Week #5: Dialect/Idiom
J. Scappettone
Mollie McFee
In Zanzotto’s critical and poetic work, it seems that despite his attachment to dialect and his best efforts to preserve it, it is increasingly slipping into obsolescence as idiom. While “to know only dialect is a fact greatly and stupendously private but also stultified, deprived, and depriving,” “beyond languages and dialects there opens up an immense space of possible language known to everyone, happily catholic, gifted with ‘excessive’ universality” (399). At the same time that Zanzotto humbly acknowledges his own archaic and in all likelihood pointless efforts to preserve dialect, his commitment to dialect dominates his poetry. One thing that emerged in the details of his poems was the connection among dialect, memory, and individual figures. I noticed this first when looking back over “Nino in the Eighties,” where Zanzotto describes "your already unreal presence / even if singularly connected to fixities subtleties / imprinting elements / everywhere always eluding us." This description captures dialect’s ability to be both comprehensible in its correspondence to fixed meanings while continually elusive in the estrangement it produces. However these qualities are mapped not onto a language but a person. The poem “Where are they?” does not describe the same kind of estrangement as “Nino in the Eighties,” but does delve into a series of memories that are attached to specific women as much as they are to local traditions. In the poem Zanzotto invokes his aunt’s attachment to Latin phrases, claiming that “in this scribbling I resemble her”. In both poems it seems that a sort of cathexis is happening between language and its speakers. Dialect behaves like a shibboleth, causing the listener to identify the speaker as one of her own. When language reveals that the speaker is not one of the listener’s own, as in the case of Nino, the dissimilarity is not a threat but the source of vertiginous pleasure.
Zanazotto produces a rich theoretical justification for the preservation of dialect, but in reading his poetry I’m repeatedly struck with the feeling that his reasons are more connected to a lasting attachment to the speakers of dialect in his life, or the worlds of his life in which dialect was spoken. From both the essay and the poetry, it seems that the waning of dialect would be some sort of failure on Zanzotto’s part to his literary and cultural ancestors. Further it would foreclose certain relational possibilities in the future, given that dialect gives rise to an intimate familiarity and a pleasurable distancing.
Peter
Perhaps it is because I've been thinking about Caroline Bergvall for my presentation, and her discussion of middle and middling, but I was attuned to the repetition of the middle in Zanzotto's poems (especially from Idiom). Both understand the middle as primarily a stretch of grass, though the fake golf turf that Bergvall evokes is replaced by the agrarian field of grains and flowers in Zanzotto. So we get lines such as “every so often the meadow dazzles me / forgotten behind an old house” (251), “and in the middle...like a little wondrous meadow” (263) or “a little station in the middle of fields” (267). There seems to be a set of metaphors running throughout these poems that contrasts the flatness of the plains to both a murky and slimy depths as well as a height which can only produce falsity and lies. Hills are loathed because they are restless (aspiring upwards, perhaps too servile (253), and mountains are places of false power: “you were climbing the stultified slopes / of your fiefdom” (257). Perhaps the simplest statement of this is the line that the dawn meadows are “always more spoiled above and down below” (267). These metaphors connect to an older contrast between the people of the mountains and the agrarian civilizations in the Mediterranean that Ferdand Braudel emphasizes as a determining factor for western culture, and also to a new contrast of the agrarian horizontality to the verticality of cities. In this respect the poem “Horizons” is an interesting place of tensions.
There seems to be several ways that this geographical imaginary connects to the role of idiom and dialect. First, and simplest, is the critique of modernity that runs through the Zanzotto essays we read – the life of the city would be rather simply the death of dialect. Second, we can see the metaphorical relation applied directly to the idea of idiom in the poem “High, Other Language, Beyond Idiom?”, where the height that language aspires to is a mark of its mendacity and stupidity: “blooming, blooming in the highest / flavors and smells, but they are idiocy” (273). I wonder how we might play linguistically on this contrast between the idiom/idiot, the idioma/idiozia, which diverge from the root meaning of something being 'one's own' (reason/language?). Finally, in “Between Minimal and Maximal Languages” Zanzotto draws a contrast between rural dialects and urban dialects, arguing that the later are “true languages comparable to Italian” (398). Urban dialects seem to be a kind of mixed form, being replaced by rural dialects while also less international (and thus appears less weak through international contrast). So one task might be to trace two senses of verticality in Zanzotto's poetry that perhaps distinguishes between urban idiom and a higher language on the basis of a distinction between idiocy and power/mendacity. Or alternately we might see the high end of verticality as national language while the low, crawling, wormy end would be the urban dialect: both fertile and corrupted by capital, media, and technology.
