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.
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