|
REVIEWS For Vincenzo Ancona, Mario Fratti and Anne Paolucci, Philip Gambone, Kenneth Gangemi,Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Robert W. Lewis, andRose Romano Vincenzo
Ancona. Malidittu la
lingua/Damned language. A. L. Chairetakis and J. Sciorra, eds. Gaetano
Cipolla, trans. New York: LEGAS: Pueti d’Arba Sicula/Poets of Arba Sicula,
1990. 211 p. In his English
versions of the Sicilian Giovanni Meli’s The
Origin of the World (1985), Don
Chisciotti and Sanciu Panza (1986), and Moral Fables (1988), Gaetano Cipolla emerged as the premier
translator of one of Europe’s foremost Enlightenment poets. Now Professor
Cipolla has successfully undertaken a project that is an organic development
of his indefatigability as
president of the Brooklyn-based cultural society Arba Sicula and editor of
the literary/cultural journals Arba
Sicula and Sicilia Parra: the
translation and bilingual publication c/o LEGAS of the first in a planned
series of “pueti siculi.” Justly, the poet
inaugurating this venture is Vincenzo Ancona, the Bard of Siculo-Brooklyn (originally
from Castellammare del Golfo, Trapani Province). His verses reeled off in cantastorie style are aptly rendered
and often refined by a translator eminently equipped to handle the urbane,
subtle wit and verbal elegance of an 18th-century aulic poet or the
earthiness, down-home lyricism and emotive vicissitudes of a modern
immigrant/folk poet. Accompanying
Cipolla’s translation, which gives us a fine sense of Ancona’s orality, are
two tapes of the poet reading/reciting/performing his works in Sicilian (some
with the spirited participation of Maria Portuese and Antonino Provenzano,
himself an “Ameri-Siculo” poet). Although the order of the verses on the
tapes differs slightly from that of the printed poems, and while some
extraneous pieces are included in the recordings, hearing Ancona’s gravelly
voice in all its tonalities (from nostalgic to burlesque, from wistful to
histrionic) convinces us that the tradition of folk oral poetry is still very
much alive—even in the most sprawling metropolis of this cybernetic-bent
country.[1] Judiciously
categorizing Ancona’s corpus poeticum
under four headings, Cipolla provides the foci of its coherence: (1) The
American Experience; (2) Life in Sicily; (3) Anecdotes; (4) Tales. Such an
arrangement makes it clear that Ancona is, first and foremost, a paradox: an urban/immigrant/folk poet who, from
“Brucculinu” (the setting for section #1), struggles not only to function in
an estranging land, but also to preserve that oral peasant tradition
disappearing behind him in Sicily and
the recollected agrarian images of his terra,
the via crucis of his spiritual
survival and very identity (see section #2). Moreover, the insertion of
anecdotes and tales, folk poetic forms par
excellence, after “Life in Sicily,” represents a reaffirming of Ancona’s
transplanted but enduring popolarità
(a quality consistently reconfirmed by his smashingly successful performances
in Sicilian cultural circles all over New York City, especially in Brooklyn’s
Castel del Golfo Social Club). The editors’ decision
to round out each section of the book with a contrasto, the poetic dialogue mode bequeathed to Sicilian and
Italian literature by the 13th century Siculo-bard Ciullo d’Alcamo,
emphasizes how integrally Ancona is related to the popular and literary
tradition of a people that has always thrived on mimesis and dramatico-poetic
performance in art and daily life via their passion for verbal cleverness and
hair-splitting argumentation.[2] Unfortunately, in their introduction,
Chairetakis and Sciorra fall short of substantiating the value(s) of Ancona’s
poetry within this tradition.[3] While the English
translation does not restage every
moment of the original’s comicality (specifically in the instances when
Ancona resorts to macaronics and “Siculish”),[4] Cipolla resolves poetically most of the
problems posed by the curious phenomenon of linguistic bastardization that is
part and parcel of immigrant alienation (“If I do not learn English soon,
I’ll be ruined”—p. 47) and of
malaprop humor (e.g., “truvai giobba nta na fatturia”—p. 46).[5] In “Amerisicula” (p. 55) and “Things
Happen to Me Even on a Bus” (p. 59), the translator preserves Siculish
phrases by integrating them into his climactic rhyming couplets. The former
poem, with tongue in cheek (and clenched between the teeth!), describes how
“misery loves company” (“mal comune, mezzo gaudio”) among the immigrant
neighbors of “Bensinosti” (Bensonhurst), who seem to be losing their battle
against linguistico-social isolation: . . . and
if they don’t know English, they can say, “Sampari spicchi
Italia?” and talk away. In the latter poem,
Ancona is boarding a bus after a woman with a voluminous posterior: As I was climbing
up two steps behind her, I was distracted
and kept looking down. That’s how my face
went smack in her backside! Rhyming English and
Siculish in the last two lines, Cipolla injects the proper dose of humor into
the poet’s attempt to extricate himself graciously and thus achieves a bombastic collapse: But then the bus
pulled out without ado. I said, “Amissari!”
She replied “Forchiù!” Cipolla, by opting
not to reproduce Ancona’s ababcdcd rhyming octaves as such, has taken the
route of many translators of poetry from the Romance languages where
“natural” (i.e., grammatical) and unobtrusive rhymes abound as they do not in English (except in cases of
heavy Latinate endings like -tion, -ncy, and -ity). But, in Maliditta la lingua, Cipolla’s
decision to implement rhyme mostly to round out each octave with a couplet
grants him the freedom to render more faithfully Ancona’s poetic moods and
nuances and to chart the flow, dips, rises and bumps of the bard’s crinkly,
up-and-down-to-earth language. Cipolla rises to the
task no matter what the predominant tone or traditional form Ancona employs.