On Thursday, April 25, 2013 2:51:32 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:
Ingrid Becker
Zanzotto takes the singularity of the idiom as both its incomparable richness and its limit. At the end of Idioma he describes his use of the title term as representing a spectrum “from the fullness of nascent, irrepressible speech as a singular blossoming, to the opposite pole of closure in the peculiarity by which one arrives at the heading ‘idiocy’.” Dialect as idiom can create an unprecedented intimacy between persons, language, and locality but does so at the risk of “[relapsing] into the private.” The experience of a true dialect speaker is of “being in contact with, breathing in, and walking arm and arm with a dialect to the point of being aware of it not as a peculiar language…but as a language that is ‘universal by default.’” So the idiom at best is pure “difference” in its felt universality, but at its other extreme it becomes closed to difference, too full of itself, and ends up being silent. I used the word “spectrum” above to describe competing definitions of idiom, but really the two poles of intimacy/silence are not at any distance from eachother, constantly in danger of—and not only in danger of, but actually—toppling one into the other.
We might read Zanzotto, then, as trying negotiating this boundary throughout these poems. There are many echoes of this intimacy/idiocy dilemma and his effort to maintain a balance in writing dialect that approaches intimacy while preserving communication: for example, in lines where he searches to see what remains of the “sixthsense/thirdeye” scattered around the world (dialects disappearing?):
adequately rendering it
trembling and wild in the weighing and evaluating—
but as if it were too sweet and tender game—
in the extreme of wideangling:
here the reel is hacked off
The “wideangling” of the “sixthsense / third eye” resonates with the opening of idiom to a “phonetic-semantic totality.” But just as this opening is taking place—the colon prepares us for a furthering definition or picturing of the scene—Zanzotto chooses a fairly large space of white, an absence of text, a silence, a retreat from language. And then with “here reel is hacked off” the sight becomes limited at the same time that the location, the “here,” becomes re-established. So this hacking is perhaps necessarily to avoid the descent into idiocy that Zanzotto’s wideangle was approaching.
Zanzotto’s experimentation with images, punctuation, and other non-textual signifiers might play a similar role as the white space and hacking off above. Sometimes language, navigating between an almost unbearable richness and idiocy, needs a break. I’m interested in his use of “/”(e.g. in Diffractions, Erythemas) as a designation of a line break, an impulse towards a new breath or staccato reading rhythm, as well as moments in Idioma where language cedes to overexcitement or exertion as with “panting h j k ch ch ch.” The line break and the / both suggest ways to breathe with the poem’s dialect. The slashes, used unexpectedly, foreground the poet’s directions, his sort of musical conducting of our breathing, as if he is trying to share the intimate sense of a speaker’s “breathing in” his dialect as he walks arm in arm with it around town. The sketched signposts later in the poem might have a similar function, directing a visitor around the locality, helping them get the lay of the land. At the same time these signposts, as tourist beacons, also erect a barrier to intimacy, identifying the reader as outsider. Basically, for now I am thinking of the formal experimentation with material markers as working to get as close as possible to communicating the "universality" of dialect and the totality of idiom before falling into idiocy. When idiocy is about to take over, images and rhythms work as a sort of safety net. Maybe they reorient the poem, give it a little re-boot, to set us back on our feet again. Still, I can't say they alleviate the intimacy/idiocy border--they are another tool for navigation.
On Thursday, April 25, 2013 2:51:32 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:
Suzannah Spaar
What I find most troubling, and isolating about the use of dialect in a poem boils down to something Zanzotto writes in “Between Minimal and Maximal Languages” asking: “but how many of those who write in dialect are true speakers and not simply knowledgeable users (396)...?” Many of you have already very elegantly stating the complex contrasts between dialect’s function as a comforter versus a discomforter (that is--it is something that includes some with familiarity only with the guarantee that it will also exclude many others who can understand the notion of dialect--and perhaps unite under the umbrella of resisting something in a “proper” language--yet will still inevitably not understand fully every particular dialect). I do wonder, though, why it can’t be enough to relate to unrelatability, to the motions of idioms if not the particular idioms. Is it avoidable?
In the above sentence, Zanzotto is explaining his authority to write in his dialect, as he is born from it. Yet, why does this matter? Aren’t all poets and artists “knowledgeable users” regardless of birth and one’s mother tongue? It seems a rather petty and familiar argument---can Taylor Swift sing country and Emeril Lagasse create an empire out of Cajun cooking when they are both, in fact, born and raised northerners? We can discredit them both on many ethical levels if we want to, but when we judge their art should their origins be part of our deduction? Zanzotto clearly has a firm hold over his language, I’m sure he could write in other dialects. So he must find something compelling in self-isolation. For example, in he poem Where Are They? the speaker begins by asking:
Wherever is the dearest of my aunts
who used to write skits in verse
for carnivals and festivities, even
dropping in a few words in Latin;
many still remember them;
“she started to drink,” they said,
to drown her sorrows.
Who knows. But only she knows how much
in this scribbling I resemble her.
