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Translating Dialect Literature

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Translating Dialect Literature

Author(s): Luigi Bonaffini
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 2, Italian Literature Today (Spring, 1997), pp.
279-288
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40153045
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Translating Dialect Literature
By LUIGI BONAFFINI Any critical discussion
of works written in di-
alect is destined to run
up against the heavy legacy of prejudices and mis-
understandings that has historically weighed upon
literature in dialect, often considered a "minor,"
subaltern, marginal language, even coarse and ple-
beian. These are misconceptions that the recent and
in many respects exceptional flowering of dialect (or
neodialect) poetry in Italy has put into a much dif-
ferent perspective, so that the absolute parity of ver-
nacular poetry with that in standard Italian, long
maintained by several enlightened critics (Croce is a
case in point), has gradually gained universal accep-
tance, to the extent that it is now an established and
irrefutable tenet of contemporary criticism. Dialect
poetry has even been able to penetrate those presti-
gious editorial circuits from which it had always
been excluded, bolstered by the recognition and en-
couragement of influential critics, even vying with
Italian poetry for the attention of a readership that is
no longer local or regional but instead national and
international. Very significant, in this respect, was
the recent Nobel candidacy of two poets who in a
way embody this fundamental dichotomy of Italian
letters, Mario Luzi and Albino Pierro, a develop-
ment all the more remarkable considering that the
latter wrote in one of the most archaic dialects in
Italy, that of his native Tursi (which Gianfranco
Contini defined as "proto-romance"), one without
any literary tradition and extremely limited in its
diffusion.
There are many reasons why so many contempo-
rary Italian poets (the neodialect poets) are nowa-
days turning to dialect rather than to standard Ital-
ian as their medium of expression, reasons which
carry far-reaching and deeply rooted implications
(literary, psychological, political, existential, anthro-
pological): recent dialect poetry is part of a broader
reaction to the alienating effects of postwar industri-
al society, which especially in the seventies meant
the rehabilitation of ethnic history and memory. In
the face of an increasingly complex reality, one re-
discovers the universal potential in every man;
Luigi Bonaffini was born in Isernia (Italy) and is Professor of
Italian at Brooklyn College. He has translated the verse of Dino
Campana (1992), Mario Luzi (1992), Giose Rimanelli (1991,
1996), Giuseppe Jovine (1994), and Achille Serrao (1995), as
well as Eugenio Cirese, Albino Pierro, and other dialect poets.
He coedited Dialect Poetry from Molise (1993) and has just fin-
ished editing a trilingual anthology of the dialect poetry of south-
ern Italy.
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hence the recovery of personal history, of personal
roots, which the impersonal language of the mass
media cannot recognize or transcribe. This also
means the recovery of one's native place, the place
of origin, as an alternative to a monotonous and
meaningless reality.
Perhaps the role of the dialect poet, as Franco
Brevini notes,1 reveals its deepest meaning in the
struggle against the imposition of a superlanguage,
English (this is particularly relevant in the case of
poets who live in the United States and also write in
English, such as Giose Rimanelli and Joseph Tu-
siani) and, at the national level, of a standard ema-
nating from the productive industrial centers of the
North. Dialect is posited, then, as the language of
concreteness and difference, in direct opposition to
the flat homogeneity of the language of television
and advertising, and therefore offers a greater po-
tential for individual creativity. The strength of di-
alect, in fact, lies in its essential "otherness," in its
position of eccentricity with respect to the national
language, in its different history, predominantly
oral, which has saved it from the process of erosion
and usura which always attends literary languages.
For this reason, contemporary dialect poets have
tended to accentuate this difference in many ways,
usually opting for more archaic forms, farther re-
moved from standard Italian, even in spelling (Pier-
ro, Bandini, Loi).
Along with sociocultural factors, there are psy-
chological motivations that account for the choice of
dialect - and not only dialect as a maternal tongue,
as in Pasolini and Zanzotto, but also as a forgotten
truth, a sacred, archaic language which is capable of
revealing one's hidden being. Through dialect the
poet represents not only the places and events of his
memory, but also a conception of the world closer
to his own personal experience. To contemporary
men and women in danger of being swallowed up
and obliterated by postindustrial society, dialect can
offer the support of a culture which, while threat-
ened with obliteration, is radically different from the
dominant culture. Dialect, then, as the linguistic
testimony of a cultural heritage, of a collective patri-
mony and an anthropological condition condemned
to extinction. De Benedetti has called dialect "the
painful conscience of history," because only dialect,
as opposed to the language of the ruling class, can
bear witness to the injustices of history and give
voice to the excluded and the oppressed.
It was again Contini, recognizing the importance
of dialects for Italian literature, who pointed out
280 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
that Italian literature is the only great national litera-
ture for which dialect literature is an integral part;
yet dialect poetry, for reasons stemming from its tra-
ditional condition of subalternity and limited diffu-
sion but also due to objective difficulties inherent in
translation itself, given the scant knowledge of di-
alects outside of Italy, has been mostly ignored by
translators until very recently, with the result that it
remains largely untranslated, particularly its most
recent output. There are, nevertheless, some no-
table exceptions. Since the 1986 publication of the
landmark anthology of dialect poetry The Hidden
Italy, edited by Hermann Haller, one other antholo-
gy in translation has appeared, and another is about
to be published;2 in the last few years alone several
dialect poets have been translated (Jovine, Serrao,
Rimanelli, Guerra, Pascarella, Di Giacomo,Trilus-
sa, Ancona, Martoglio),3 and more are currently
being translated (Giacomini, Zanzotto) - a clear in-
dication that interest in dialect poetry is growing
outside Italy as well. Undoubtedly, the translation
of dialect poetry poses peculiar problems which go
beyond those encountered in translating from Ital-
ian, and each translator adopts a somewhat different
approach, providing several possible methods and
techniques to which we can refer.