In “The Life I Lead” (p. 77), the poet reflects on all he has lost via
emigration and the translator ex-presses
the core of that famous Sicilian tragic sense of life: What living
memories, and yet what shambles! Sometimes I even
get the urge to cry. It feels then like
the burning of a knife, when I review my
past. But what is life? In “The Dawn is
Breaking . . .” (p. 91), Ancona’s folk lyricism cum alliteration resounds limpidly in
the English version: I hear the cock
call cock-a-doodle-doo, and in the eastern sky
a flame is rising. The sun appears and
spreads abroad its rays decking the earth
with silver and with gold . . . And, although
Cipolla’s rendition of one of Ancona’s most heart-wrenching poems, “Bread
from Wheat” (p. 95 f.), lacks some of Ancona’s “folksiness,” the translator
fully captures the rhythm, pace, and rugged beauty of this work song/prayer,
a ritualistic and mythic evocation of a bygone Sicily. I sense that Cipolla
had the most fun and felt most creatively fulfilled himself in finding the keys
to Ancona’s Sicilian wit and gallows humor with all their punch lines and
ironic twists of fate and language. Examples of Cipolla’s art in meeting the
stiff challenge of translating such conceits are rife throughout Malidittu la lingua. Temple
University Mario
Fratti, ed. Thank
you Gorbachev! Wall to Wall Press, N.Y. N.Y. 1990. 94 pp. Anne
Paolucci. Gorbachev in Concert (and
other Poems) Griffon House Publications, Whitestone, N.Y. 1991. 60 pp. One of the lesser
known fallouts of the changes in world affairs is the promising appearance of
Gorbachev as one who inspires poetry. As if by fortunate coincidence Mario
Fratti and Anne Paolucci have suc-cumbed to Gorby’s charm. Mario Fratti, award
winning playwright put together an anthology of poems entitled Thank you Gorbachev! The poets range
from Katherine Hepburn’s short poem which opens the anthology with: We need you Gorbachev Man of the decade Man of the century to
a Russian pensioner’s lament: We are 65 now And you are
destroying Our faith and Our pensions You are taking our
bread away After we sacrificed
so much for mother Russia. There are thanks also
from a Rumanian professor, Daniela Gioseffi, and Richard Davidson, a
socialist poet. Certainly as Fratti writes in the forward, the anthology is
an unusual and unpredictable portrait of the man chosen as a symbol of a new
decade. Anne Paolucci’s Gorbachev in Concert and Other Poems
begins with a brief soliloquy, a poem in the human emotions of rage. The
poems read like a dialogue the poet has with history, with a personal past,
all in a language filled with fresh imagery and the unexpected arrangement of
words that keeps one reading. There are poems to
Faulkner, to the universe and to a family album and of course to Gorbachev:
Purpuric on his scalp / Set there at some early date / By a brooding fate. Both volumes bear
witness to our times. SUNY,
Plattsburgh Philip
Gambone. The
Language We Use Up Here and Other Stories. New York: Dutton. 1991. 257
pp. The Language We Use Up Here is a collection of stories about a
variety of men who happen to be gay. Most live in Boston with their life partners.
Philip Gambone thus resists two powerful injunctions: don’t talk about Italian-American family life, and don’t talk about being gay. It is good
that he chose to heed neither, because the talking his characters do is well
worth hearing. All of the stories refer to language—cliches such as “too
much” or “losing it” are transformed into surprising insights. In one story
we reconsider “family”: family of origin; gay family; infertile heterosexual
couples; lesbian couples who choose pregnancy. These are stories
about belonging. Whether gay or
nongay, people yearn for acceptance and love. Yet many of us must overcome
the childhood lessons we learned too well: Don’t trust. Don’t talk about your feelings. Adults are often
burdened with a habit of avoidance and denial, preventing them from
sustaining love and intimacy. These stories are most eloquent when they
depict characters trapped in their own repressed feelings, unable to
articulate their needs. In “Saying the Truth” two lifelong friends learn to
become more honest with each other on a trip to the American Southwest. In
“The Words,” Matt’s pal Ellen doesn’t fall for his defensive attacks and
keeps to the point Matt is trying to avoid—his fear of losing Brad and what
to do about it. “Matt, what does he need to hear from you?” she asks, then
tells him, “Come on, Matt. . . . The words. Say the words.” What
Gambone’s really after is the cathartic release of emotion through small
epiphanies. All of his characters are carrying some nugget of pain or anger
or grief—difficult to carry and even more difficult to let go. The stories are not
all seriousness. In “Babushkas,” “Body Work” and others, Gambone offers
humorous depictions of gay men with great affection for the people
(including, perhaps, himself) he satirizes. In “Acceptable”
Brian’s ex-roommate Janice has a new roommate who pursues Brian at work and
falls in love with him. He tries to tell her, “you just cannot fall in love
with a guy like me,” to which she retorts, “Is there some law against it?”
Gambone confronts stereotypes held by gays as well as anti-gay bias. An
especially painful dramatization occurs in the title story, where racial
stereotypes are juxtaposed against internalized homophobia. The narrator
wants his young lover to be an acceptable form of gay, not to socialize with
embarrassing drag queens. What good does it do, Gambone seems to ask, to
overcome racism only to oppress people in other ways? “Enrollment” and
“Pallbearer” focus significantly on their narrators’ membership in Italian
families. In “Enrollment” the “mixed marriage” of the narrator’s cousin
Monica to a Jew is paralleled by the narrator’s own partnership with a Jew.
And in “Pallbearer,” Michael’s uncle has died, but a sharper grief is fueled
by what no one talks about: a cousin’s impending divorce and Michael’s
looming breakup with Clark. When Michael says, “Clark, I just didn’t know how
to reach you,” he could be echoing Raphie or his wife or any spouse anywhere
faced with a crumbling marriage. But of course Michael and Clark aren’t
married, or are they? Gambone gently invites the reader to judge. The reader becomes so
immersed in these men that it’s easy to forget how both American and Italian
culture deny that gays exist. Gambone’s characters nearly leap off the page
and into the reader’s own world. The sheer fact of their vibrancy will change
forever the reader’s awareness of Italian-American men, of gays, and of
Italian-American families. In “The Summer of the
Daiquiri” a group of mostly Italian-American gay men speak in bastardized
Italian and give themselves colorful names such as Lucrezia della sport and Beatrice
Biblioteca; the narrator is dubbed Carlo
Masculino-Immaculata. But for all the joking, some serious loss and
betrayal is going on, and at the end Carlo wants to scream both at his
friends and at his lover, though “with him I can never find the right words
for that combination of rage and affection he always brings out in me.
