In 1966 the poet Ernesto Calzavara, born in Treviso in the northeast of Italy, published e. Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And. Mad words, Poor words). This collection of poems written in the trevisàn dialect became the emblem of Calzavara’s rebellion against the disappearance of local idioms in favour of the Italian language, but it was also his first step breaking away from the Neodialettali poets and the rural themes and settings of traditional vernacular poetry. The puns and wordplay in this collection are irretrievable in the Italian language—they are part of Treviso as the landscape is, or the weather—but Calzavara believed that dialects had an inherent linguistic power, and only by tapping into that power could they break free from their condition of dying languages. In this essay, Assistant Editor Marina Dora Martino, looks at Calzavara’s poetry in the context of Italian local languages in danger of fading away forever, and considers what it means to remember and forget a language, a place, and a way of life.
Growing up, I absorbed the notion that speaking in dialect was vulgar and inadequate, especially at school. I am not sure where or when my first encounter with the local dialect even occurred—my family (originally from Naples) didn’t speak it, the schools didn’t use it, and most of my friends practiced it only with their grandparents, if at all. Treviso, my hometown, is an ancient city in the northeastern plains of Italy, whose local variation of the Veneto dialect is known as trevisàn—the Veneto dialect being a sort of regional language understood everywhere in the Veneto region, from the mountains to the sea. Excluded from school and spoken rarely among friends, Veneto lingered somewhere at the edge of my life for a long time. It was only by chance, picking up a secondhand book at the town market, that I found out about the existence of local poets, and an entirely new literary world opened to me. This is how I met Ernesto Calzavara’s poetry and realised that I had to rethink everything I knew about the dialects of my country.
It is widely known that Italy has many regional dialects, but not everybody knows that they are more than a bit of an accent and the occasional slang word. Far from being only a distortion of standard Italian, dialects are complex and ancient ways of speaking—in some cases languages in their own right—and they have been around since long before standard Italian even existed. They were known as “volgari,” from vulgo (a.k.a. not Latin but the languages that most common people spoke in their daily life) and they had started emerging from Latin itself as early as the eighth century, transformed by virtue of contact with pre-roman local languages (Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Messapic, and the like) but also, throughout the years, by the influence (or invasion) of tongues from other lands, such as Gaulish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. The volgari were generally considered inadequate for the high expressions of the mind, so it was normal praxis for intellectuals to write and discuss their work in Latin. This was until Dante and Petrarch came around, bringing their Tuscan dialect to the forefront of poetic innovation and proving once and for all that volgari could take on the most exalted topics (the Sicilian school of poets had prepared the ground in this sense) as well as the lowest. Indeed, in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante went even further and made the argument (in Latin, so that it couldn’t be ignored by the intellectuals) that the mother tongue was more noble because it was learnt from infancy, and non-mediated by grammar. Which makes it all the more ironic that his fourteenth-century Tuscan (and Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s) would later be picked by sixteenth-century intellectuals as the basis for standard Italian, as the result of an educated debate on which of the peninsula’s many languages should become its lingua franca; in reality, a debate of intellectuals for intellectuals that had little or nothing to do with the life of the vulgo. In 1861, the year of Italian unification, 78% of Italians were illiterate, and most of them spoke only their regional language. The unionist phrase “we made Italy, now we must make Italians” shows the uneasiness of a young country whose people couldn’t communicate with each other from region to region, which led to standard Italian being made the language of education, politics, administration, and entertainment in the attempt to “italianise” Italy. Despite this, by the 1950s and ’60s the gap between the official role of Italian and its place in the life of people, particularly in rural areas, was still shockingly wide. With the arrival of television the nation found its most powerful tool for counteracting illiteracy: TV programs like Telescuola and Non è mai troppo tardi (it is never too late) are believed to have taught half a million Italians how to read and write.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the years of Non è mai troppo tardi coincided with a resurgence of poetry in dialect. The movement of “Neodialettali” poets—whose aim was, as the name suggests, to produce new poetry in the dialects of Italy—had been around since the beginning of the century, but it exploded in the 1950s and ’60s, with intellectuals such as Pasolini joining the cause. Neodialettali argued that dialects needed to be preserved, and like in Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, they put special emphasis on the importance of one’s own lingua madre, the mother tongue. This was not only for intellectuals and poets—the mother tongue for them was connected to the land, the deepest expression of its geography and its people. In this perspective, Italian was the extraneous language of legislation and administration: detached from the land, to some extent incorporeal, and the language of mass entertainment that was sweeping away the old world. While dialects, inextricable from their terra, were the incarnation of belonging, perpetuating the authenticity of a filial relationship between the mother tongue and the poet. Dialectal poetry had to capture this relationship by telling the ways of living and being that were one with their language. So the countryside, the life in the fields, and the geographical features of the land became prominent themes in the Neodialettali’s production.
