ITALIAN AMERICAN POETS ARE AN UNHAPPY BUNCH

Among the five million Italians who came to America looking for work, a few had some education—and wrote poetry. The Italian-language newspapers of those days regularly published their poems in every issue—a tradition that continues to this day. How many of these poets have seen their work published? Nobody knows. A detailed analysis would yield funny and even surprising results, but nobody has bothered to investigate because, frankly, not many readers would be interested in finding out how many individuals brought from Italy a baggage full of clichés, worn-out words and banal meters. Their survival, though, is an interesting phenomenon. It is similar to the phenomenon studied by biologists who observed that animals that are transferred to an environment with a different climate continue to give birth to descendants with unchanged characteristics, even if those characteristics do not serve any purpose in terms of sustenance and preservation. The environment apparently has no influence on them. This happens to humans as well. There are families of white people who migrated to Africa centuries ago who keep generating children with blond hair and blue eyes. The sun does not change those traits as the power of the seed is stronger than that of the environment. Residues of immigrations or of invasions from foreign peoples can be found, for instance, in the foothills of the Italian Alps, where small communities of Germanic people still speak dialects by now extinct in Germany. These Italian American writers are the same: they use a poetical dialect that nobody in Italy has used in a long time. The size of their production, published in America, is significant. There are many books, probably published at the authors’ expense, that look like they came out of the presses of small, marginal printers. And now, there is a cottage industry of publishers in Italy, mostly unknown, who publish the works of the last survivors of the literary migrations. They take advantage of these authors who are willing to spend their hard-earned money in hope of gaining fame in Italy.

I am not referring here to Italians who ended up in America for a variety of reasons and published their work in American journals, as fiction writers like Nicola [sic] Tucci[1] and Antonio Barolini;[2] or political essayists like Giuseppe Borgese.[3] These authors are integrated in the American system and now enjoy good success and a loyal following. I am not even talking about the phenomenon of writers of Italian origin who are writing in English. This is a phenomenon that deserves attention in a different context and concerns writers who sprung out of Italian roots but whose thoughts and imagination are primarily American.

These others survive perpetually nostalgic, spending their own money to publish their work. In a poem dedicated to his unfortunate comrades, i.e. the “Italian poets in America,” one of the most famous of them sang this song:

Oh poets who came here

To end your lives

After living

For many years in that desirable

Land where the sun almost

Always shines, and where

Sweet love sparkles

deep in everyone’s pupils

I know you are oppressed

And cannot find peace

Because although you are messengers

 of true Beauty

Nobody listens to you here

for here there aren’t enough people

cultured enough to understand a cantor.

And all those beautiful

Rhymes that you write

Pushed by the sublime inspiration that you know

Are like flowers lost in the wind

Stars that for one moment

Shine in the firmament

And then disappear in the darkness.

[O poeti venuti/ venuti a finir qui la vita/ dopo esser vissuti/ molt’anni in quell’ambita /terra ove il sol brilla /quasi sempre, e sfavilla/ in fondo alla pupilla/ /di tutti un dolce amor,/ io so che siete oppressi/ e non trovate pace,/ giacché sebbene messi/ della Beltà verace,/ nessuno qui v’ascolta,/ perché qui non c’è molta/ gente abbastanza colta/ da intender un cantor./ E tutte quelle rime/ belle che voi scrivete,/ spinte da quel sublime/ afflato che sapete,/ son fiori sparsi al vento,/ stelle che un sol momento/ raggian nel firmamento/ e spaion nel buio.]

I cannot fathom how, with all the real tragedies that immigration caused (about which the survivors feign amnesia and the dead keep silent), anybody one could also include the tragedy of poets, a supposed tragedy that consumed only paper and it spread—at least so I hope—more ink than blood and tears. There is something pathetic about a group of decent people who stuck faithfully to their love for what they claim are the pure Italian words. At a time when their language, or better yet, their dialects, were mutating into a barbaric mix contaminated by low-class English learned from the American plebes, they kept writing in grammatically perfect Italian, following the rhymes and the same identical century-old so-called poetical words, untouched by the changes that were taking place in Italy. At their core lies the rhetoric of the late- Romantic period, undisturbed even by the influence of more modern poets such as Carducci or D’Annunzio.

