Translator's Introduction: Luigi Meneghello, Dispatriate

1 Translator’s Introduction: Luigi Meneghello, Dispatriate There is no good way to reproduce the sparkling sense/nonsense of Libera nos a malo, the title of Luigi Meneghello’s first1 and best-loved book. “Deliver us from evil”: the well-known phrase, in Latin, comes from the Paternoster, of course, but it also evokes pure childish fun, for Malo is the name of the country town near Vicenza in northeast Italy where Meneghello was born and raised. That malo pronounced during the mass set off a chain of associations for a native, not only because it bizarrely summoned up a real place on the local map, but because the vernacular (male) means not just evil but also pain, suffering, illness, and harm, practically the sum total of everything terrible. “Deliver us from luàme,” the children prayed: from the dung heap, “the dark splatter of death, the lion’s jaws, the bottomless pit.” And yet the little town of Malo—the name is a lopped off version of its medieval place name Maladum—was not, we quickly learn, a place synonymous with misery, suffering, or sorrow. There certainly was all that, yes, but also much to laugh about. It seemed that even a place on a map could be impertinent, irreverent. By turns sharp, amused, ironic, light-handed, and sometimes vigorously rude, Meneghello’s first book is a recollection of childhood in a time and place—rural Italy of the 1920s and 1930s—that was already disappearing when it was published in 1963. Although the events in his story take place less than a century ago, Meneghello describes a world in some ways closer to the peasant Italy of the Middle Ages than to the twentyfirst-century urban sprawl that characterizes the region today. Here as elsewhere in Italy in the 1920s, most people still lived in the countryside and worked as farmers or tradesmen. Much of the Veneto countryside was backward and unlettered; most people had probably never even seen a train.2 All but a few spoke a dialect as their first language, painfully mastering the awkward cadences of standard Italian only when they began to go to school. Malnutrition was still widespread; death was not so far away that children didn’t think about it. In a playful appendix, the author lists the real and imagined causes of death for sixty-four types of human beings, animals, and insects as the children understood them. Rabbit: Sharp blow. War dead: War. As Meneghello liked to remind people, he was born in a portentous year: 1922, the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome. His mother Pia was a schoolteacher; his father Cleto, an auto mechanic who ran a small family hauling and transportation business with his brothers. The shop was across the courtyard from the house, as were the drying sheds for tobacco and the rooms where silkworms fattened on mulberry leaves. Ball bearings and inner tube rubber from the mechanic’s shop were the raw materials of Luigi’s (or Gigi, as he was known throughout his life) childhood toys and games. The creek, the woods, the water hole, the vine 2 rows and the sorghum fields, the manure pit, the garden with its moles and rabbits, its pumpkins, its grasshoppers and its maybugs, were his territory. It was a territory ruled by hard work, the Church, and Il Duce. Here, as in many other parts of Italy, the Catholic Church exerted a powerful hold on morals and on the popular imagination. The newest element in this universe was Fascism, and it was during the 1920s that the Fascist regime with its noisy propaganda and its promises of virile modernity came to dominate Italian political life, society, and expression. Questioning authority, whether that of the Church, the state, or the family, was not encouraged by anyone. And yet the people of Malo constituted their own part-archaic, part-modern society, through which the laws and language of the priest and the prefect trickled down only partially and imperfectly. In some ways the town was fiercely controlled from on high; in other ways, it was strangely free. When Giorgio Bassani, Meneghello’s editor at Feltrinelli, decided to publish Libera nos a malo in 1963, the book was termed a romanzo, a story, or a novel. In part, perhaps, that label served the same function as the familiar disclaimer: “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead . .” It’s worthwhile, however, keeping in mind that Italians do not divide their literature by the same fiction–nonfiction dichotomy that we have in English, but rather by a distinction between romanzo, a story, and saggio, an essay. A romanzo may be fictive, but it is not always so. And as Meneghello’s most perceptive readers have observed, this is not a work of fiction.3 It’s a work of memory that implicitly acknowledges the pitfalls of