It should be noted, first of all, that the problem of
dialect does not concern Italy alone, although in
Italy the phenomenon is much more extensive than
in any other Western country. A good starting
point, since most of this essay is devoted to transla-
tion from Italian dialects, might be an American
writer well versed in vernacular speech, Mark
Twain, who prefaces his masterpiece, Huckleberry
Finn, with the following remark:
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit:
The Missouri Negro dialect, the extremest form of the
backwoods Southwestern dialect, the ordinary "Pike
County" dialect, and four modified varieties of this last.
The shadings have not been done in an haphazard fash-
ion or by guesswork, but painstakingly and with the
trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiari-
ty with the several forms of speech.
I make this distinction for the reason that without it
many readers would suppose that all these characters
were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.4
John Du Val, who has translated both Trilussa and
Pascarella from Romanesco, in an article in which
he discusses Miller Williams's translation of Belli's
sonnets and which begins with the above quotation
from Mark Twain,5 advises any hypothetical transla-
tor of Huckleberry Finn not to tackle the author's ex-
planation at all; this of course would not solve the
problem of translating all the varieties of dialect
mentioned by the author, which not only pertain to
the depiction of local color but also play a key role
in distinguishing and individualizing the various
characters. The use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn is
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in fact rather more complex than it might at first ap-
pear from the author's preface, because the charac-
ters' vernacular speech is dynamic, not static; that
is, it tends to adapt itself to different situations, and
its use is complicated by a moralization of the lin-
guistic act, which privileges some varieties over oth-
ers. The hypothetical Italian or Spanish translator of
Huckleberry Finn who wished to reproduce the mul-
tiplicity of local linguistic forms would be forced to
let the characters speak Neapolitan, Sicilian, Gali-
cian, or Catalan, with all the resulting problems of
incongruity and misplacement. It is not surprising,
then, if the complexity and semantic richness of the
language appear sharply diminished in the Italian
translations, where the local and individual varieties
are in effect erased and supplanted by a generically
colloquial and idiomatic form of speech, as in the
following declaration by Jim (chapter 7), cited from
the bilingual edition with Giovanni Baldi's transla-
tion:6
I tuck out en shin down de hill, en 'spec to steal a skift
'long de sho' som'ers 'bove de town, but dey wuz peo-
ple a-stirring yit, so I hid in de ole tumbledown cooper
shop on de bank to wait for everybody to go away.
Mi sbatto giu dalla collina e penso di sgraffignare una
barca lungo la riva sopra la citta, ma c'era ancora in
giro della gente, e allora mi nascondo nel vecchio ne-
gozio del bottaio, quello tutto a pezzi che sta sulla
sponda del fiume, per aspettare che se ne vanno.
Jim's dialect, strongly characterizing and quite dif-
ferent from the speech of the other characters, is
thoroughly flattened in the translation, which in fact
eliminates the most markedly idiomatic and vernac-
ular elements by transferring it to an area of uncer-
tain colloquialism. Moreover, the idiomatic word
sgraffignare translates almost incongruously one of
the few standard words in the passage, "steal,"
while all other linguistic peculiarities, which are
phonetic as well as grammatical and syntactic, com-
pletely disappear from the Italian text.
Mark Twain himself criticizes the French transla-
tor of his famous tale "The Jumping Frog" for hav-
ing used standard French, seemingly without any
understanding of the importance and the implica-
tions of the use of vernacular: "Benzon has not
translated the story at all: he has simply mixed it all
up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he
gets through with it than I am like a meridian of
longitude."7 In other words, translating into a stan-
dard language, the translator cannot capture the ec-
centricity of vernacular speech, its function as an al-
ternative, a non-normative deviation from the norm.
While reflecting on this concept of deviation, in-
escapable in any discussion of dialect literature, one
must, however, take into account the considerable
variation in meaning that the very term dialect un-
dergoes in anglophone areas, where in effect it
 BONAFFINI 281

stands for anormality, a departure from a well-de-
fined linguistic standard, so that even a local or re-
gional pronunciation can be regarded as a form of
dialect. The "vernacular" style is therefore designat-
ed by the deviation from a standard, where there is
no multiplicity of autonomous idioms as in Italy.
Vernacular style may, of course, be defined in a num-
ber of ways, but in the following I shall take it to mean
a special category of "substandard" or "common"
usage that serves as a marker of class, regional, or age-
group affiliation and that includes such speech-oriented
lexical and grammatical features as colloquial formulas
and epithets, slang, obscenities, and other vulgarisms,
and certain kinds of allusive or elliptical morphological
and syntactic arrangements.8
This definition could be suitable for the various
American "dialects," but it would be absolutely in-
adequate to describe the phenomenon of vernacu-
lars - and thus related questions of style - in Italy,
where dialect is understood not as a simple diver-
gence from the national standard but as an au-
tonomous linguistic system, historically determined
through well-known mechanisms, as all linguists
recognize. On the other hand, as we shall see further
on, several translators acknowledge the inevitable
validity of this principle; and not only do they reject
the notion of dialect as a deviant and eccentric lan-
guage, but they consider it instead the site of natu-
ralness and spontaneity, the linguistic norm of a de-
termined community and therefore - in keeping
with a seemingly paradoxical methodological criteri-
on - the exact opposite of deviation.
The anglophone world, with its countless vari-
eties of English, is of course not alone in being pro-
foundly affected by the question of vernaculars. For
the West, we should at least mention the franco-
phone universe, just as rich in particular local and
regional types in so many parts of the world. It
would suffice to mention one instance among the
less obvious: the influence of dialect in Canadian

Giuseppe Jovine

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282 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
fiction and its consequences for translation, exam-
ined by Henry Schoght in his study of several Cana-
dian novels, including La sagouine by Antoine Mail-
let, in which a few characters speak the dialecte
acadien of the province of New Brunswick.
The emphatic characterization of the heroine who re-
cites the monologue rests on dialect traits as well as on
the content of what she is saying. One could wonder if
the book's appeal for many readers is due to a feeling of
condescension awakened by the simplicity and naivete
of the protagonist and by the so-called color of dialect.
