Margins and Challenges of Italian American Studies: the Role of Translation in Joseph Tusiani's Poetics

Dottorato di ricerca in Studi Iberici ed Anglo-Americani, 23° ciclo Scuola di dottorato in Lingue, Culture e Società A.A. 2009-2010 MARGINS AND CHALLENGES OF ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES: THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN JOSEPH TUSIANI’S POETICS Settore scientifico disciplinare di afferenza: L-LIN/11 Tesi di dottorato di Cristina Tinelli matricola: 955507 Direttore della Scuola di dottorato Tutore del dottorato Prof. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi Prof. Paola Mildonian CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS p. 5 Introduction JOSEPH TUSIANI IN THE CONTEXT OF ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES 7 Chapter 1 ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES: A BRIEF SURVEY 17 FACTS AND MYTHS ABOUT ITALIAN AMERICANS 26 The facts 26 The myths 31 AN ITALIAN AMERICAN ETHNOPOETICS 39 Stages of Italian American Writing 43 The three stages for Gardaphé 46 The three stages for Tamburri 47 Tusiani’s poetry and the classification into three stages 49 The question of a history of Italian American Literary Studies for Viscusi 52 Are Italian American authors all Italian Americans? 56 Chapter 2 JOSEPH TUSIANI: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY 65 A poetic production in four languages 69 Italian poems 70 “Te Return” an exercise in rewriting 75 English poems 85 Latin poems 94 Gargano dialect poems 102 1 Language issues in Joseph Tusiani’s poetics 106 The voice and the word 110 Joseph Tusiani translator of seven centuries of Italian poetry 115 Chapter 3 FOUND IN TRANSLATION PULCI’S MORGANTE 125 THE MORGANTE AND THE MOCK-HEROIC TRADITION: PULCI AND BYRON 129 Pulci’s “domestiche muse” 129 ... and Byron’s “pedestrian muses” 136 ON PARODIC FIDELITY 141 Tusiani’s “American muses” 145 Different parodic solutions: Byron and Tusiani 147 On some olden and newer games... 147 A scrap-iron heap or an ancient armoury 151 A difficult fidelity: Byron’s parody of the sacred 155 A perfect fidelity: Pulci’s and Tusiani’s parody of the sacred 159 Tusiani’s parodic devices 162 An anaphoric theft 164 The professional hangman 166 A clash of the dishes 167 The most twisted stanza of the Morgante 169 Chapter 4 TUSIANI AND LEOPARDI’S “L’INFINITO” 171 LEOPARDI’S CANTI IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD 177 The nineteenth century 177 The twentieth century 180 A collection of different voices: Singh’s translated anthology 183 2 Leopardi on the web 186 PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATING LEOPARDI’S CANTI 187 Interpreting “L’infinito” 191 ... And translating “L’infinito” 195 Tusiani’s “Infinity” 202 Appendix Fifteen different translations of “L’infinito” 213 Bibliographical references 221 3 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has been helped greatly by the precious assistance of a number of people that I would like to thank here. First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Paola Mildonian. She has been my tutor during the three years of my PhD studies, but she has also been my longtime mentor, and I would like to thank her for always trying to share her vast knowledge with me and for her constant encouragement and dedication in guiding me through this research. I am also indebted to Prof. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, the Director of the Scuola di dottorato in Lingue, Culture e Società, and Prof. Daniela Ciani Forza for their constructive criticism and advice. I would also like to thank Cosma Siani, lifelong scholar of Joseph Tusiani, who has encouraged this project since its inception, has given me useful suggestions and helped me in finding not easily accessible volumes and essays. In this dissertation I have been helped from the other side of the Atlantic too. Prof. Robert Viscusi has opened my mind to the state of the art of Italian American studies; Prof. Fred Gardaphé welcomed me to the John D. Calandra Institute during my stay in New York and allowed me to use all its resources. Without his consistent help, I wouldn’t have been able to collect all the materials necessary for my research. Finally, my greatest gratitude goes to my family and friends who have always been there, supported me – and “sopportato” – in this long-overdue experience. I also want to thank my PhD colleagues, and in particular Agnese, for sharing their enthusiasm with me throughout these three years; and Anna and Diego, staff at the Department for their kind assistance. A special thank-you goes to my friends Barbara and Miriam for their final invaluable help and to Mary-Jane for her timely suggestions. 