POETRY AS AN EMBALMED CADAVER

During my tenure as director of Columbia University’s Casa Italiana, I had the unfortunate idea to organize an Italian Poetry Day and to invite all the New York schools where Italian was taught. Students and pupils would compete for prizes by reading Italian poems of their choice. Events like poetry readings and staging of contemporary or ancient plays in a foreign language are very common in American schools. The winners were to be selected by a committee composed of teachers whose students did not partake in the competition. The initiative was successful and continued for a number of years. I am not sure, however, how much it has contributed to the popularity and love of Italian poetry. My guess is that the students of Italian I had to listen to every year were not worse than those who acted in Molière’s[1] farces in French or in Cechov’s[2] [sic] tragedies in Russian. It was in this context that I had a revelation. The poems, as is bound to happen, were obviously chosen by the teachers, not the students. And the choices were a window on those teachers’ culture and taste. I remember distinctly that three particular poems kept coming up for years and years, recited by more than one student. These were, in order of preference: La spigolatrice di Sapri (1858) by Luigi Mercantini,[3] A mia madre,[4] by Edmondo de Amicis and a poem by the same title by Aleardo Aleardi.[5] How many times did I hear :

                        They were three hundred, they were young and strong

                         and now they are dead.[6]

I didn’t count, but to me it felt like a thousand times and every time it felt like nine hundred and ninety nine times too many. After these poems, best sellers were the works by Giovanni Prati;[7] sometimes Giosuè Carducci and, the most recent, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Among the classics, the best known was A Silvia by Giacomo Leopardi.[8] Clearly we were witnessing the literary stratification of the Romantic period. The teachers who were showing off personal knowledge and preferences through their students had, in turn, been taught by teachers who had gone to school in Italy between 1880 and 1900 and were exposed to poetry anthologies that reflected the sentimental choices of those days. Nothing had broken the tradition. The poetical baggage of those new teachers was the same as that of their teachers when they were high school students in Italy. In the meantime in Italy things had been evolving dramatically. Poetry had undergone great changes with deep transformations. New sensibilities, new issues, new sources of inspiration, new and different poetical languages had—and have—recently emerged. The trauma of World War I hasn’t had any influence on these teachers; nor has the social transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society; nor a different psychological landscape and the absorption of realistic language into poetic expression. In America everything has remained the same, as if fossilized. Not even the most recent immigrants had brought with them the new Italy. However, the aspect that struck me the most was the almost complete impermeability of the teachers to new country, where many were born and schooled; and where most of them completed their studies in English and were exposed to Anglo-Saxon literature. At the beginning of the [twentieth] century, Italy started absorbing literary experiences, styles and concepts from other countries. In the meantime, in the immigrant communities the patriotic and provincial taste and the languid and frayed vocabulary of Italian late-Romanticism[9] were still honored and preserved, like in a museum glass case. The poetry festival resembled the exhumation of embalmed cadavers.

In this as in many other cases, the image that came to my mind to describe Italian immigration (although, in all honesty, the image applies to other immigrations as well,) was that of a cyst, an image I used in previous occasions. A cyst is a blister of sorts that shows up in the body and surrounds itself with resistant tissue for protection. Cysts remain isolated and do not respond to the evolution and renewal of the surrounding tissues. Most of the times they are harmless and live on, until the body dies. The literature of the last gasps of bloodless and exhausted sentimental Romanticism will last until the death of Italian immigration; despite the fact that it no longer has any relation with the body of Italy and it is an anomaly even within the body of America, against which Italian immigration still seeks protection.

Other residues of this phenomenon grab the attention of Italians who visit the United States for the first time. These residues are the names of Italian associations that honor the likes of Giordano Bruno,[10] Camillo Sbarbaro[11] or Giovanni Bovio.[12] Or they can be on the shelves of an old bar where a yellow liqueur is sold, the Galliano,[13] something that takes me back to Italy’s colonial wars in Africa before 1900. The festival of Italian poetry revealed to me the existence of a literary cyst that doesn’t hurt anybody and that no doctor with common sense would recommend removing.