Here is the privation of another language--ironically, of the proper, mother language of Italian that is probably much more foreign these days than any dialect. There is the communal uncertainty (“who knows” is not a question, but rather a fact) of the Aunt’s inaccessibility, the chattiness of the “she started to drink” that works as a bandaid over whatever mysteries lie beneath the language of the word “sorrows.” Language is private because life is private, touchable only in certain, ineffable moments. “only she knows how much/in this scribbling I resemble her” gives written text (rather than spoken words) the power to connect these dots. So, maybe it’s not so isolating after all.
On Thursday, April 25, 2013 2:51:32 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:
David Finch
I agree with Mollie’s comments about the growing obsolescence of dialects as idioms. Dialects disappear with the scattering that happens when local communities move about, separate, fall apart, or are diluted with other languages, other customs, and, as Zanzotto puts it in his essay “Between Miminal and Maximal Languages,” the “avalanche of the media, with its barrage of stupefying luminesences.” This loss of identity and selfhood must seem enormous to a nostalgist like Zanzotto, who revels in a sense of the authenticity and exclusivity of the past.
But Zanzotto is ambivalent. He admits that the idiomatic language of dialect creates borders and divisions and miscommunications, as well as the outsider’s frustrations when trying to work through the dialect’s “hallucinations” in search of what he describes in his poem “High, Other Language, Beyond Idiom?” as the “untranslatable why / beyond-idiom.” Idiom is “that ossified gesture / that accumulates / evenings snipped away towards nothingness” (which might be somewhat of an overreaction). On the other hand, idioms “[e]ach seems to the residue of itself, of / the me-tongue, reduced to seduction!” He admits to being seduced and to caring about “some / small poem, that doesn’t want anything to do with it / yet lives and dies in idioms.”
The search for a language of expression “beyond-idiom” is not likely to get anywhere, as Zanzotto knows. Old idioms die and new ones come alive; the language of experience, however it might evolve and whatever might be its influences, is always slanted, coded, full of half-hidden ironies and rhythmic priorities. Artistic expression itself is idiomatic in the sense that it communicates through compression: complexities explained in exquisite detail with a brushstroke, a poetic line, a gesture in performance. For the audience the trick, I suppose, is to learn how to participate in the idiom rather than merely to “understand” it; for the artist, it is to invite such participation.
On Thursday, April 25, 2013 2:51:32 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:
Dani Fox
Zanzotto, though seemingly entirely committed to the preserving of regional dialect, seems to me to be especially interested in the tension that arises in the breakdown of language when it becomes either incomprehensible or otherwise fails. I was struck by the tiny drawings in The Book of Woodland Manners and they way they marked his text both as punctuation of a sort but also as sign posts (literally as actually a representation of a signpost once with a guide to get to places) that keep a reader oriented. These little signs need bear little resemblance to an identifiable thing, merely somehow point to one--and I mean thing as loosely as possible.
Dialect for Zanzotto I think is interesting precisely because of the very way it parallels a standard language; sometimes they can be thoroughly similar though perhaps heavily accented as to render it difficult to understand, but sometimes also, as the vocabulary changes effectively driven through enough linguistic isolation for long enough, only similar for sharing a root and otherwise almost entirely divergent otherwise (thereby leaving speakers of the dialect and the original language--if you will--each deaf and mute to each other, blank, and unable to communicate).
Such focus on the local, often the minutely local, leaves the global in contention. Zanzotto does not seem pleased about the utter take-over of massive languages such as English or even the enforcement of standard languages that plow over dialects that for their speakers might have been previously all they ever spoke, ever heard, and ever would have known. This makes for an interesting reading of the small pictures I was talking about a lot earlier. On one hand, they are the very product of what may arise at the end of language, at the space of deafmuteness where there is nothing to say but to rely on some shared index of signs so as to make one's point clear. On the other, these signs also are a representation of the global which Zanzotto clearly does not outright reject and recognizes the necessity of such a level of communication, but definitely is not the darling of this project that features a strong locality at its center.
Tala Radejko
Dialect “appears as the metaphor – and it is, from a certain angle, the reality – of every excess, unimaginability, gushing superabundance or ambiguous stagnancy of the linguistic fact in its most profound nature. It remains laden with the vertigo of the past, of the megacenturies in which it extended, infiltrated”. It emerges from a place without writing and grammar, and in terms of a physical space it is tied for Zanzotto to villages and rural microcosms – the “wellspring(s)” of dialect and the spaces most resistant or slow to change (in this case being the homogenization of Italian dialects) in which life throughout the ‘megacenturies’ has not altered as frequently or drastically as in more urban areas. Urban dialects and inner city languages, on the other hand, are “true languages” with complex literary traditions comparable to proper Italian – urban centres are also the spaces in which the homogenization of language and the infiltration of English words occurs first and most obviously. At the same time as he associates dialect with rural spaces, Zanzotto also describes it as being the “location of a logos that is always erchomenos” – a ground, expectation, philosophy that is always coming or arriving; an ill-defined entity that describes and exists in a space not reached by ‘proper’ language. This description stands in contrast to the more concrete and typical association of dialect with the village, and so with tradition and particular reality.