Instead, I don’t say anything. But then, I feel the ache of wanting to give
him something, of wanting to give something to each one of these men, these men, of wanting to give
something to myself: something sharp and certain, the knowledge of our
needs.” Knowledge of our
needs is what these stories give us. Read them for the recognition of our
common humanity, for the lovely release from silence they bring. Columbia
College, Chicago Kenneth
Gangemi. The
Volcanoes from Puebla. Marion Boyars Publishing Ltd., 1989. Though I’m a fan of
the spare, post Modernist style for which Ken Gangemi is famous, I confess to
bafflement when I first encountered this ostensible Mexican “travel book,”
with its odd array of alphabetic entries (Eggs . . . Guadalajara
. . . Pulmonías
. . . Young Girls, etc.). But I quickly caught onto his joke: the
seemingly haphazard frame is perfect for this whimsical/serious and
compressed account of his lengthy motorcycle journey through the federation.
And he has the best sensor for serendipity in the business: when I traveled
to Mexico I depended on The Volcanoes
to ferret out the most savory experiences Mexico has to offer. Gangemi is a lapidary
prose writer: he can’t afford to be careless since he knows that at some
level we choose our experiences, and what we select powerfully illuminates
our character. Nonsense and trivia (which he loves) interplay with the
author’s major and minor epiphanies during his Wander/Bildungsjahr, and each adventure and anecdote yields
tantalizing glimpses into his decidedly remote persona. Thus, while we learn
about Mexican goats and raincoats, we also gain insight into such deeply
personal issues as the narrator’s dedication to “voluntary poverty” (Mexico
gave him a distaste for “bourgeois comforts”), his rejection of his scientistic
education (Gangemi is an engineer by training), and his unambiguous feelings
towards women he meets along the journey. Some of his strongest criticism is
levelled at pig-headed forms of Mexican behavior, such as machismo, whose
expression on the road nearly killed him a number of times. But anger is not
the leading motif: Gangemi patently adores Mexico, not for the sights at
which tourists normally goggle, but for the rare, the evanescent, and the
sensual. A visit to a young dentista
provides this unique insight: “I remember her leaning over me, and the slight
smell of perfume. It is not often that a young woman is so close to a man in
a non-sexual way. As she leaned over me I could smell her. I could hear her
quiet breathing, I could even feel her warmth.” Dark sides of Mexico
are no less provocative: we learn of widespread alcoholism among retired and
expatriated Americans: “I was only twenty-four when I lived in Mexico and had
no drinking problem, but I observed that the longer I lived there, the more
alcohol I consumed.” Poor road signs, Mexico City smog, rotten road maps, and
conspicuous consumption amidst devastating poverty all dismay but never sour
him on this fascinating country. Whether he’s fumbling
with rudimentary Spanish, feeling his way with Mexican etiquette,
distinguishing types of Mexican hummingbirds or people (Oaxacaños, Chiapanecos, Yucatecos, Capitaleños, etc.), or
noticing the moon, Gangemi has all the tools for piercing the veil of the
ordinary (as always, his training in scientific observation is invaluable).
This book is recommended whether you are a veteran traveler, or making your
first trip to Mexico, or have no intention of going there at all. Gangemi’s sympathetic
insights, from the point of view of a diffident and unthreatening traveler,
are the best aids I know for reappraising our southern neighbors. Kean
College Barbara
Grizzuti Harrison. Italian
Days. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990. 477 pp. Barbara Grizzuti
Harrison’s book has received much press and is already in paperback. Her
by-line keeps surfacing on articles about Italy or Italian America—on
Coppola’s Godfather III in Life, on “The Secrets of Italy” in European Travel and Life, and on the
Costa Smeralda, which she fatuously calls “La-La Land,” in Travel and Leisure. Yet however
muddled and shallow, Harrison’s divagations are a bellweather of yuppie-ish fascination
with Italy as a phenomenon of consumption and conversation (pasta and
Pavarotti). Italian Days attempts
to “explain” Italy to a generation, and such widely circulating claims should
be taken seriously. Her book recalls Luigi Barzini’s The Italians published thirty years ago, though his is
immeasurably superior to hers. One would think it
hard to write a boring book about Italy. Harrison’s book is dull, and not
even dull in a new way. It combines two genres, a travelogue, covering the
high points from Milan to Naples, and an autobiographical quest for personal
origins that we may call “roots” autobiography. Her knowledge and taste are
inadequate to the travelogue, and her emotional courage and powers of
self-examination fail her in autobiography. She tries to spice the narration
with soap-operatic tales of friends and acquaintances, false intimacies, and
a veritable chatter of observations and pronouncements. “The Forum mocks our
hopes.” One should think so, but then a little modesty is not such a bad
thing. “The ‘sin’ of science is to presuppose that all of reality is knowable
and to deny that which we know not theoretically but from direct experience”
(211). Does she think she knows from direct experience that the earth goes
around the sun? One hundred pages later she is at the doctor’s (320) and two
hundred fifty pages later she fears falling seriously ill in Italy (471).
Suddenly modern science is no longer a “sin.” Essentially a food-and-travel
writer, she wants good food, stirring views, “roots,” and no hassles, all of
which her audience wants, except for the “roots,” which puts her on a level
above them. But she has reached far beyond her capabilities. Italian Days are long days. I came to Harrison’s
book after reading George Dennis’s Cities
and Cemeteries of Etruria (1845) and Rodolpho Lanciani’s Wanderings in the Roman Campagna
(1909). These books emerged out of the deeply educated culture of the
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and, whatever else might be said of that
society, I can think of no sharper contrast between the sensitivity and
inquisitiveness of these learned, adventurous travelers and the contemporary
tourist of Italian Days, a person
with great pretensions and a thin patina of culture, with an expense account
and all Italy before her, complaining of airports, traffic, and hotels, and
documenting menus down to the last atom of pasta and droplet of oil. In
Dennis and Lanciani, incidents and anecdotes are chosen from a vast trove,
and are lingered over so that they reveal the full richness of their
historical relations. For Harrison, Italy is a table heaped for consumption,
where all things are levelled by the eye of the beholder, like her list of
forty-two kinds of ice cream at Giolitti’s. (Grizzutti Harrison likes to list
things, and one is reminded that the list is the most primitive form of the
gathering of knowledge.) Santa Maria della Pace and a girl in black tights
may be found in the same sentence, illustrating that the whole “material
world” belongs “to God” (310). “Sitting in the Piazza Navona, eating a
gelato, I am reminded of the Trinity” (332). The dominant theme of the book
is eating, which even she admits is an “obsession” (239). In this regard, she
betrays the yuppie phenomenon, obsessed by food (and dieting, its dark shadow)
and the body, concerned to get the maximum of pleasure out of its tight
caloric budget. Harrison’s prose is
fluffy and ponderous by turns. The following sentence is placed in a position
of strength, at the very end of the book: “Among the worn coins of sadness
and despair is the gold coin of hap-piness, inexhaustible” (473). The coin
metaphor for happiness links pleasure with money. “The world is lovable when
the world is Rome.” Such a jejune comment reduces Roman grandeur to the
“lovable,” a cuddly doll. She finds the Forum “taciturn” (221): evidently
this means it does not “speak” to her “I spend no time in the Colosseum,
preferring to see it—always amazing, never friendly—from a taxi” (219).