Calzavara was a dialectal poet, and he was born in a world in which language and land were in communion. Raised by his upper-middle class family in the eighteenth-century family house (nicknamed “Villa del Ciodo”) in the northern suburbs of Treviso, he was the youngest sibling by far and grew up under the protective wing of his mother, with whom he would remain extremely close in later life. She didn’t think Ernesto was cut out for the practical things of the world, and he might well have agreed. After his diploma at Treviso’s Classical high school, he took law and graduated at the University of Padua in 1931. After a couple of years of practice in Treviso, he moved to Milan. Life in Milan as a lawyer had a double edge for Calzavara: a much wider and richer cultural landscape was available to him than in Treviso, or even Padua. He met intellectuals, was introduced to poets he hadn’t read (among these Calzavara described the Milanese Delio Tessa and the Neapolitan Salvatore di Giacomo as particular influences in those early years), not to mention the libraries, the bookshops, the theatres, and the bars that Milan had to offer to talk, meet, research, and sharpen his wits. Then there was his job: working for big debt collectors, Calzavara the lawyer was so far in essence from Calzavara the poet that Ernesto thought of them as two different people altogether. Zaverno Estoralca, as he called him, was the lawyer who had to maintain the poet, Ernesto Calzavara. Every weekend Zaverno Estoralca was left alone in Milan, while Ernesto Calzavara rode a train back into Veneto and to his beloved Villa del Ciodo.
In the 1940s he timidly presented himself to the public with the collections Il tempo non passa (Time Does Not Go By, 1946), I fiori di carta (The Paper Flowers, 1947), and Il nuovo mondo (The New World 1948), in which his use of Veneto was limited to three or four poems about Treviso. The Veneto language had been a Venice-centric koinè for centuries, the outcome of La Serenessima’s influence on the mainland. Calzavara, however, wished to find a more authentic trevisàn rooted in its own past. In 1950 he curated an edition with critical apparatus of Il Pianto de la Verzene Maria (The Weeping of the Virgin Mary) written by Augustinian priest Fra Anselmino in 1369, thirty years after Treviso had spontaneously given itself up to La Serenissima. It is one of the few and rare testimonies of ancient trevisàn without Venetian influence (though it had some Latin and Tuscan flares). This is an important moment in Calzavara’s poetic growth—the study of Fra Anselmino’s ancient trevisàn text signals his restlessness with the Italian lyrics of his first three collections and the desire for his poetic language to take another route. Anna Rinaldin, who took care of the Calzavara Archive at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, talked to me of the poet’s linguistic turbulence emphasising his astonishing grip on the subject, despite not being a professional linguist. “His work shows great linguistic awareness. From his letters we can tell that Calzavara had a network of university professors he was in touch with and to whom he sent his work,” she went on, and pointed out, “this was not very common among his contemporaries. He didn’t want the opinion of the poets as much as that of the literary scholars, the people who studied the texts, not who made them. He also asked them for books to read about linguistics, I think he studied a lot.”