Be it as it may, the translator Luis Cespedes tried to
preserve a little of the flavor of the original text which
. . . utilizes only one register and does not create any
internal opposition in the text. Since the geographic
factor did not permit him to replace the dialect of La
sagouine with an equally marked dialect of a village of
English or Scottish fishermen, he opted for a process of
compensation by substituting the dialecte acadien with a
geographically neutral popular sociolect. Unfortunate-
ly, the sagouine of the translation speaks more or less
like Holden Caulfield in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye,
so that the compensation is not really successful. (34;
my translation.)9
The solution adopted by the translator, in choosing
a sociolect which is geographically neutral and with-
out oppositions within the text, is not much differ-
ent from the one chosen by the Italian translator.
But the totality of the linguistic context in which di-
alect appears is crucial for the various compensatory
strategies available to translators, because if it is
possible to speak of naturalness in a monolingual
context, in which only dialect is spoken, and the
perennial opposition between standard language
and dialect is kept below the threshold of conflict,
this becomes practically impossible the instant the
standard language is introduced, in whose presence
the vernacular must necessarily become eccentric
and deviant. It is the multilingual context, then, rife
with internal frictions and contrasts, that further
complicates the task of the translator, who is forced
to adopt compensating, inevitably reductive strata-
gems, incapable of expressing that diversity which is
fully manifested only in the presence of the standard
language.
An Italian example of the use of multiple dialects
in a work of fiction bears the prestigious signature of
Carlo Emilio Gadda in Quer Pasticciaccio brutto de
Via Merulana. In this expressionistic and baroque
detective story, Gadda mixes Romanesco, Neapoli-
tan, Venetian, Milanese, Molisan, and Sicilian with
the bureaucratese of the various offices, with police
jargon, and with several other sectorial languages. In
order to guarantee the authenticity of the various di-
alects, Gadda consulted several people; for Ro-
manesco, for instance, he turned to the dialect poet
Mario dell'Arco. Quer Pasticciaccio is at least as re-
fractory to translation as Huckleberry Finn: the trans-
lator must take into account not only the complex
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interaction of the various dialects but also their ex-
pressive and structural function as well, as in Mark
Twain. It would be impossible to re-create the indi-
vidualization of the characters through language
carried out in Quer Pasticciaccio by assigning each,
say, an American vernacular variety, and the trans-
lator, William Weaver, does not even try, with the
same effect of expressive impoverishment and de-
preciation noted above. In an essay on the English
translation of Gadda,10 Brian Altano takes the trans-
lator to task for not having used a sufficiently collo-
quial, vernacular language in the translation, citing
as an example the following passage describing a
seller of porchetta in a market:
"La porca, la porca! Ciavemo la porchetta, signori! la
bella porca de l'Ariccio con un bosco de rosmarino in
de la panza! Co le patatine de staggione! . . . V'oo dico
io. Asssaggiatele!" Posava un attimo a riprender fiato. E
poi a scoppio: "Uno e novanta l'etto, la porca. E' 'na
miseria, signori! a chi venne e a chi compra! Uno e no-
vanta l'etto, piu mejo fatto che detto. Famese avanti co
li bajocchi a la mano, sore spose! Chi nun magna nun
guadagna." E poi sottovoce a una belloccia: "A voi ve
do er mejo boccone, v'o giuro! Me piacete troppo! Sete
troppo bona!"11
In rendering this passage, according to Altano, the
translator should consider three important factors:
1) the lively jargon used by the youth to attract the
crowd; 2) the sense of breathless excitement of the
original; and 3) the nuances of tone, especially the
spicy allusions of a fourteen-year-old.
Weaver's translation is quoted in its entirety in
note 1 1 below, but here it will suffice to repeat the
final sentence, namely "A voi ve do er mejo boc-
cone, v'o giuro! Me piacete troppo! Sete troppo
bona!" Weaver renders this as "I'll give you the best
part, that's a promise. You're my type, all right.
You're too pretty!" "You're too pretty!" has nothing
of the sensuality of the original, perhaps because the
translator is not aware of the erotic connotation of
the adjective bona, the spicy allusion mentioned by
Altano. The latter proposes his own translation of
the passage, using a much more colloquial and id-
iomatic language: "I'll give you the best mouthful, I
really swear. I really like ya a lot! You're really good
lookin'!"12 Even here, however, something is clearly
missing, and the tone of the original, its expressive
specificity, remains remote, beyond reach.
Huckleberry Finn and Quer pasticciaccio, though,
are extreme examples of the literary use of multiple
vernacular codes; the norm is instead the use of one
vernacular - Belli's Romanesco, Meli's Sicilian, De
Filippo's Neapolitan - which can nevertheless be ar-
ticulated in several expressive registers that indicate
social position, cultural level, place of origin, and so
on. All dialectophones are aware of these linguistic
levels in their dialect and can immediately distin-
guish forms that are slightly more archaic or periph-

eral. It must also be added that the same dialect is
not necessarily identical for all, and can be em-
ployed in very dissimilar ways by various authors:
Basile's Neapolitan is quite different both from Di
Giacomo's and from Serrao's more recent version,
and Trilussa's Romanesco is different - much more
neutral and closer to Italian - from Belli's. Return-
ing to Belli, here is the preface by his translator,
Miller Williams:
There is in some quarters an assumption that because
Romanesco is looked upon as a dialect by those who
don't speak it, Belli's poems can't be truly translated
unless they are rendered into some sort of patois, some
special language spoken by a people outside the center
of culture and mostly deprived of whatever the culture
offers - people, that is, like the Romani of Trastevere.
