their creativity can show up on a page, on a canvas, on a stage. The more perceptive observers of the time were quite aware of this:
But the ill-clad Italians, with their odious pipes puffing out malodorous [sic] smoke, who crowd into the dramatic stableyard and make the atmosphere within the old mule shed unbearable to all save themselves, do not go there for vulgar vaudeville or cheap variety. You would not expect it, and it is hard to believe when you see it, but these ignorant, untutored men, who labor with their hands all day at the worst work in New York, flock to the Star [the Star Theater at 101 Union Street, in South Brooklyn] to see the highest of Italian drama attainable here. They flock there every night and listen enthralled at the words, written centuries ago by the immortal Tasso, the Italian epic poet, who, together with his father, Bernardo Tasso, contributed some of the best of Italian epics. [. . .] The Star Theater is a dirty place to go: it is filthy and sickening to the sight and senses, and one sees men there who surely never wash. Yet with all its dinginess and dirt, its bad odors and mean looking men, it is worth a visit, and if one is of the people of the Italian quarter and doesn’t object to the smoke and grime and understands the Italian language, it might be worth enough visits to cover at least a canto of “Jerusalem Delivered.”4
This full re-enactment of Jerusalem Delivered, performed at the Star Theater with marionettes, is a bold statement. What was happening was the conscious appropriation and re-use of styles and languages passed down through the centuries along the Italian peninsula and elsewhere. To different degrees, all the major voices of the Italian American communities crafted their stories and poetry transporting the home-grown tradition to the new shores. Such a modus operandi was risky but inevitable and necessary, in order to win approbation and consent; repetition had to go hand in hand with openings.
Reassure and dare is the emblem of an immigrant art which is at the same time popular, multi-layered, and ephemeral. Pulp fiction lives side by side with the diabolically intense skits of the vaudeville multilingual theater of Eduardo Migliaccio, a/k/a Farfariello. The romantic potboilers by Paolo Pallavicini — exemplified in this collection by his Tutto il dolore, tutto l’amore (San Francisco, 1926) — embellishing the life of a mostly imagined Italian middle-class in California, were at some point in such demand as to appear in the columns of the colonial newspapers in San Francisco, and at the same time to be printed by major publishers back in Italy.
Arturo Giovannitti, the first great bilingual Italian American poet, poignantly called The Cage (eloquent title) “a poem of rotting tradition and living men.”5 he had composed it on a Sunday, in 1912, unjustly detained in Salem Jail; and its first publisher had been The Atlantic Monthly — just like a decade later Pascal D’Angelo, author of Son of Italy, was to be read both in The Nation and in the New York-based nationalist monthly, with strong Fascist leanings, Il Carroccio.
Italian immigrant artists can count on a public attuned to their culture. This is not surprising, since they are well and truly part of it, being for the most part immigrants themselves, largely self-taught, and more often than not used to doling out a meagre living with an assortment of jobs. Gigi Damiani, a/k/a Simplicio, a leader of the hyper-active anarchist subterranean network, can flaunt his familiarity with the real common ground of most Italians at the time, the language of the opera, when he inserts in an otherwise virtuosic but rather inane parody of fascist opportunism three joyous and sonorous lines like the following: “Addio banchetti, addio ragazze belle,/ e facili guadagni,/ “clamori e canti di battaglie addio!” (“Farewell banquets, farewell fair girls,/ and easy money,/ ‘farewell shouts and songs of battles!’”).6 That is, he is quoting from Arrigo Boito’s free adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello7 for Verdi’s opera, one of his late masterpieces. It is telling that Shakespeare is served to an immigrant public (striving to unshackle it from its torpid social and political conformism) through the mediation of Verdi and Boito. Can you be more aptly bicultural than this?
Such a playful and sophisticated intertextuality affects at different levels the creativity of the immigrants’ art, and constitutes an indispensable prerequisite if we want to approach without naïveté the varied and adventurous world of the immigrants’ publishing world, in both its commercial but also cultural components.
Publishing. – Arrival point. When you publish, you decide to go public. And in so doing and being, you forge a public. What was previously an intellectual operation which required recognition as a hypothesis now tests itself in front of a real audience. Your public is no more a double of the mind, but a real paying entity and, on occasion, it votes with its feet. A substantial degree of mutual linguistic understanding is paramount; and so is a close relationship with the territory. if your public has a high degree of returns, both physical and imaginary (if daydreaming and being informed about the motherland remain a staple of everyday life, as they did), then you should also consider stretching as much as possible your activities, in a variety of ways, on both sides of the Atlantic.