Actually the ruins will “speak” if you have ears to listen, but it takes
time. “Everything good in my nature is nourished here [in Rome]. My body
feels safe here. When I love the space around my body, I love my body” (p.
212). What of the mind? what of intellectual risk and challenge? Far from
feeling “safe” in Rome, Du Bellay, Piranesi, and Shelley were haunted by
death and terror: Rome put the fear of God in them. Desperately attached to
Italy, Freud nonetheless avoided Rome till he was forty-five. The theme of
safety preoccupies Harrison: “All journeys, carried to their logical, their
ultimate, conclusion, are safe journeys; they lead into light” (311). What of
Dante’s Ulysses? Columbus? Leopold Bloom? Dante himself? “Inside the Pantheon
I feel (no other space bestows this blessing) absolutely safe” (317). She says
she wants to die there; her Pantheon is a womb metaphor; she wants to be
reborn. She glosses the Paolo and Francesca episode: “Dante believes that in
love all things are safe” (150). If such things were safe, Paolo and
Francesca would not be in hell. Harrison fails to distinguish between Dante
the voyager who can sympathize and Dante the author who must also judge. The
plight of the lovers “doesn’t seem fair” to Harrison. Yet Dante recognized
that Paolo and Francesca committed adultery. Harrison’s epigrams
have a sometimes crushing logic: “I think that what I hate about the Forum is
that everything that has happened there has already happened” (223). (This
could have been said ironically by Yogi Berra.) Rome, of all places, should
nourish the historical sense, not lead to its repudiation. She masquerades in
high emotions: “I begin to feel Dantesque. We are, or seem to be, in the
middle of a dark wood . . . Felliniesque, in fact” (177) In fact? Note the imprecise sliding of very different aesthetic
states into each other, but in this emotional legerdemain, what is the
difference between one cliche and another? She likes to shock us: “ ‘FUCK!’ is written inside the elevator
at the Uffizi; the world intrudes upon our dreams” (174). Meaning is read
into everything: “On the Piazza Sonnino I buy cherries: the explosion and the
trickle of dark-red sweetness their firm flesh yields feels as if it should
be illicit” (225). As awkward in rhythm as in sound (“yields” followed by
“feels”), this sentence undercuts its own false heightening: the “firm flesh”
that “yields,” the “explosion” that is too strong a metaphor for chewed
cherries. Elsewhere “explosion” mistakenly describes the light as one enters
the Piazza Navona from a side street. “Twin images of goodness: water and
oil. Everything is soothed by oil; everything is purified by water. Think of
Trastevere as innocence frayed; innocence renewable” (255). Innocence hardly
characterizes the experienced trasteverini,
streetwise from two thousand years of urbanization. Harrison corrects
Zola’s Italian (“compagna” to “campagna”), but her own knowledge is
untrustworthy. It was Clement VII who witnessed the Sack of Rome, not Clement
VIII (203). It is magazzino, not magazino (239); e, not è (230),
Barzini, not Barzani (475), Affinità,
not Affinitá (476). She translates
Ungaretti’s “Mattina” poorly and cites the original incorrectly: Millumino On the edge of night d’immenso I fill with the light of Immensity The
original (“M’illumino/d’immenso”) does not need to be a syllable longer, even
in translation. Harrison supplies “On the edge of night,” leaving nothing to
the imagination (“The Edge of Night” is incidentally a soap opera). It was in
rustic Torbole, and not in Venice, as Harrison says (95), that Goethe asked a
servant where he could relieve himself. Having just crossed the border,
Goethe relates this story to introduce the naturalness of the Italians. The
servant replied, “in the courtyard” (Hof
hinunter); Goethe then asked where exactly in the courtyard and the
servant said, “Anywhere you like.” To place the story in a Venetian courtyard
is absurd; imagine those elegant Venetians excreting in their own courtyards.
Cardinal Bembo would have had a heart attack. Harrison quotes a friend about
the “only sentimental poem Leopardi every wrote,” on mountain flowers; the
friend was probably thinking of “La Ginestra” (Broom), because he called it
Leopardi’s “last poem” (278). Harrison chimes in with “Sempre caro mi fu
quest’ermo colle,” the opening line of “L’infinito,” one of Leopardi’s
earlier poems, and compounds the error by mistranslating the last line, again
by addition: “The sweetness of being shipwrecked in that sea of flowers.”
Leopardi’s conclusion may be translated: “And being shipwrecked is sweet to
me in that sea.” Leopardi offers no flowers, only the apeiron, the boundless. Harrison reduces the poet’s sublimity to
the lyrical bathos of a Hallmark greeting card. In the Piazza Navona she
concludes that “a great deal of happiness has accumulated here”; note the
quantification, as if happiness were a material: she has a tendency to err on
the side of addition. As for happiness, she had just mentioned the church of
the martyred saint that dominates the scene, Borromini’s Sant’Agnese in Agone (311). She does not realize
that the Piazza Navona originated as Domitian’s stadium. Nor are Harrison’s
opinions properly explained. “If one were to spend all one’s time looking at
Raphael,” she says, “one would feel nothing but serenity and sweet repose”
(174). What about the Expulsion of
Heliodorus in the Vatican? or the Deliverance
of St. Peter? or the Transfiguration?
