Poetry and Literary Language Barriers in Nineteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Three 'Dialect Poets'

Abstract

This contribution seeks to examine the poetry of Carlo Porta (1775-1821), Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863) and Angelo Canossi (1862-1943), three Italian poets who reacted in creative and transgressive ways against an artificial literary monolingualism removed from the linguistic realities of the peninsula’s inhabitants. As with many of Italy’s dialect writers, these poets choose to privilege the dialetti - the local languages - that are much closer to reality for speakers. Each of them constructs their own defence of multilingualism, often by means of mixing registers and local languages, resulting in a sort of anarchic pastiche reminiscent of Commedia dell’Arte. Literature thus becomes the forum for the charged juxtaposition of these multiple languages, including the inherited language of poetry and its formal constraints, which these writers will attempt to transgress. Neither folk literature nor high literature, the work of these poets situates itself playfully between the two, and does so by celebrating multilingualism and the idea of unity in diversity.