The literary cyst, present in Italian teachers, is identical to the literary cyst carried by the old wave of literate immigrants from the same social class. By old immigration I mean the stream that arrived before the great break of World War II. That hiatus constitutes an enormous abyss between the old and the new wave. In the first wave of the great migration, the educated immigrants brought with them the literary taste, level and style of that time; therefore, this is how they expressed themselves as soon as they were in the position to “make the presses squeal”—as we used to say before the linotype machine was invented. Today there are still several Italian poets in the United States who use the language of Aleardi and Prati. Isn’t this an interesting phenomenon from a social, anthropological and folkloristic standpoint? There are daily and monthly publications that print these works. Here is, for example, a passage from the self-introduction to a poetry book. This is fascinating to me in that it is a mix of classical and American languages, in a total unselfconscious way, of course.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye:[14]

 

I am enamored of the old form and I abhor the extravagances that today [1931] pass for poetry, extravagances that deface the melodiousness and levity of Calliope’s[15] divine art and tend to condemn the beautiful and harmonious Italian muse to a shameful decadence. I wrote what this soul of mine dictated with no sophistry or hesitations and without worrying about the poisonous arrows flung by jealous people and the eunuchs sitting in the first rows and high price theater boxes… I wrote for those who suffer like me, for those who know the cramps of hunger and the torment of seeing one’s child cry for a miserable penny, for those whose heart is not petrified…. I abhor pedantic individuals because they have given nothing to the world; they are relentless naggers, repugnant orthodox who feign being scandalized at every chance they get, people who splash themselves in a stagnant pond; they cannot comprehend my verses, the same way

they ignore the speed-up in the factories of America…

 

And do you want to hear one of the poems of this enamored of the ancient form? I am selecting a passage that talks about the life of those who, like the poet, took the big step of immigration:

And there they go! go! away, toward unknown

shores, pushed by indecent fever

for gold, always they are the eternal Helot[16] servants

who only know of trouble and hunger.

Here is someone who probably really endured suffering and paid a heavy price, but that experience has triggered only trite clichés in his poetry. This immigrant carried some literature in his baggage and when he tried to say what he perhaps felt but could not express, he just repeated what he had read. When one examines the poetics, or, better yet, the versification that was born from immigration and was transplanted in America and survived like a cyst, it is incredible how little reality, how little novelty and sincerity it contains. There are dozens and dozens of poetry volumes whose publication is paid for by the authors themselves. They are a literary tragedy even more painful than the social ones they describe. In the passage I quoted above, the only hint of reality comes from the two English words: the child desperate for a penny and the technical term—which becomes poetic in this rhetorical context—of the mechanical cruelty of the speed-up (“quicker-or-you-are-fired”). The word penny that came out of his pen in America is an almost archaic expression, because generally the word used is cent; the child that cries for a penny takes on an almost mythical character. The speed-up sounds like the tyrannical order given by a supervisor. These two English expressions are more lively than the Italian. Curiously, in order to find expressions that are born from a poetic, non-literary spirit, one needs to search in popular songs.

If the so-called poets of the old immigration that are still alive should happen to read this article, god knows how much they would despise me. The paradox is that I respect and appreciate them for the love they kept for that kind of literature that cost them a lot of disappointments, sorrows and, I presume, money. In addition to the unhappiness for being far removed from Italy’s new sensibilities and expressive modes that were evolving in a different direction, they also were met by the silence of fellow immigrants who couldn’t care less about their poetry; didn’t even notice their existence and, naturally, didn’t spend a dime to buy those volumes. As a result, these poets were pushed toward becoming lachrymose beggars and they now make for a curious chapter in the history of Italian immigration. They wanted to be poets in a language that is foreign to the country that took them in; they wanted to live off their poetry which, by the way, is no longer considered poetry even in their country of origin.

New York, April 8, 1960