Romans earn her praise “because their not taking it upon themselves to
organize the world makes Romans in some ways trustworthy” (224). What about
the papacy? She gets tickets to The
Magic Flute at La Scala and reflects that there, too, Stendhal saw this
opera “which he didn’t particularly fancy (nor do I)” (86). From that lofty
perch she can put down Mozart’s masterpiece. She never tells us why she
dislikes it. As for her aesthetic principles: “That is the function of visual
art—to erase questions . . . not to
mean, but to be (a function
which, Archibald MacLeish nothwithstanding, poetry cannot fulfill)” (163).
Why should poetry be excluded? Too intellectual? Note the put-down of
MacLeish while she makes a cliche out of his deft conclusion to a poem. Her
failure to understand the connections between pagan and Christian Rome might
have been corrected simply by reading Lanciani’s Pagan and Christian Rome. In a blurb on the dustjacket
Norma Rosen has the audacity to claim that “If, instead of Virgil, some
great-souled woman had guided Dante through the Inferno and Purgatorio,
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s voice is the one which might have spoken.” Like
Harrison, Rosen is sufficiently knowledgeable to recall that Virgil leads
Dante only through Hell and Purgatory, and not Paradise, but what did that
knowledge of Dante do for her sense of scale and value if she is capable of
making such preposterous claims? Although Harrison
professes to be partial to the south (5) and bristles like a Southerner
whenever its glories are maligned, the region receives far less treatment
than the north and central regions—there is less to consume—and most of that
concerns her search for the various branches of her family tree. But she
gives up in the wilds of Calabria. “We keep putting off my trip to Canna”:
lingering on the beach with family and friends delays the day of reckoning
and supposedly builds tension. She meets someone who may or may not be a
relative and decides to treat the meeting as “symbolic” (464), promising to
return when she knows she won’t. The town of Grizzuti is located on a map and
we are told of her being “immensely moved” (462), immensely but still not sufficiently moved to visit it. What
abverb would that take? At Oriolo,
from which her grandparents emigrated eighty years before, “We find no
Grizzutis here. I do not look very hard.” When an old man points to the
higher fortress town and encourages her to go on, “I choose wearily not to
regard his gesture as definitive” (466). Barbara Grizzuti Harrison cannot
walk the final mile in search of her heritage, but she would traipse across
Trastevere for a good penne
all’arabbiata. University
of Miami Robert
W. Lewis, ed., Hemingway
in Italy and Other Essays New York: Praeger, 1990. pp. 215. Perhaps even more
than Spain, Italy was Ernest Hemingway’s favorite foreign country. But though
we have at least two studies of Hemingway and Spain and another on his
relation to Cuba, and despite the fact that twelve of his short stories and
two of his major novels (A Farewell to
Arms and Across the River and into
the Trees) have Italian settings, thus far no comprehensive study of
Hemingway and Italy exists. Such a work would find a welcome place alongside
the many valuable studies and collections on Italy and nineteenth- and
twentieth-century writers: Shelley, Byron, Stendhal, Browning, Ruskin, Proust,
and Pound, to name a few. Hemingway in
Italy and Other Essays, a collection of seventeen essays chosen from
among the fifty presented at the Second International Conference of the
Hemingway Society at Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy in June, 1986, partly but far
from exhaustively explores the subject of Hemingway and Italy. The collection lacks
focus, for seven of the essays have nothing to do with Italy or Hemingway’s
Italian writings. Of these, the best are Michael F. Reynolds’s analysis of
Hemingway’s imaginative transformation of the sources of “My Old Man”; Paul
Smith’s study of the narrative function of a brilliant fragment (he titles it
“Mons [Three]”) which probably should have been included in In Our Time; and Alan Margolies’s
discussion of how F. Scott Fitzgerald purged the stylistic influence of
Hemingway from successive drafts of Tender
is the Night. Barry Gross’s “Dealing with Robert Cohn” demonstrates what
is often denied, that Hemingway shared the anti-Semitism of the Gentile
characters in The Sun Also Rises.
Yet Gross never illuminates the thematic and narrative significance of
anti-Semitism and its effect upon our judgment of the novel. The worst of the
essays is Eugene Kanjo’s “Signs are Taken for Nothing in The Sun Also Rises,” which merely translates Hemingway’s post-war
nihilism into the ponderous, inappropriate, and by now hackneyed jargon of
existentialism and post-structuralism. For example: “Sexually viable Brett
Ashley suffers from having to endure the phallocentric order that de-privileges
the female.” There’s more misery, surely, in having to read such prose. In the absence of a
general study of Hemingway and Italy, the remaining essays would have
benefitted from an introductory discussion or a separate essay outlining the
significance—personal and literary—of Italy to Hemingway. There should have
been a review of Hemingway’s experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver on
the Italian front as well as a clarification of the circumstances of his
traumatic wounding in the feet and legs by an Austrian canister on July 8,
1918. Contrary to what Hemingway led others to believe and what some still
believe, he did not fight at Caporetto, did not, while wounded, carry another
wounded soldier to safety, and did not on that July night also suffer a knee
wound from an Austrian machine gun. Nor did he, as legend has it, serve as a
lieutenant in the Italian Army, nor as a member of the Arditi. Likewise there
should have been a summary of Hemingway’s Toronto Star dispatches on Italy from 1922 to 1923. Besides observing the
collapse of Italian Communism and the rise of fascism, Hemingway interviewed
Mussolini, at first regarding him as a heroic type but ultimately deriding
him as a swaggering bluffer and opportunist. Hemingway’s disgust with fascism
is evident in “Che Ti Dice la Patria” and in his journalism of the 1930s,
especially “Wings Always Over Africa,” which combines detestation of
Mussolini’s Abyssinian campaign with sympathy for Italian soldiers sent to
die in Africa. So too, something might have been said of Hemingway’s frequent
visits to Italy, his days in Taormina in 1919, his walking tour with Ezra
Pound in 1923, his later sojourns in Venice and Torcello, his familiarity
with Italian night-life and game hunting, and especially his knowledge of
Italian architecture and museums (the Brera, Uffizi, Scuola di San Rocco, and
Accademia), whose paintings influenced his writing. All this would have
provided a context for Hemingway’s statement that he “loved Northern Italy.” What did Italy mean
for Hemingway? The single key event of his life seems to have been his
wounding on the Piave. In this overwhelming confrontation with mortality, he
felt his soul leave his body and return, as if he had died and been reborn.