The truth, of course, is exactly the contrary. If we ren-
der the poems into any kind of dialect, slang, or jive
talk, we hear them only as the middle- and upper-class
Roman would have heard them and hears them now. If
we are to come to them as the people of Trastevere did,
then we have to hear them as they did, in the plain lan-
guage of our own conversation. The simple fact is, to
those who live in Trastevere, the language spoken in
Trastevere is the way people talk.13
If it is true that every dialect, as Williams notes, is
merely the natural way of speaking for people who
speak dialect, then the problem of translating dialect
poetry is made considerably simpler, because it does
not require the translator to employ a strongly con-
noted language, something other than and different
from the language of ordinary conversation. Yet the
fact remains that dialect is by nature a distinct and
marginal language with respect to a standard lan-
guage, and all speakers of dialect consider it such -
that is, they are conscious of speaking a language
which in some way is in opposition to another, more
widespread and important, even if they are in a to-
tally dialect-speaking setting where the opposition is
only virtual. This means that translation from di-
alect must in some way reflect its uniqueness and
diversity, even if the various solutions may take very
different forms. Du Val points out, for instance, that
the political and cultural power in Rome in Belli's
time belonged to those who spoke Latin and Italian,
and that the sonnet was the literary form par excel-
lence; writing sonnets in Romanesco was in fact a
violation of the traditional sonnet, and therefore
Belli's Roman readers saw in every sonnet an act of
literary and linguistic impertinence as well as politi-
cal impertinence.14 In order to translate dialect as it
was perceived by those who spoke it, Williams was
obliged to translate its impertinence, its potential for
sedition.
Besides the use of dialect, Belli desecrates the
sonnet with obscenities, with the depiction of popu-
lar scenes, with comments on the church, philoso-
phy, theology, and biblical history, all from a low,
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BONAFFINI 283
popular perspective. These other subversive ele-
ments, in fact, come to the translator's aid, because
they tend to retain their iconoclastic force in the
new linguistic context as well, where they can sound
just as out of place and irreverent, especially in the
dignified literary garb of the sonnet. A few examples
of Williams's translation cited in Du Val's article
will suffice: the pope "fiddles around, snacks, de-
bauches a bit"; "instead of making a tower they
made a mess"; "one of the angels had a charley
horse," and so on. It is more difficult, Du Val points
out again,15 to render the complex play of words
that often mixes obscenity and religion. He cites as
an example the following closing tercet of a sonnet:
"San Giuseppe tratando s'ariscarda: / Doppo leva ar
somaro la bbardella, / E appoggeno tre mmesi la lib-
barda." The last line literally means "for three
months they put away the halberd," which indicates
that they sponge or freeload for three months; but
also implicit is the idea of sexual abstinence and
therefore a negation of the Catholic doctrine of
Mary's perpetual virginity. Williams translates the
tercet thus: "Saint Joseph, meanwhile, rubbed away
the cold / beside the fire and saddled up the ass /
and put his tools away for a long time."16 The final
line remains a strongly ironic comment on the Vir-
gin's chastity, therefore retaining the subversive
force of the original.
As for his own translations of Pascarella, Du Val
recognizes the differences that distinguish the vari-
ous Romanesco poets: Trilussa, since the poetic
voice of most of his sonnets belongs to the common
people of Trastevere, adopts another of Williams's
expedients in order to reproduce the estranging ef-
fect of their speech - that is, he systematically vio-
lates the meter of the iambic pentameter, so that the
constant violation of the canonical verse may reflect
Romanesco 's deviation from Italian. But in the fa-
bles, since Trilussa's voice remains above the action
and comments upon it with ironic detachment, the
way La Fontaine judges his animals, with barely a
smidgen of Romanesco's insolence, the translator
adopts other criteria: "In translating, I felt that I had
to aim for a modified elegance and a slightly
smoother rhythm than would be appropriate in the
sonnets." For Pascarella, the problem is of a differ-
ent nature: unlike Belli, who larded his poetry with
obscenities, Pascarella's language is relatively sober,
within the limits allowed by Romanesco. "A conflict
I am having," the translator observes, "whether it is
from the dramatic enthusiasm of this speaker or
from his obvious kinship with the characters of Bel-
li's great work or simply from my own warped imag-
ination, is that with every sonnet, some obscene ex-
pletive strikes me as the perfect solution to a
rhyming difficulty, and in each case, I must decide
whether to express the modesty of the author or the
enthusiasm of his tough Romanesco."17
284 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
But if Romanesco impresses translators with its
impertinence, what should one say of Neapolitan, of
its uncontainable expressive richness, of its pro-
teiform embodiments not only in poetry and theater
but in narrative as well? One of the first works in
Neapolitan dialect to be translated was // Pen-
tamerone of Giambattista Basile, published in 1634
and translated for the first time in 1713 - curiously
not into Italian but into the Bolognese dialect, by
Maddalena and Teresa Manfredi, and then anony-
mously into Italian in 1754. It was later translated
into German in 1946 and into English in 1848,
1893, and 1932. In his long introduction to the
1925 translation of the Pentamerone, Benedetto
Croce finds the German and English translations
generally better than the Bolognese or Italian ones,
then explains the criteria adopted for his own trans-
lation.
I have been very faithful to the words of the text, trying
not to diminish the quantity, and to alter as little as
possible the quality, of the images they contain; but I
have acted freely in reworking the syntax, which in
Basile is defective and often very bad, mainly perhaps
because the work was published while still unfinished
and in many parts still in the draft stage. I resisted the
temptation, to which someone else would have given
in, to substitute Neapolitan idioms with equivalent
words and phrases of current Florentine usage; and I
have tried to preserve not only the baroque adorn-
ments, but also a certain Neapolitan flavor of the
book.18
The English translation by Norman Mosley Penzer
of 1932 is based largely, but not exclusively, on
Croce's Italian translation. In his preface the trans-
lator wishes to display a certain familiarity with the
complex relationship between standard Italian and
dialect, taking care to convince the reader that he
also knows the original in dialect and going so far as
to criticize some of Croce's renderings.