Italian-language poets were a deeply unhappy bunch, at least judging from the wailings of their poems and the introductions of their books. Actually, since many of them are still alive, they are still unhappy. Everywhere one can hear the same lament over and over: “Philosophy, ye poor and naked go”[4] (with the only difference that here it is not philosophy but poetry). I guess it was inevitable. These people grew up locked inside the mass of Italian immigrants who either spoke only dialects and couldn’t read and write; or, if they could read, they didn’t read books. On the other side they saw the masses of American natives, indifferent to what they called the “beautiful language of Italy” unless it was sung by opera singers. Their merchandise had no value in this country. Riccardo Cordiferro,[5] one of the best known and most appreciated practitioners of this trade and who, to this day, is held in high esteem by the members of this poetic tribe, in an article inveighed with epithets like “filthy, loutish, cheap” against the solid Italian businessmen who were making a lot of money trading chestnuts, olive oil and wine but would not buy their poetry books. It could be that those businessmen deserved the epithets for other reasons, yet I don’t understand how and why importers of cured salami and tomato paste with a bit of the color and scent of Italy should have supported a literature that was alien to them, that nobody understood and that the host country didn’t even know existed. It was not a product worth patronizing.

In Italy their poetic language had already disappeared. Books no longer swooned about “swallows that chirp about love” and “weave fair love-carols in the sky.” You couldn’t find anywhere in print “Hyrcanian tigers,”[6] “the deep maelstrom of sin,” “fate that ridicules and threatens me,” “hours of pleasure, days of inebriation.” Really, were they dreaming of making money—by the hatful—in America—with this kind of imagery? Almost none of these poets had any contact with American schools. Some went through high school in Italy and called themselves professor, a title that enjoys very little consideration in Italy, particularly in the south, where even kindergarten teachers are called professor. Whatever the case, they never got regular jobs as teachers. I met many teachers of Italian in American schools and none of them, as far as I can remember, mentioned being a poet. They all used prose to write their idiocies, which is exactly what I do when I write my own idiocies.

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Note: I want to immortalize the colonial bard Riccardo Cordiferro with a few quotations from his work because I don’t want my readers to think that I am making things up. Italian provincial poetry, the kind that is published by the Farfalla illustrata, came to shore here and here it is preserved with mothballs in a museum glass case. And let’s not talk about the cravings for publicity and praise pursued by these poets. Cordiferro, for example, in his own periodical re-published press reviews of his work taken, respectively, from Colombo (Houston, Texas), La Rassegna letteraria (Palmi, Reggio Calabria) and La Sentinella (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Here are a few lines from his sonnets. From I Too Much Loved You, first quatrain:

If a Hyrcanian tiger ripped apart my chest

And if it tore up piece by piece my heart,

No, I would not sense as much pain

As I feel, oh ungrateful one, in front of you.

[Se ircana tigre mi squarciasse il petto/ e mi facesse a brano a brano il cuore,/ no, io non sentirei tanto dolore/ quanto ne provo, o ingrata, al tuo cospetto.]

Here is another example from Why?...

Why are you asking me for love rhymes,
Why are you asking me for winged song,
Now that a gelid tomb is my heart,
Now that of my lyre broken are
All the strings and mute it lies..?

[Perché mi chiedi tu versi d’amore,/ perché mi chiedi tu canzoni alate,/ se una gelida tomba è questo cuore, /se della cetra mia si son spezzate/ tutte le corde e muta se ne sta?...]

Is it possible to imagine a collection of worse worn-out words, of falser feelings, of more banal rhymes; of a sentimental vacuum rendered even worse by the show of the ellipse, those infamous three dots, the ineffably romantic poetry’s specks of dust that fell from the skies on those “love rhymes”; on those “songs” that, of course, are “winged”; over the tomb that had to be “gelid” and on the “lyre” (where could he buy it, if not from a junk dealer? ) with, it goes without saying, “broken strings?” Why didn’t someone grab a mop and do a clean up?

New York, June 26, 1960