With respect to his poetry, dialect is often associated with memory (perhaps reflective of his attempts to preserve and maintain it in the face of increasing homogenization). In “Who Are They?” for example, the Latin ‘scribbles’ of his aunt mimic his use of dialect in poetry, while the characters sketched out in the rest of the poem are recalled in specific scenes particular to local spaces – Pina’s little shop and Aurora’s sweets also reflect older local traditions, but those traditions are tied to their person. As Mollie pointed out, in this way dialect is also associated with the individuals that embody the traditions, rather than a general notion of tradition and local life, and is situated largely in the past. Scenes in “In Memory of Pasolini” also reflect this, where Zanzotto’s description of the “little station in the middle of fields” is tied to Pasolini and is very clearly a recollection by an old and tired man (“forgive me if all I can give you now/ is this old man’s mumbling”). Zanzotto details why the “gleaming mosaic” of dialects must be preserved in “Between Minimal and Maximal Languages”; for the sake of difference and the ability to use language in a more varied manner and to a limited extent for the connection to older roots and memories it affords its speakers - the latter I think comes out more through his poetry via his selection of images and the manner in which a local tradition or physical space is repeatedly associated with a person from his memory.
Patrick Morrissey
I’m interested in the way Zanzotto imagines the intimacy and diversity of dialects or idioms in relation to more expansive and seemingly unified languages such as Italian or “neo-English.” One memorable image is of dialect as “a tiny society of swarming little worms from whom a stone has been abruptly lifted that negated and yet also protected them” (398). Zanzotto’s talking here about his own participation in a local dialect; the figuration of speakers as worms burrowing in the dirt implies that dialects are locally-grounded in the extreme, their speakers hidden from the world at large, nourished by and in turn rejuvenating the earth beneath them. But what interests me more at the moment is the metaphor’s vivid visual aspect—many tiny singularities squirming in a mass of distinct members of same species. Zanzotto rephrases the image at the end of the next paragraph: “But at the opposite extreme [from a mythic “universal” language], the flicker of thousands of persistent languages becomes even more feverish. Flickers, especially for dialects, ‘at the threshold.’ Destined, at any event, to bring into being the metaphor of the without-beginning and the without-end” (399). Here we can imagine the mythic universal language as the obscuring (and perhaps preservative?) rock and the “flickering” as the tiny movements of so many speaker-worms (and later as “millons of ‘errors,’ of individual wanderings” (400)). In these images, the “exclusive facts” of idioms—their high degree of difference—survive (and sometimes don’t) as micro-provinces nested within or beneath threatening/protecting megalanguages, and these provinces sustain the possibility that we might imagine differently the relations between present, past, and future.
The poems from The Woodland Book of Manners seem to me to perform something like this provincialization of dominant languages not only because Zanzotto writes in his own Veneto dialect (the effects of which I suspect are largely lost on me; something I wouldn’t mind talking about tomorrow is the texture of that dialect and the ways Barron tries to render it in English) but also because he puts in play various other “dialects,” such as the medical and “liturgical” vocabularies of “Certain circular chasms,” the playing-card idiom of “Diffractions, Erythemas,” or the chemistry of “Conflicting Dominant States, Their Designs.” These are like dialects in that they’re not completely foreign—HCl, for instance, is a recognizable signifier for many standard English speakers—yet they remain a bit strange to the uninitiated. They retain (or risk) a certain privacy. The surfaces of the poems do, it seems to me, flicker or squirm with these various differences. A poem I’d be particularly interesting in talking about tomorrow is “Conflicting Dominant States,” especially the way Zanzotto seems to present himself as deploying his different idioms to articulate or reveal something of the “prehistory” of the Montello. “No chemistry no logic / no pentecost will dissolve it,” he writes at the end of the poem, suggesting that something of “this hypersedimented terrain” remains inarticulate or hidden despite his many-tongued (pentecostal) approach (199, 438n). Whether he achieves full articulation or not, Zanzotto, like Celan, seems to be interested in diverse idioms as means to achieve a kind of precise naming and measuring of something elusive, such as the deep history of a particular landscape; furthermore, both of them imagine this naming and measuring to be uniquely possible in poetry. A place to start in “Conflicting Dominant States” could be the passage on 197 in which “thus it is / that poetry exists” is typeset next to a passage involving HCl, the Spanish word lluvias, and a bunch of hand-drawn lines, creating a thicket of oral-literate representations. What can we understand about Zanzotto if we take this passage as a kind of ars poetica?