I have endeavored to keep two main objects constantly
in view - first to translate literally, taking noun for noun
and verb for verb, and secondly to preserve all the
puns, local allusions, similes and metaphors of the orig-
inal. Before speaking of the style of language adopted, I
would like to give a few examples of the difficulties of
translation. Take, for instance, the string of vile abuse
that pours out of the old woman's throat when her
pitcher is smashed by the court page (the introductory
tale). She starts off as follows: "Ah zaccaro, frasca,
merduso, piscialietto, sautariello de zimmaro, pettola a
culo, chiappo de mpiso, mulo canzirro!" The first four
words present little difficulty, but what is the meaning
of "sautariello de zimmaro"? Croce gives it in modern
Italian as "salterello di cembalo" and "martellino de
cembalo," something moving very quickly and causing
a lot of noise, possibly our "madcap." But figuratively
"martellino" can mean "torment," and "cembalo" can
mean "ugly."19
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He goes on in this vein for quite a while, at the same
time examining the previous English translations
and finally concluding that in fact Croce misread
the text and that zimmaro really means "billy goat";
he then proceeds to reveal his own translation of
"sautariello de zimmaro," namely "jumping he-
goat." The same meticulous analysis is applied to
"pettola a culo," which Croce demurely renders as
"falda pendente di dietro" (flap hanging behind),
diluting much of the expressive power of the origi-
nal. By studying Neapolitan dictionaries, Penzer
discovers that the expression "cu 'a pettola 'nculo"
means "wet behind the ears, inexperienced"; but
then, realizing that the concept is already implicit in
the word frasca that appears just before he decides
that it is better after all to translate "pettola a culo"
with a vulgar expression such as "ass flap." Having
demonstrated his knowledge of dialect, at least the-
oretically, Penzer states his methodological criteria,
which in a way place him in the same line as
Williams and Du Val:
In the present edition I have decided to employ mod-
ern rather than archaic Chaucerian or Elizabethan Eng-
lish, which might be supposed to be the equivalent of
seventeenth-century Neapolitan. My theory is that the
modern reader in reading modern English will obtain a
much better idea of what the Neapolitan book meant to
the Seventeenth-Century reader than if I attempted to
preserve a mock-archaic atmosphere by dragging in
early English words and phrases.20
What is lacking here is any reference to the unique-
ness of dialect, to the latent dialectical tension be-
tween dialect and standard language, so that Penzer
does not attribute any specific difficulty to the trans-
lation of Neapolitan that could not be resolved with
a good dictionary.
In the sixteenth century, the most renowned di-
alect poet of his time was a Sicilian, Giovanni Meli.
Meli's Sicilian is a very particular language, one
which shows how the question of dialect is intimate-
ly connected to Italian literature and requires a spe-
cific treatment, as Gaetano Cipolla explains in his
introduction to his translation of Don Chisciotti e
Sanciu Panza, first published in 1787.
While Meli may have intended to create an "illustrious
Sicilian," the result of his efforts was a mixture of the
literary idiom of Italy, that is, Tuscan, especially in its
Arcadian tradition, and of Sicilian. The interrelation-
ship between these two components represents an es-
sential feature of Meli's language. This interrelation-
ship may be articulated along an axis that includes a
highly literary Tuscan (a direct quotation from Pe-
trarch, for example), passing through a line of expres-
sion that is structurally Tuscan but with Sicilian super-
imposed on it. A third point of the axis might consist of
"illustrious Sicilian," that is, purified from its local
Palermitan dress and distilled from a variety of idioms
spoken in Sicily, and finally there might be a line or ex-
pression which comes from the every day jargon of the

streets. I have tried to reproduce such sliding along the
axis whenever possible. . . . Consonant with the tone of
the original, which obtains comic relief by mixing a
highly dignified language with popular speech, I have
tried to maintain the same combination in English, al-
lowing myself to slide in the direction of archaic terms
or slang, according to the situation.21
I have quoted Cipolla at length because, unlike Pen-
zer, he takes on directly the problem of the various
expressive registers, of the tension generated by the
relationship between language and dialect, between
dialect and dialect, between popular language and
literary language, proposing various concrete solu-
tions in his translation. Consider, for instance, the
mixture of styles in Sanciu's answer to the lofty "bel
morir tutta la vita onora":
"Comu! rispusi Sanciu, e chi scacciati!
Ch'aju a muriri pr'esseri onoratu?
Pirdunatimi, e grossa asinitati;
mi sentu megghiu eu vivu, sbrigugnatu,
chi Achilli e Ulissi morti, decantati;
pirchi eu, o tintu o pintu, avennu ciatu,
la cinniri di st'omini valenti
la scarpisu, e percio su chiu potenti." (Canto I, 1 1)
"What are you telling me?" then Sanciu asked,
"Am I to die so honor can be mine?
Forgive me, but that's really asinine!
Alive, though in disgrace, I feel much better
than both Achilles and Ulysses, for
they're honored but quite dead, and since I breathe,
good man or bad - I am the stronger, then,
for I can tread the dust of those brave men."
In more recent times, one of the most interesting
phenomena in contemporary Italian literature is un-
doubtedly the current flourishing of neodialect poet-
ry, exceptional in so many ways. I would like to
dwell briefly on two of the best neodialect poets,
Giose Rimanelli and Achille Serrao, whose work I
have translated into English. Rimanelli recently
published Moliseide,22 a book of poems in the
Molisan dialect with my English translations, in
which the problem of dialect is complicated by the
extreme literariness of the text and is systematically
contaminated by references to troubadour poetry,
medieval Latin poetry, American and French poet-
ry, jazz, and blues. It is a text characterized by di-
verse languages and styles, and by a rich variety of
meter, from free verse to the ballad, from hendeca-
syllables to double seven-syllable lines, with an
abundance of rhyme and assonance. The dialect is
therefore the trunk on which are grafted multiple
linguistic and literary experiences. The search for
dialect thus becomes a search for the poetic word,
with the awareness that the greatest difficulty lies
more in the cultural and literary layering of the text
and in the pursuit of a rhythm suited to the internal
movement of the verse than in the peculiarity of di-
alect.
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BONAFFINI 285
The untranslatableness of dialect - that is, its se-
mantic opacity - is proportional to the idiomatic use
of words, slang, and jargon limited to local color.
