Differentia: Review of Italian Thought Number 8 Combined Issue 8-9 Spring/Autumn Article 4 1999 That Awful Mess Carlo Emilio Gadda Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia Recommended Citation Gadda, Carlo Emilio (1999) "That Awful Mess," Differentia: Review of Italian Thought: Vol. 8 , Article 4. Available at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/vol8/iss1/4 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Academic Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Differentia: Review of Italian Thought by an authorized editor of Academic Commons. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. FICTION I That Awful Mess ... Carlo Emilio Gadda A New Translation by Robert De Lucca The most easily observable, and probably the most easily describable, trait of the Pasticciacciois its lexical richness and variety. Such variety in the Pasticciacciois favored by a double foundation of Roman dialect (though there are also present in lesser measure the Neapolitan, Molisan, Abruzzese, Milanese or Lombard, Venetian and other dialects, not to mention a heavy presence of foreign borrowings) and an Italian which is elevated, or literary, or to put it more precisely, scholastic, meaning heavy with elements Gianfranco Contini calls "di una cultura nobilmente liceale" - an Italian which, in general, raises the register of Gadda's prose far from the lingua d'uso. So the page in the Pasticciacciogathers together dialectal words (of many regions), and Italian words, the latter coming from extremely dissimilar phases, varieties and applications of Italian, such as trecento terms and contemporary terms; regionalisms and pan-Italian terms; formal, colloquial and trivial Italian; or the sectorial: the scientific, bureaucratic, or technical.