In 1960, Calzavara published Poesie Dialettali, entirely written in dialect. Italian showed up only for specific purposes, such as making fun of official bureaucracy or conveying the alienation of his job. Treviso is everywhere in this collection. “Quel che par” (“what it seems”) rings with the contrast between the quietness and liveliness that the city manifests in the houses and the streets where “par che tuti gàbia da vivar sempre”—”where it seems like everyone has to live forever.” The word sempre is pivotal here: it can mean forever, but it can also mean always, and by hinting at the latter meaning Calzavara prepares the reader for “la fatiga de star a sto mondo”, “the effort of being alive in this world,” and the final “E intant tegnir dentro la voja/de morir e de vívar,” “and in the meantime to have inside the wish/ to die and to live.” The poem “L’Istà” (Summer) is crowded with onomatopoeic trevisàn words that recall the sounds of the countryside under the rain: sbatocia (slam, rattle), sbusa (puncture), sbecota (peck), and also s-ciantisi (claps of thunder), giozze (drops), mussatto (mosquito). There are farmers, ploughers, women washing laundry in the town river, cows giving birth—trevisàn characters that were already the last of a fading era. Though nostalgic of this childhood universe in Poesie Dialettali, Calzavara as a boy must have perceived that something was sliding away, that the world he knew and that his parents belonged to was growing more and more obsolete, interiorising a sense of vertigo for the passing of time which later matured into his trademark melancholy. In “La Note de San Martin,” a long night monologue in the company of a hidden mouse nibbling on corn, his melancholy takes the form of the house, his Villa del Ciodo, and replaces its structure with the structure of his sadness. The granèr (granary) and the càneva (cellar) are full, and there should be nothing to worry about as long as they are, because they mean safety and abundance—but in the silence of the night, the mouse’s nibbling and biting soon becomes for Calzavara the universal sound of erosion, the disintegration of “el gran, la zoventù, la vita, tuto,” “of corn, youth, life, everything.”
No mòre mai
sto far e po’ desfar e far de novo,
sto rumegar nel granèr de la menteIt never dies
this doing and undoing and doing again,
this ruminating in the granary of the mind
Then, another kind of certainty is reached—the full granaries are not the token of safety, but the material against which to contrast the emptiness of life.
Granèri pieni e vita voda.
Granèri pieni e vita che se incioda.
Granèri pieni e la solita roda
d’ogni ano, d’ogni stagion che se volta nel tempo dei tò afani.(. . .)
Tuta note cussì, sórze el te scólta.
Full granaries and a life empty.
Full granaries and a life nailed down.
Full granaries and the usual wheel
of every year, every season turning in the time of your sorrows.(. . .)
All night like this, mouse you listen.
The mouse and the man sharing the empty house are now one—for both, life is brief, full of fears and sorrows, and culminates in the solitude of a house where abundance and fullness can do nothing against the erosion of time. The poem ends in a Fellini-like scene in which the poet addresses his departed father, asking him to take the house, the garden, everything, even himself, should he still want him. The ghost of the father, incarnated only by his voice, replies matter-of-factly that there is no escape, and that he, his son, must stay among the living and take care of things himself.
Poesie Dialettali sticks to themes, settings, and characters that are inseparable from Veneto and its language, like most Neodialettali, but it carries in embryonic form Calzavara’s later views on poetry and dialects. The gentle refusal from his father at the end of “La Note de San Martin,” and his urging his son forward without delusions about what life is and does, is I think evidence that Calzavara’s research into the past of his land and his language went beyond nostalgia and even beyond dialect. “He was looking for solutions to problems that were entirely his,” wrote literary critic Cesare Segre, “related to the relationship between reality and the supernatural, between the animate and the inanimate, man and god.” In 1966 Calzavara published e, Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And, Mad Words, Poor Words), described by Segre as his “second birth”—here, not only does Calzavara write in his dialect, but he fully shreds it from the earlier forms that made Poesie Dialettali the closest he ever got to traditional vernacular poetry. The collection opens with the poem “e,” the laconic conjunction of the logically equal:
Ma po’ la torna e la me dise che.