On the question of the untranslatableness of dialect,
Hermann Haller, who translated into English the
poems of his important anthology The Hidden Italy,
opting for a literal rather than literary rendition, in-
sists, "I have chosen a literal prose translation at the
cost of some stylistic and rhythmic elegance, aware
of the difficulty of translating the unique expressive-
ness of each of the dialects."23 Further on, he adds:
"The result of this pluralistic operation is a poetry
that can barely be translated. Words such as the Mi-
lanese cagabizet or cagoni, the Piedmontese brandev,
or the Triestine povaro can cannot be rendered ac-
curately. . . . The sound of each dialect is different,
the phonosymbolism of each adding a special musi-
cal effect: the rather somber, melancholy sounds of
Sicilian; the happy tonality of Neapolitan, express-
ing love for life; the cordial timbre of Romanesco
and the airiness of Venetian; the powerful gallic in-
tonations of Milanese."24
On the other hand, the translatableness of dialect,
as Franco Brevini points out in a fundamental study
of dialect poetry, Le parole perdute: Dialetti e poesia
nel nostro secolo25 depends precisely on the elimina-
tion of the more strictly vernacular elements, the
overly pronounced idiomatic peaks, as is the case
with Giotti, Marin, Noventa, and finally Rimanelli.
Take as an example the very first stanza of the first
poem in Moliseide:
Quanne t'ezziccche a i vrite du penziere
e fore chiagne u sole, ze fa' notte,
u sanghe te ze chiatre, sie' streniere:
a vije da terre tije donde sta'?
When you get near the glasspanes of your thoughts
and outside the sun weeps, and darkness falls,
your blood turns into ice, you are a stranger;
the road back to your land, where can it be?
It should be noted that in this stanza there is no
word or expression which presents any particular
difficulties for the translator; instead, they are hid-
den in the tone, in the rhythmic modulation and the
metrical structure, so that in the translation I was
forced to leave out the rhyme, which would have
considerably affected the possibility of following the
subtle musical patterning of the text.
Quite different is the case of Achille Serrao from
Campania, who in his book 'A canniatura I The
Crevice, also accompanied by my English translation,
does not use the Neapolitan dialect but rather the
peripheral dialect of Caivano, much blunter and
harsher than Neapolitan. The resistance of the lin-
guistic medium is compounded by the programmatic
avoidance of sentimentality and subjectivity by Ser-
rao, whose text therefore appears extremely concen-
trated, deliberately antimelodic, refractory, granular,
286 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
aiming at more subtle, more secret harmonies. To
try to render into English the harshness of Serrao's
diction would lead to a forced quest for consonantal
tones and broken, antimelodic rhythms, which
would sound artificial in English. My strategy in this
case was instead to attempt to capture the basic
tonality of the text, the melancholic intensity that
subtends the apparent impersonality of the poetic
persona. Moreover, there is the question of Serrao's
philological precision, evident in the glossary he ap-
pended in order to explain his linguistic choices. I
cite the poem "Nu tiempo c'e stato" as an example:
Nu tiempo c'e stato ch"e pparole
nun cagnavano 11' aria, addu nuje
frievano cu' ll'uoglio
d"a jacuvella areto 'a vocca, attenute
pe' ppaura, cummenienza che ssaccio . . .
There was a time when words
didn't change the air, around these parts
they fried in the oil
of cunning, held in the mouth
by fear, expedience maybe . . .
Anyone familiar with Neapolitan will probably have
difficulty only with jacuvella, which is explained as
follows in the glossary:
s.f.: "intrigue, cunning, blandishments, fondling."
Etym.: from the French Jacques = Giacomo (James),
which has the metaphorical meaning of "fool, simple-
ton," at least since the XlVth Cent, (in fact, in 1358 re-
bellious farmers were disparagingly called Jacques Bon-
homme; the personal name "Giacomo," in its Latin
form Jacobus gave Jdcovo in Neapolitan; the expression
Jdcovo Jdcovo ("to waver") is derived from the name
"Giacomo": the name Coviello, a mask from the
Neapolitan farce that stands for "buffoon, oaf," is a
diminutive form of "Giacomo."
Given the impossibility of rendering in translation
even part of the connotative richness of the word, I
had no choice but settle for the generic and unsatis-
fying "oil of cunning," betting instead on the econo-
my and compactness of the diction.
Due to be published soon - to remain in the area
of contemporary dialect verse - is a trilingual an-
thology of the dialect poetry of southern Italy, a vol-
ume which I myself have edited. I asked some of the
translators who collaborated in this project to pro-
vide a few observations on the difficulties they en-
countered in translating dialect. It must be noted
first that from the translator's perspective the prob-
lem of translation is affected by his knowledge of the
dialect in question. Those who do not know the di-
alect are forced to avail themselves of the Italian
translation and, as a consequence, remain essential-
ly outside the dialect experience. The best situation
is that of the dialectophone who is also perfectly an-
glophone and can therefore deal with dialect from
the inside; or, to go even further, the ideal situation
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might be that of the bilingual writer who translates
himself, as we shall see in Zanzotto's case. For
Michael Palma, the translator of Gozzano and Va-
leri, who dealt with Neapolitan and Calabrese
poems for the anthology, a poor knowledge of di-
alect is a determining factor.
I would point out two immediate problems that I
have encountered in translating dialect poetry. The first
is my unfamiliarity with the dialects in question. There
is always a concern with what is lost in the translation
process; under these circumstances, there is a concern
over a potentially double loss. . . .
The other problem occurs at the other end of the
translation process. Obviously, there is no equivalent in
English for the Italian tradition of dialect poetry.
Translating into slang or any other non-normative Eng-
lish dialect - "So I says to him, I says," or some such
thing - would be totally inappropriate; it would fail to
catch the spirit of the original and it would make for
some rather bizarre-sounding English poetry. The only
real solution was to translate these poems in the same
idiom as any others: if there was any concession to the
supposed flavor of the originals (and even this notion of
"flavor" is debatable, if the dialects are in fact the nor-
mal language of their speakers), it was a slightly greater
tendency at moments toward more informal expres-
sion.26
Palma's remarks are along the same line as those
made by Miller Williams, who considers dialect the
norm for dialect speakers, so that translating into
slang - that is, deviating from the norm - would be
inappropriate and out of place. A similar course is
followed by Anthony Molino, translator of Magrelli
and De Filippo,27 who translated the poetry from
Abruzzo for the anthology.