The fictional repetition of this trauma figures in “Now I Lay Me,” “A Way
You’ll Never Be,” and A Farewell to
Arms. In a Toronto Star article
Hemingway reports his return to the scene of his wounding, an act repeated by
his fictional alter ego Colonel
Cantwell in Across the River and into
the Trees. For Hemingway, Italy mingles paradoxically the ideas of death
and life, annihilation and rebirth. In “Out of Season,” the narrator’s desire
not to force an abortion upon his wife takes place beneath the sacred life
symbol of an Italian campanile. Colonel Cantwell returns to Italy, the scene
of his first wound, in order to die. Hemingway’s identification of Italy
simultaneously with vitality and morbidity well consorts with that element of
aestheticism and even decadence which runs throughout his works and which
reflects the influence of Walter Pater, whose Renaissance celebrates Italian art for combining life-like
intensity and death-like stillness. Two of the best
essays in the collection, by Frank Scafella and Erik Nakjavani, focus on “A
Way You’ll Never Be” and “Now I Lay Me.” Whereas Scafella demonstrates
that Nick Adams’s (and Hemingway’s) trauma results not from a cowardly fear
of combat but from his fear of the vagrancy of his soul, in short mortality,
Nakjavani shows in a subtle phenomenological reading how Nick masters his
anxieties as a necessary stage in becoming an author. Another well-argued and
well-detailed essay is Robert E. Godjusek’s study of the dense symbolic
patterns of life, death, and cyclical rebirth which inform A Farewell to Arms with Hemingway’s
antitranscendental paganism. One sees at a microscopic level the extent to
which Hemingway identified his Italian experience with the inextricable
powers of destruction and creation. The most unexpected essay is James D.
Brasch’s study of Hemingway’s extensive correspondence (1949-1956) with the
aged Bernard Berenson at Villa Tatti, to whom Hemingway wrote in search of an
aesthetic mentor and father figure, and whose passion he shared for Italian
art and landscape. Notwithstanding Berenson’s amusingly anxious misreading of
Hemingway as an inveterate macho
warrior, the novelist emerges as a soul tormented by loneliness and extreme
sensibility. Many critics have
dismissed Across the River and into the
Trees as Hemingway’s erotic wish-fulfilment fantasy or as an
unintentional self-caricature in which the swaggering, opinionated,
embittered, hard-drinking Colonel Cantwell does little more than settle the
author’s old scores. Actually, for all its flaws Across the River has been misunderstood and considerably
underrated. Charles K. Oliver proves that the novel is no self-caricature but
a careful portrayal of Cantwell’s painstaking preparation for death and hence
his farewell to Italy and life. The best and most original essay in the
collection is John Paul Russo’s “To Die is Not Enough: Hemingway’s Venetian
Novel,” which argues convincingly that Across
the River needs to be understood thematically and emotionally in relation
to the many European literary representations of Venice, as in Byron, Ruskin,
Barres, Proust, Mann, and D’Annunzio. Russo’s dense and richly textured
readings demonstrate the depth of Cantwell’s (and Hemingway’s) appreciation
of Venice’s “classical” and “romantic” mythologies, its architectural and
painterly traditions, its sinister associations with death and luxury, its
richly ambiguous littoral origins, and its masculine and especially feminine
symbolism. The novel is Hemingway’s fullest exploration of his familiar
Italian themes of death and rebirth. Russo is also the first to elucidate the
ambivalence of Hemingway-Cantwell toward Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose Venetian
novel Il Fuoco helped to inspire Across the River, and whom Hemingway
resented for his superior military exploits. This essay abundantly confirms
the need for a general study of Hemingway and Italy. University
of Miami Rose
Romano. Vendetta.
San Francisco: malafemmina press, 1990. 47 pp. Janet
Capone and Denise Leto, eds. “Il
viaggio delle donne”. Sinister Wisdom Vol.
41. (Summer/Fall 1990). Italian/American
lesbian women writers depict the struggle to survive in a heterosexist world
with conviction and disarming honesty. Rose Romano’s book of poetry Vendetta and this special issue of Sinister Wisdom are dedicated to
exploring the riches of the Italian/American cultural legacy predominantly
from the perspective of Italian/ American lesbian writers. Vendetta, Romano’s first book of
poetry, explores the relationships between the poet and her culture. Thus
grandmothers, mothers, and aunts are preeminently figured. Women from the
family and the lesbian community are central to Romano’s analysis of the
intersection between Italian/American ethnicity and sexual orientation. The
term gridare vendetta, or, to cry
out for retribution, places Romano in her Italian culture, but with a
distinction. Her anger is not
silenced by the traditionally Italian injunction to be quiet (codified by the
term omerta). Rather, Romano voices
her anger not nearly so much at her Italian culture, but at the larger
culture that would encourage the silence and define Italian culture according
to popular stereotypes. For Romano, this
larger culture includes the American lesbian community, which is prescriptive
in its definition of otherness. As Romano says elsewhere, “what a lesbian is
depends to a great extent on where she fits in what is known as a ‘hierarchy
of pain.’ . . . The lighter one’s skin, the less respect one is
entitled to.”1 Romano’s concern (if not fear) is this:
if she, as an Italian/American lesbian, is not allowed to name herself as
“Olive, / neither white / nor of color,” she will become the quintessential
invisible woman, unrecognized by her culture of heritage and the lesbian
community: “not Madonna or puttana enough, . . . not light or dark
enough” (from “Permission—Two Friends,” and “The Fly”). Such a fear compels
Romano to reinvest with new meaning the old proverbs of her culture:
“Sicilians tell their children—‘A fly doesn’t enter a closed mouth.’ / I’m
standing now and I’m / telling the Sicilians, / the Italians, / and the
Lesbians— / You can’t spit a fly / out of a closed mouth” (“The Fly”). Romano
strongly insists here that, whether we are Italians, Sicilians, or lesbians,
we cannot afford to be silent and allow others to interpret and define our
behavior. If we are falsely and narrowly defined, then we had better learn
how to use language to redefine ourselves and thereby empower our lives. Romano’s greatest sense of power is, in
fact, given to her by her Neapolitan and Sicilian forbears, especially by her
grandmothers. Werner Sollors reminds us of the by-now famous formulation that
one cannot change one’s grandparents, a theme that is central to ethnic
rhetoric (Beyond Ethnicity, 151).