La torna e la me dise sì-no.
La va e la me scrive:
“Non ho parole per”Non-ho parò le-per.
Tuto cussì va via par gnente e.
Tuto se ilude da se stesso
e casca.
E ti te credi che.Varda qua la balanza.
Do piati e in mezzo la misura.
Te pesi tuto. Te pesi gnente.La balanza no pesa mai giusto
e.But she comes back and she says that.
She comes and she says yes-no.
She goes and writes to me:
“I have no words for”I-have nowor ds-for.
Everything goes away for nothing and.
Everything’s deluded by itself
and falls.
And you think that.See here the scale.
Two plates and in the middle the measure.
You weigh everything. You weigh nothing.The scale never weighs right
and.
Guided by his “tormented hypersensitivity,” and triggered by his “attention for the small things,” in e, Calzavara’s language, freed from traditional punctuation, sinks into an almost meditative mode—his focus on “undoing the tricks of language” brings him closer to conceiving of it as primeval linguistic matter in which all the elements are equal, shapeshifting and plural, and all words oscillate between existence and effacement, life and oblivion. Under the power of the conjunction “e,” Calzavara’s universe vibrates down to its smallest and most intimate parts. The push of modernity leaving in its wake a world of linguistic rubble drives Calzavara to unleash his words and let them take part into the maddening chaos. He doesn’t do this with carelessness, but with the sadness of never knowing whether they’ll survive his daring experiments.
E mi çerco mi vago no so par dove
par che rason no vedo no so
ma rovine rente rovine
rovinassi ore de sol
su acque nere che frise pescaori e pessi
in crose de po’.And I seek I wander I don’t know where
why I don’t see I don’t know
but ruins near ruins
ruins hours in the sun
on black waters that fry fishermen and fish
on the cross of after.
The poem ends with a desperate address to his own words: “parole mate. Restè no morir/ no morìme in man/ restè restè parole,” “mad words. Stay don’t die / don’t die in my hand/ stay stay words.”
Calzavara had left Italian behind, a language “in which he could never raise his voice,” and now he was leaving dialect too, at least as it had been conceived by those who, like him, wanted to save it. In his following collections, in particular Come Se (What If, subtitled Infralogie, a neologism he had come up with putting together the Italian for “in” and “between”), Analfabeto (both meaning “illiterate” and the “opposite of the alphabet”), and Le Ave Parole (The Old Words), Calzavara set out to re-forge the connections between the elements of his linguistic ruins, severing them firmly from tradition. “He had to take this leap,” said Anna Rinaldin. “He knew that the force that was deleting dialects couldn’t be stopped—maybe it shouldn’t be stopped—and this made him suffer. At some point he just needed his poetry to make the jump and go on its own route.” His plurilingual instinct, already a mark of Calzavara’s work (he used macaronic Latin, French, English, Milanese, Sicilian, juridical, and scientific registers), became then a conscious tool to pry his mother tongue open and let it be influenced and contaminated. This is the necessary, fertile contradiction of Calzavara’s poetry. Instead of enclosing trevisàn in its familiar landscape in the hope to protect it, he brought it outside of itself, “to the utmost limpidity and atemporality” so it could “bear the interlinguistic and intradialectal exercises that Calzavara’s inventio” demanded. Perhaps, paradoxically, this is part of the cause of his obscurity today—he didn’t fit in the lyric Italianità or in the regional nationalism of his contemporaries, and his poetry is even more difficult to place now. Maybe this wouldn’t worry him too much. As he said, “dialects don’t need to be saved nor condemned, but respectfully allowed to live.”
Marina D. Martino is a poet from Treviso. She’s currently based in Venice, where she works as an editor and translator, and she learns a thing or two about water.
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