5 6 Introduction INTRODUCTION JOSEPH TUSIANI IN THE CONTEXT OF ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES Joseph Tusiani occupies a particular position in the panorama of Italian American authors. Giose Rimanelli has defined him: “a surviving Humanist, in the old great tradition”,1 a sentence that epitomizes his long and distinguished career as a poet, a translator and a scholar and also reveals his own classical approach to poetic materials. Tusiani writes in four languages: Italian, English, Latin and the Gargano dialect. He arrived in the United States in 1947 and, since then, English has progressively substituted Italian in his creative process of composition becoming the “garment” of his thought.2 Yet Italian is still the language of his cultural heritage and of his education, while dialect and Latin are the expressions of two intimate worlds: the former is his native, oral and traditional language, the latter is the language that allows him to dive into the heart of classical tradition; and both are revived in his everyday American experience. His poetic research moves among these languages and the cultures they represent. Tusiani’s poetry in four languages and his work as a literary translator, which are the two entwined activities of the same creative process, reveal continuous contaminations and even though he changes the “garments” of his thought, his expressive and aesthetic issues remain the same. When tackling Tusiani’s opus the problem of language – or rather the continuous interactions between his four languages – is of the utmost importance: themes, 1 Giose Rimanelli a famous Italian American writer, poet and translator has celebrated Tusiani’s poetry on various occasions. This quote is from “A mesmeric sculpture: Tusiani, the Humanist” in Paolo A. Giordano Joseph Tusiani Poet Translator Humainst. An International Homage, West Lafayette, IN, Bordighera, 1994, p. 5. 2 See below, end of chapter I, for the full quotation. 7 Introduction myths and feelings recur throughout his poetry, as the same sensitivity underlies all his poetic production, and each language complements another in his stratified culture. In fact, a whole range of poetic experiences is explored from different perspectives: memorial, meditative, but also ironic and with more or less apparent parodic allusions to the different cultural backgrounds of these languages, especially in the case of his Latin and Gargano-dialect poems, which allow the poet to explore expressive modalities he does not usually employ in his Italian and English poetry. If we try to explain Tusiani’s works through Benjamin’s statement that each language is the expression of what can be communicated in itself and that languages can only communicate the true and pure meaning of words – i.e. the linguistic and consequently spiritual essence of things3 – we understand how Tusiani’s poetics carries out research into the expressive potential of his four languages: different genres, traditional metrical forms, different symbolic and rhythmic modalities are a range of possibilities used to voice the urgency of his poetic vision. In fact, in Tusiani’s poetry creative research, aesthetic intentionality and poetic intuition coincide, and it is above all the musicality of words and lines that guides – or rather “illuminates”, – his own hermeneutical path through the languages. This continuous confrontation between his languages is of the utmost importance when considering his activity as a literary translator first from English into Italian, and subsequently and prolifically from Italian into English. Translation allows him to relate the word of another poet to his own poetic word, and is a cultural/linguistic laboratory in which he verifies the potentiality of a renewal of a literary language when it is turned into another. His work as a translator has been extensive and has gained him a considerable reputation in the departments of Italian Studies in the United States. Tusiani has rendered into English seven centuries of Italian poetry from Dante to Montale; he has given his personal poetic rendition of famous authors, whose works had already been translated into 3 Walter Benjamin, “Sulla lingua in generale e sulla lingua dell’uomo” in Angelus Novus, transl. and introduced by Renato Solmi Torino, Einaudi, 1982 pp. 55-56. 8 Introduction English, such as Michelangelo or Leopardi, and also of poems such as the Morgante by Pulci whose “bulk” had previously disheartened other translators. Tusiani’s translations, as well as his poetry and his critical studies, have functioned as mediators between two cultures and have brought the Italian literary tradition into the heart of American culture and life. Considering the richness and variety of Tusiani’s works, it becomes important to analyze how his opus is received in the critical context of Italian American studies. He is the Italian intellectual, poet and scholar who migrated to the United States as a young adult with a degree in Italian literature. From this perspective Tusiani not only represents the living emblem of emigration but also possesses the expressive means to transform it into a literary experience. In fact, Tusiani has sung the tragedy of immigration in his English poetry volume Gente Mia and Other Poems, which constitutes one of the best achievements of his whole poetic production, but even though he recognizes his own experience in the tragedy of emigration, and has poetically rendered it in his poetry and in his autobiography, his whole opus eludes the excessively rigid, ideological and political categorizations of ethnic approaches.

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