Romano happily consents to embrace the power she feels in the hands of her
grandmothers, a power reinforced by their unceasing availability and constant
nurturance. Rather than interpreting her grandmothers’ situation as a form of
patriarchal oppression, Romano sees the women’s strength and independence as
fundamentally matriarchal: women are the heads of their households, a
position that lesbians emulate in their own families. In “To Show Respect,”
for example, Romano implores us to imagine and to remember our grandmothers,
creatively connecting Italian/American lesbians with their foremothers, “all
of us our own bosses.” Romano quite ably explores the intersection of ethnicity
and sexual orientation, thereby diminishing differences between the
generations and between heterosexual and lesbian women. The writers published
in the Italian/American issue of Sinister
Wisdom similarly begin with their grandmothers, asking, “Don’t die, old
woman, you are unique / . . . You showed us strength within the
limits of the possible” (Jean Rietschel, “Rose”). Editors Janet Capone and
Denise Leto have truly broken another silence for Italian/Sicilian-descended
lesbians, who enter into the conversation about cultural heritage with
increased sensitivity because of their own position as outsiders. Careful not
to exclude well-known Italian/American women poets, Capone and Leto begin
their issue with what may be called the anthem song of Italian/American
experience, Maria Gillan’s “Public School No. 18: Paterson, New Jersey.” Like
the speaker who has found her voice in Gillan’s poem, the writers in this
issue, through poetry and prose, have expressed the importance of la famiglia to aid in their understanding
of themselves. Thus, many of the writers have learned to reevaluate their
families because they are poignantly aware of the fact that being a lesbian
without family is unhealthy and damaging to the soul: Elizabeth Fides writes,
for example, “I stand back and wonder how it all blends together; my love of
womyn, my love of home, my need of family, my respect for culture, tradition,
and my lesbianism” (“La Mia Polenta,” 11). In a non-fiction piece called
“Turning Away from Secrets and Shame,” Rosanna Sorella realizes the necessity
of returning home, “to a stable cultural identity for support,” despite the
restrictive nature of the family (44).
Throughout the Sinister Wisdom issue, in fact,
there’s a feeling of profound sadness over the loss of one’s cultural
heritage because of enforced assimilation (Capone, “Italy”); internalized
hatred and fear of one’s difference (Gravenites, “Shadow Sister”); and fear
of cultural genocide due to the experience of migration and the denial of
heritage (Mattioli, “Legacy”; Pascale, “Photographs of Home”). These issues
clearly shape the content of Italian/American writing in general, thus
suggesting the shared experience of lesbians and heterosexuals in the
Italian/American community. I do not mean to deny or undercut the alienation
that Italian/American lesbians have felt from their families, but the
overriding theme of both Romano’s book and the Sinister Wisdom issue is the need to reclaim familial culture in
a homophobic, life-denying world. The means taken to fulfill such an end are
decidedly Italian: to overcome feelings of loss, many of the second- and
third-generation writers return to Italy, as Mary Anne Bella Mirabella does
in order to understand her position in America as an Italian/American: “if
immigrants cut themselves off from the land and culture they have left, they
cut themselves off from their history” (“Connections,” 98). To regain a sense
of the history, Italian/American lesbians not only return to Italy, but they
inculcate a feeling of italianita
through feasting and ritual, thus revitalizing the connection between their
immigrant forbears, many of whom maintained their ethnicity through eating
well. One thinks of Helen Barolini’s Festa,
a collection of recipes and recollections in which she makes a connection
between Italian folktales and recipes—both are efforts “ ‘to ensure the
survival of the race’ through preserving its heritage” (xiii, 1988). In a
similar vein, Italian/American lesbians are claiming (or reclaiming) their
familial heritage by carrying on food traditions. Janet Capone escapes the
“nutritionally bankrupt” fast-food queues in favor of stockpiling pasta in
her kitchen, “Italy captured in a jar. In this way, she fed herself well,
. . . reviving her Italianness day by day” (52). For Italian
lesbians who are alienated from their families, Patrizia Tavormina suggests
that they apply their Sicilian customs to lesbian culture: “When my mother
cooks ‘springi’ (sweet rice balls) in October to celebrate San Martino, I
celebrate National Coming Out Day on the 11th, and when we cook ‘cubata’
(honey-coated almonds) at Christmas, I celebrate Solstice.” Tavormina
reinvests food traditions with lesbian meaning, but at the same time, she
celebrates the shared connection between mother and daughter: both use food
as a means to survive in a harsh world (78). Rose Romano best expresses the
connection between food and ethnicity in her belief that the love of food and
the love of woman is as natural and necessary as grandmother: “I never knew
where / her food ended and her body began— / like love. . . .
Everybody must know / that we eat. Until we have / a right to this place”
(“That We Eat,” Vendetta, 26). Both
Vendetta and Sinister Wisdom (Vol. 41)
give attention to a group of Italian/American women whose voices refuse to
fall between the cracks. They are opening their mouths and making beautiful
worlds. Gonzaga
University Rose
Romano. Vendetta.