Many people have asked me how does one manage to
translate from the Neapolitan - apparently implying
that the rendition of a "dialect" into English can pose
more or different problems than would a more widely
known language. I've always believed that a translation
is successful to the extent that the culture and language
that nurture a text can be fully assumed, indeed known,
by the translator. In this, there is something of an an-
thropological dimension, something akin to the ethnog-
rapher's capacity for "going native." Though not of
Neapolitan origins, I'd been exposed to a number of
Southern Italian dialects and traditions, first as a child
and later via my own experience in the Abruzzi, Rome,
Sicily and Matera, where altogether I've spent ten years
of my adult life.28
Here Molino touches on another, extremely impor-
tant question concerning the problem of dialect,
taken up by another translator, Justin Vitiello, who
translated from Sicilian and Apulian. Vitiello enu-
merates some of the most important factors in the
translation from dialect: 1) "A work of conservation
of disappearing cultures" (and here Vitiello gives a
global perspective on the problem); 2) "The transla-
tion of dialect poetry gives back a cultural-global

voice to the excluded, those whom Frantz Fanon
calls the damned of the earth"; and 3) "Is this a po-
litically correct discourse? No, look at Dante, father
Dante, even he is rooted, in his revolution of literary
language, in a dialect."29
Vitiello's observations are very much to the point
and beg to be expounded and clarified, but that
would take us too far afield. It must be noted,
though, and this is one of the aspects of dialect that
cannot be ignored - that dialect has a tragic core,
because the anthropological universe it expresses
has almost entirely disappeared. As Luigi Mene-
ghello, whose understanding of the dialectal condi-
tion is uncommonly profound (see his books Libera
nos a malo and Jura), reminds us, things disappear
but words remain. Dialect is a tragic language be-
cause its referents have vanished. This is precisely
its inner contradiction: on the one hand, dialect is
seen almost universally as the language of concrete-
ness and corporality; on the other, its external refer-
ence points have been concretely erased, so that the
substance of dialect is in fact manifested as a ghost
of memory, as inner resonance. The specific diffi-
culty in translating from dialect, therefore, also
hinges on the fact that the dialectal word has been
torn out of its original humus of determinateness, of
total identification with the object.
The ideal situation, it was noted before, perhaps
occurs only when the bilingual writer becomes a
translator of himself. In an essay on Zanzotto as a
translator, Giovanni Meo Zilio remarks that "the
translator of someone else's text, even in the best of
cases, namely when he is perfectly bilingual and ef-
fectively possesses the 'internal form' of the lan-
guage from which he is translating (which is not
very frequent), runs into every kind of semantic dif-
ficulties (which are added to stylistic and melodic
difficulties), such as polysemy, ambiguity, intention-
al obscurity, contextual reference of a historical, so-
ciocultural, biographical nature, et cetera, which do
not exist for the translator of oneself."30
Zilio provides a long and very detailed analysis of
Zanzotto's Italian translation of one of his stories in
the Venetian dialect, "La storia del barba zhucon /
La storia dello zio tonto" (The Story of the Witless
Uncle). He concludes that Zanzotto adopts a crite-
rion of rigorous faithfulness, but that within this
fundamental faithfulness there are here and there in
his translation certain stylistic choices (lexical, syn-
tactic, melodic, and so on) which depart from the
original text and which, in such a careful and con-
trolled writer, cannot be accidental. These differ-
ences are grouped into two categories: a) deviations
from literariness, in the sense of choice of words or
syntagms (less familiar or less plebeian or less rural
than those of the original text); and b) deviations
from essentialness, in the sense of a greater sobriety
(restraint, expressive discretion), which includes
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BONAFFINI 287
simplification, rationalization, downplaying (anti-
theatricality) with respect to the original text.
As for the greater literariness of the Italian text,
Zilio concludes that while the original is taken from
the dialect folklore of Treviso, in the Italian text the
author is less conditioned by the psycholinguistic
and sociolinguistic forms with which that folkloric
material was handed down. But there is another
mechanism at work, one "which acts more or less in
all dialect speakers when they go from dialect to the
national language. It can be articulated, with various
results, under the label of hypercorrectionism (stylis-
tic, in this case), and it consists, as is well known, in
a psycholinguistic reaction that produces effects of
excessive self-censure toward the natural tendency
for contamination."31 It should be noted that this
difference in literariness between Italian and dialect
texts in Zanzotto occurs in the translation rather
than in the original writings, since his dialect poetry
is no less literary than the Italian.
This essay does not deal with the inverse opera-
tion, perhaps even more problematic and in need of
critical study - that is, the translation from standard
language into dialect, which has produced various
versions of the Divine Comedy, a Calabrese version
of Jerusalem Delivered, a Neapolitan Aeneid in ottava
rima, and so on. I would like to mention, however,
at least one recent attempt by a dialect poet,
Giuseppe Jovine, to render in dialect an author as
complex as Montale.32 I mention this also for the
methodological clarity with which the author under-
takes an apparently unfeasible task.
With respect to the translation of Montale, which could
be contested on the pretext of the untranslatableness of
elaborate and psychologically complex texts into a ver-
nacular that is assumed to be lacking stylistic complexi-
ty and refinement, it must be noted that Montale's
great themes of life and beyond, of the search for the
ultimate form of being, of the "word that scans from
every side our shapeless soul," of human passing, can
well find a place in the vernacular. All those themes
have a linguistic equivalent in dialect, if it is true, as I
believe, that folklore encompasses all the surviving and
contaminated documents of all the conceptions of the
world and of life that have been held throughout histo-
ry, as Gramsci observes.33
As for the results, once one is past the initial disori-
entation and estrangement, the very least one can
say is that the attempt is undoubtedly interesting
and provocative.
Come Zaccheo
Si tratta di arrampicarsi sul sicomoro
per vedere il Signore se mai passi.
Ahime, non sono un rampicante ed anche
stando in punta di piedi non l'ho mai visto.