More plainly, the appearance of an Italian American publishing world means that an Italian American public is born, i.e., acquires the consciousness of being such. Italian Americans existed before Frugone e Balletto, before the Italian Book Company, before New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano, San Francisco’s La Voce del Popolo, and stores like E. Rossi on Mulberry and Mott, but such ventures testify to a new rise in status and self-confidence. The same linguistic and expressive phenomena which we have tried to exemplify above now make it into print.
Here, then, are the books and items on display. There’s a difference between being a native speaker (no matter how traumatized or energized by the encounter with a different culture, depending on a myriad variables) or being a writer (using and/or abusing tradition) — and, on the other hand, making your appearance on the social stage, becoming a read item, metamorphosing into an author. Books do that. You may still be halfway between a god and a jester, but your voice doesn’t just produce a narcissistic echo any longer: the publisher bets on its response and its recognizability. The name above the title is now, potentially, a beacon for a community.
The histories of the Italian American publishers (and there were, literally, thousands of them up to the 1970s, scattered all around the U.S.) are replete with big and little facts, with anecdotes, with acts of courage, as well as with acrimonious bickering — Luigi Carnovale’s 1909 Il giornalismo degli emigrati Italiani nel Nord America provides lots of evidence of the latter — with grand or petty failures (and, less often, successes), with opportunistic schemes and political feuds. Taken collectively, they can represent, in some way, a metaphor of the entire Italian immigrant culture.
Italian publishing in the U.S. started in the mid-19th century, in the fiery climate of the Italian Risorgimento, and soon expanded and adapted to the gigantic wave of immigrants from the peninsula (arriving in steerage class with other hundreds of thousands of southern and eastern Europeans). While always, by necessity, open to both worlds, from the 1920s they also increasingly showed signs of interaction with the surrounding linguistic landscape.
Simply put, the English language takes over more and more newspaper columns as we get closer to the outbreak of World War II: not only “English sections” begin appearing as a rule on the last page, but Italian American authors venture into bilingualism (Giovannitti, Tresca), book publishers like the Società Libraria Italiana (Italian Book Company) print volumes in both languages, and typical “American” products, such as the comic strip, quickly eschew the short, goofy Italian translations. Newspapers like the Corriere d’America look American (see their elegant use of pictures, and the overall layout of its pages) way before their Italian counterparts in the peninsula. And after World War II, a New York magazine like Divagando anticipates Mondadori’s Epoca in imitating, at least superficially, the graphics of Life.
On an individual level, more and more the authors of the Italian American community show their keen attention to a close rapport with their audience. “Publishing,” i.e., mingling with the public, is for them, literally speaking, an essential dimension of their popular activity.
That is why, especially until World War II, these two dimensions (authorship and publishing) represent, in the Italian American world, almost two communicating vessels. They mirror and they strengthen one another, following the biological trajectory of a generation which had come of age in the years of the Great Migration, between the end of the 19th century and World War I. So, Tresca and Giovannitti rally the “ethnic” crowds of the unionized workers; Migliaccio/Farfariello cheers the undifferentiated spectators of the neighborhood theaters, and, later, local radio station listeners; and newspapers of all orientations show an unfailing devotion to the most diverse products of “colonial” literature (fiction, poetry, op-eds, even drama). And as it had rapidly formed with strong homogeneous characteristics, so that culture will gradually but inevitably disperse from the 1950s on, to be replaced by new ways of being “public,” and eventually turning its back on the Italian language.
*Reprinted from Strangers in a Strange Land · Italian-Language American Imprints: The Periconi Collection (omeka.net)
Notes
1. Salvatore Scibona, The New York: Riverhead, 2009: 308.
2. Not far from the birthplaces of the parents of such distinct Italian American personalities as novelist Mari Tomasi and politician and military officer Charles Poletti.
3. Marie Ets, Rosa. The Life of an Italian Immigrant. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.
4. “Local Italian Theater Crowded every Night.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 3, 1899:7.
5. See Arturo Giovannitti, The Cage (Riverside, CT: Hillacre, 1914), at colophon.
6. Simplicio [Gigi Damiani], Coraggio e avanti!, in Sgraffi (Newark: Biblioteca de l’Adunata dei Refrattari, 1946:93).
7. Verdi’s Otello: Act 2, Scene 3.
Martino Marazzi is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the State University of Milan, Italy. He has been Visiting Professor at New York University and a Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. His most recent studies are Italexit (2019), Danteum (2015), Voices of Italian America (2012). His last book of fiction is Sbagli (2019). His nonfiction piece Amelia was longlisted in the Best American Essays 2017. He collaborated with director Gianfranco Rosi on the script of Notturno (2020).