San Francisco: malafemmina press, 1990. 47 pp. Poets prematurely own
the earned wisdom of the elderly. One way they do this is through their
working out of—reconciling or not—tensions between opposing concepts. It is no
exaggeration to claim that Rose Romano demonstrates this wisdom in her first
book of poetry, Vendetta, surpasses
it, by becoming her grandmother’s generation, forging a path for future generations
of Italian-American women. She accomplishes all this with the sparkling
touches of humor Henri Nouwen calls “the soft smile of wisdom.” To name just a few of
the tensions dramatically explored within Vendetta
are those between: Italian-nonItalian, lesbian-straight,
friend-lover, feminine-masculine, female-male, matriarchy-patriarchy, goddess-woman, sexuality-asexuality, holy-unholy, mother-daughter, grandmother-granddaugher, poverty-wealth, peasant-royalty,
rebellion-acceptance, and silence-voice. Detail and layers of these tensions
refine and intensify upon rereadings; reread is what the teasing-inviting
poetry tempts readers to do. Satisfaction recurs in the speaker’s
willingness—pursuit, even—to embrace initial conflicts as she does “big, round
women / whose bodies curve up / around the sides of me in the best / kind of
hug.” Resolution lurks in the reason for their roundness (wholeness?):
“Everybody must know / that we eat. Until we have / a right to this place”
(28 “That We Eat”). Since Romano wisely
subordinates resolution to honesty, the tensions she disrobes—like the fig
tree’s fruit that is its own flower—multiply whether or not they are
reconciled. Resolution is surpassed or supplanted with unforgettable cycles
and transformations. Rich in the traditions of their past and those they are
establishing, these evolutions fall surprisingly into the pattern of the
epigenetic theory of life stages described by Erik Erikson (Vital Involvement in Old Age). The
stages most evident in Vendetta
are: Identity and Identity Confusion: Fidelity; Industry and Inferiority:
Competence; Integrity and Despair: Wisdom; Intimacy and Isolation: Love; and
Trust and Mistrust: Hope. In the opening poem,
“Facing Mirrors,” identity is confronted across three generations: the
daughter-speaker does not “see the resemblance” between herself and her
mother until passing a mirror once she has a child of her own. “That’s
Mommy,” she whispers, and “her daughter says, ‘Well, / who did you expect’ ”
(7). In “Like the Mother” the speaker cringes in embarrassment when her
heritage in its second-language speakers is mocked in American books; in the
closing stanza, a transformation occurs when relatives declare her “just like
/ the mother.” The line in the first stanza—“I listen as I read and cringe
without / thinking”—finds its new reflection in the closing line—“I remember
as / I read and soften without thinking” (12). Many of the poems
establish the poet’s connection with her grandmother. This identification,
once the confusion over the mother has been settled, escalates into the
subject of religious celebration in poems like “Invocation to the Goddess
Grandmother.” Several pages later, “To Show Respect,” the grandmother
responds to the invocation, the festivities begin in an irresistible
paradisical atmosphere: . . . the
Crone, sitting at the head of the table,
sharing wisdom. Imagine the Mothers,
sitting around the table, sharing food.
Imagine the Maidens, sitting around the
table, sharing promises. (22) When they’re all
together like this, the transformation can occur. The speaker begins a long
comparison in which she becomes her grandmother: “someday / I’ll be round,
like a meatball, like my / grandmother.” Familial ties established, fidelity
to heritage is then established through them: “That’s no stereotype; / that’s
my grandmother” (22). Since the speaker is
a woman, it is most natural that the female lineage of her identity be
traced. Once accepted, the females are subjected to the speaker’s scrutiny:
they are found superior both religiously and humanly. The “Grandmother
Cooking” says “Take ye and eat” (27) while a jar of sauce is offered and
reoffered in the “Confirmation” poem (8). When the grandfather in “The
Chopping of Wood” accidentally cuts his leg, he must relinquish what was
earned by “the fully / developed muscles found in / men.” “Using the fully
developed / attention to detail / found in women” (11), the grandmother takes
over (and doesn’t cut her leg). In “Three Quarters” a daughter is that much
of an inch taller than her disbelieving father; her poem, however, is
permanent testimony to that fact (13). While outsiders insist the
Italian-American culture is patriarchal, the poet in “Explaining Again,”
humorously reconfirms the truth. Doesn’t the woman announce what will
be done, only waiting graciously until the man finds a way to
make it look like it was his idea? (29) Through the poet’s
industry, and the industry of the women in her poems, all imposed inferiority
dissolves into “steam rising like the smoke / of incense” (27 “My Grandmother
Cooking”); what lingers is the sweet smell of competence throughout all the
poems. When womanhood is
truly embraced, it can only be declared unnatural to deny the love of women
celebrated by all lesbians. Thus the tensions between integrity and despair
must be confronted by the poet. As an Italian-American lesbian, the speakers’
situation complicates; she’s truly “Sitting Outside” (poem title) all
cultures when a woman at another table buys a beer for the narrator, who is
uncertain whether to interpret the gesture as one of compassion intrinsic to
food-bringing, or as an insult to all that is feminist (35). In “Mutt Bitch,”
however, integrity is achieved through the hopeful choice to speak. If I have no
culture I can say nothing; therefore, if I say nothing, I have no culture.
(37) For “a culture /
whose most profound statement of anger / is silence,” this becomes an
achievement. The speaker takes inventory of all her traits (woman, contessa,
contadina, scholar, dyke, mother—not “just / one / person”), culminating in a
loud curse to anyone who would cram her into a single, stifling category. What could have been
despair becomes the wisdom of integrity for this poet. What could have been
isolation, through confrontation, becomes intimacy and compassion in poems
like “Coming Out,” “Sitting Outside,” and “First Scent.” Even in “Over the
Edge,” a loved woman will be given yet another chance: “she who has hurt me
. . . / . . . I suspect, will hurt me again” (25).
Avoidance of pain is no antidote to isolation; informed compassion is better. Finally, by openly
communicating the sufferings, cycles, and transformations undergone by an
Italian-American lesbian feminist daughter-mother-grandmother speaker, Romano
has eradicated much of the mistrust between herself and a world of
potentially antagonistic readers. Mistrust has been replaced with the hope of
trust. A true epigenesis has occurred—the mineral character of the rock has
changed due to outside influence, but for those of us who desire it, the most
beautifully colored rough and smooth rock solidly remains. Rider College Works Cited Erikson,
Erik H. Vital Involvement in Old Age.
W. W. Norton: 1986. |
[1]For relevant background on this tradition, see my article, “Sicilian Oral Poetry: Myths, Origins, History,” Almanacco: Quadrimestrale di Italianistica (Interflow Publications, Box 35174, Roxborough, PA 19128), 1, 1 (March 1991): 74-82.
[2]Such oral qualities, displayed by Sicilian folk and their American transplants in their poetry and everyday culture (e.g., in games like the passatella—called the “scomp out” where I grew up in New Jersey), are also crucial in the works of Sicilian classics like Verga, Pirandello, Vittorini, Brancati, and Sciascia.
[3]As an associate editor of Arba Sicula, I had access to the editorial matters discussed in the above two paragraphs.
[4]That is, the Sicilianization of English words. Examples in Ancona are too numerous to quote.
[5]The use of “fatturia” here creates an odd comic distortion since, in Sicilian, it actually means “farm.” Similar comic malapropisms occur in Italish words and phrases like “magazzino,” “tappa cotta,” and “non spoglia la grassa.”
1“Coming Out Olive in the Lesbian Community: Big Sister Is Watching You,” unpublished paper.