memory—lapses, anachronisms, exaggerations, mistakes—but it is told with the utmost respect for the truth. When the author recounts how he and his oldest friends return to Malo as adults and meet up to repeat, revise, and embellish the tales of their childhood adventures, he’s letting us know that, yes, he may have altered a name or polished a story, but not in any way that would make it untrue. Often, he consulted his friends and family to confront his memory of an event with that of the others. For this was not a just personal memoir but a collective one, an account of his people and their world told in an original mix of linguistics, folklore, and ethnographic speculation. Yet certainly this is also a romanzo—if not a novel. The literary invention lies in the shaping and the telling: the wit, the pitch-perfect tone, the effortless shifts from elevated language to small-town wisecracking, the pared-down brevity of his tales, the deft portraits of people sketched in just a few words, the dizzyingly rapid juxtapositions, the way, in the end, his narrative traces the arc of a human life. As a writer, “I enjoyed myself defying the conventions of the romanzo current in Italy at the time,” Meneghello said. He wanted to achieve both “the spell cast by a story” and “the bite of an unconventional essay.”4 His “motley” themes ranged from the world of childhood to that of the adults, from the precepts of religion to those of the secular society, from poverty and misery to eros, love, and its variations. Closest of all to his heart were reflections on language and the experience of using multiple languages: one spoken, one written, and one only vaguely apprehended in church during the mass. In the beginning there was Vicentino, the dialect of Vicenza, or more specifically, of “upper Vicenza province,” Meneghello’s native tongue and the vernacular of Malo. Then came 3 standard Italian, the language that children learned to read and write and eventually to speak in elementary school, including that strained and bellicose variation that was the language of the Fascist regime. And finally there was Latin, the Church Latin of Paternoster and of i sequèri, as Aunt Lena called the prayers she muttered in order to recover lost thimbles and needles. (Liceo-educated Italians like Meneghello himself were of course fluent in Latin by age eighteen.) Unlike other writers in the distinguished current of twentieth-century Italian dialect literature—Carlo Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini—Meneghello doesn’t so much shape characters and sentiments out of dialect, as use dialect expressions to illustrate the mindsets and thought processes of his native environment. And although his experiences are very particular to his time and place, the theme Meneghello draws from them is universal: the ways that childhood’s words, places, things, and people shape the very contours of thought itself. “Languages,” he later wrote, “become extinct more slowly than things do, and so there is a lapse of time in which things that have disappeared are still accessible as ghosts that linger in the language.”5 Old words for old things: shards of a genuinely different world that had been superseded, and which Meneghello made it his business to try to reconstruct. Words could be eloquent archeological remains in other ways too. Some friends of his kept a mynah bird in their house in Montecchio, not far from Malo. This bird had a way of calling for Renzo, one of the sons in the family, “he would say Rènsooo . with that particular cadence they had in the Agno valley.” Over the years, the people of Montecchio had long ceased to say “Renzo” that way, but “the mynah bird had registered those tones and reproduced them to perfection—and even a little more than perfectly.” And so, Meneghello wrote, “peasant civilization, so rapidly laid to rest in this vigorous little town, lives on in this Vicentinophone bird.”6 “I’d like to think,” he wrote elsewhere, “that languages are fastened together by links, at least in terms of their comprehensibility.” If all the generations of the Meneghello forebears (“about sixty back to the Romans . several thousands back to pithecanthropus”) were brought together, they’d make up a town about the size of Malo, he reckoned. “And thus we could each plausibly say something to the person next to us and watch as passed it on to the next person until finally, down at the end of the line, the ape Meneghello laughed—or we shook a fist at him.”7 Libera nos a malo begins with the clatter of rain falling on a roof, a sound that conjures up the beginning of consciousness itself in the aural space of childhood, a town so small that God himself has his place in the sky just above the rooftops.

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