(from Diario del '71 e del 72)
 288 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
Chi sa se passa u' Patraterne
Ze tratta da 'nghiana
'ncopp'a n'albere de chiuppe
Nze po sape! Pessotte po passa
da nu prichinde all'atre u' Patraterne.
Ma se mmanche na' luna 1'anne viste
'gna le pozze vede se nen m'arrizze
manche 'npunte de pede pe le calle?
(from Chi sa se passa u' Patraterne)
Who Knows If the Almighty Will Go By
You have to climb on a poplar tree.
You never know! The Almighty
could go by at any moment.
But if he hasn't been seen even on the moon,
how can I see him if I can't stand
on the tip of my toes because of calluses.
It would be useful, in further studies, to analyze
the texts in translation in order to measure and eval-
uate their literary and stylistic rendition in a con-
crete manner. In the end, however, we are forced to
acknowledge the obvious: namely, that it is impossi-
ble to find a conclusive answer to the problems of
translating dialect. I have pointed out some possible
paths to explore, but the success of any attempt can
ultimately depend only on the linguistic and literary
sensibility of the translator.
Brooklyn College
1 Franco Brevini, Poeti dialettali del Novecento, Turin, Einaudi,
1987, p. x.
2 Poesia dialettale del Molise: Testi e critica I Dialect Poetry from
Molise: Texts and Criticism (trilingual edition), eds. Luigi Bonaffi-
ni, Giambattista Faralli, and Sebastiano Martelli, Isernia,
Marinelli, 1993; and Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy, ed. Luigi
Bonaffini, New York, Legas, 1997.
3 Tonino Guerra, Abandoned Places, ed. & tr. Adria Bernardi,
Toronto, Guernica, 1997; Salvatore Di Giacomo, Love Poems, tr.
Frank Palescandolo, Toronto, Guernica, 1997; Achille Serrao, 'A
canniatura I The Crevice (trilingual edition), ed. & tr. Luigi
Bonaffini, New York, Peter Lang, 1995; Giuseppe Jovine, Lu
pavone and La sdrenga (trilingual edition), ed. & tr. Luigi Bonaffi-
ni, New York, Peter Lang, 1994; The Poetry of Nino Martoglio, ed.
& tr. Gaetano Cipolla, New York, Legas, 1993; Giose Rimanelli,
Moliseide (trilingual edition), ed. & tr. Luigi Bonaffini, New York,
Peter Lang, 1992; The Discovery of America, ed. & tr. John Du
Val, Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1991; Vincenzo
Ancona, Malidittu la lingua I Damned Language, ed. & tr. Gaetano
Cipolla, New York, Legas, 1990; Tales of Trilussa, ed. & tr. John
Du Val, Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1990.
4 The Portable Mark Twain, ed. Bernard De Voto, New York,
Viking, 1968, p. 193.
John Du Val, "Translating the Dialect: Miller Williams' Ro-
manesco," Translation Review, 32-33 (1990), p. 27. Mark
Twain's comment appears at the beginning of the article.
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6 Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn, Milan, Garzanti, 1992.
7 David R. Sewell, Mark Twain's Languages: Discourse, Dia-
logue, and Linguistic Variety, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1987, p. 67.
8Judson Rosengrant, "Toads in the Garden: On Translating
Vernacular Style in Eduard Limonov," Translation Review, 38-39
(1992), p. 16.
9 Henry G. Schogt, "Langue etrangere et dialecte et leurs rap-
ports avec le texte principal: Un probleme de traduction," Con-
trastes, 17 December 1988, pp. 21-38.
10 Brian Altano, "Translating Dialect Literature: The Paradigm
of Carlo Emilio Gadda," Babel, 34:3 (1988), pp. 152-56.
11 The following is Weaver's translation, as quoted by Altano,
p. 155: "'Get your roast pork here! Pork straight from the Areca
with a whole tree of rosemary in its belly! With fresh, new pota-
toes, too, right in season! . . . I'm here to tell you. Taste them for
yourselves.' He rested for a moment to catch his breath. And
then, exploding: 'One-ninety the slice, roast pork! We're giving it
away, ladies! It's a crying shame, that's what it is, ladies! You
ought to be ashamed to buy it so cheap. One-ninety, easier done
than said! Step right up, cash in hand, ladies! If you don't eat you
can't work.' . . . Then, to a local beauty, lowering his tone: 'What
about you, pretty girl?' The girl, at that tone of authority, could-
n't restrain her laughter. 'A half pound of pork?' and, sotto voce,
to her, but with a glance at the penniless tooth-puller: 'I'll give
you the best part, that's a promise. You're my type, all right.
You're too pretty!'"
12 Altano, p. 156.
13 Sonnets of Giuseppe Belli, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1981, p. xxii.
14 Du Val, pp. 27-28.
15 Ibid., p. 28.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 31.
18 Giambattista Basile, // Pentamerone, tr. Benedetto Croce,
Bari, Laterza, 1925, pp. xxx-xxxi.
19 The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, London/New York,
Dutton, 1932, p. viii.
20 Ibid.
21 Don Chisciotti and Sanciu Panza, Ottawa, Canadian Society
for Italian Studies, 1986, p. xxxi.
22 Giose Rimanelli, Moliseide, New York, Peter Lang, 1992.
23 The Hidden Italy, ed. Hermann Haller, Detroit, Wayne State
University Press, 1986, p. 22.
24 Ibid., p. 45.
25 Franco Brevini, Le parole perdute: Dialetti e poesia nel nostro se-
colo, Turin, Einaudi, 1990.
26 In a letter to me, answering a few questions on translating
from the dialect.
27 Eduardo De Filippo, The Nativity Scene, Toronto, Guernica,
1997.
28 In a letter to me, answering a few questions on translating
from the dialect.
29 In a letter to me, answering a few questions on translating
from the dialect.
30 Giovanni Meo Zilio, "Come Zanzotto traduce se stesso,"
Quaderni Veneti, 14 (December 1991), pp. 95-107.
31 Ibid., p. 106.
32 Giuseppe Jovine, Chi sa se passa uy Patraterne, Rome, II Ven-
taglio, 1992.
33 Ibid., pp. 9-10.