CAMPANIA
Dante Maffia


In order to understand fully the reasons leading to Neapolitan poetry of the Twentieth century, one must read very carefully the introductory essay by Alberto Consiglio, "Spiriti e forme della poesia napoletana" [Spirit and Forms of Neapolitan Poetry], in the now classical Antologia dei poeti napoletani¹
Consiglio goes far beyond the task at hand, and investigates the historical and social reasons in order to connect them to the phenomenon, especially in the results and nuances of certain expressive twists attained by means that might seem improbable to a reader unfamiliar with the history of Naples. The path followed by Consiglio may seem even impervious, due to the frequent digressions and subtlety of reasoning, but in the end one realizes that his theses are rooted not only in his inveterate convictions, but above all in the contentions always supported by strong documentation. When he states that "Neapolitan poetry, between the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, is the center of all Italian literature. Better still, it is the real, representative Italian literature,"² he does not commit an act of pride, but only manifests a reality that any reader could plainly see. In any case, in the study by Mario Chiesa and Giovanni Tesio, "La poesia del Novecento in dialetto," [Twentieth- Century Dialect Poetry] which introduces the two volumes Le parole di legno [Wooden Words]³, Consiglio's statements are accepted and amplified precisely because not prompted by patriotic fervor. Chiesa and Tesio write: "In the attempt to find a criterion to mark a point of departure for Twentieth-Century dialect poetry, we have had to concede that the numbers don't add up: there is no date in which chronological and critical reasons coincide; or at least we have not seen it. Di Giacomo published various collections before 1901 (and in fact he does not appear in Mengaldo's anthology to throw off the reckoning); yet anyone working on dialect poetry cannot - it seems to us - begin to talk about the Twentieth Century without Di Giacomo: it would not be possible to find the origin of the poetic line that was to bear such fruits in our century. It is precisely in Di Giacomo's experience that one can observe how an epigon of the Nineteenth Century can become the first poet in dialect of the Twentieth Century"⁴ Of course this thesis stems from precise and specific analysis, and the two authors choose, among other critics, Ettore Bonora⁵ who, for instance, shows the link between Di Giacomo and the French symbolists, in an essay rich with pointers and suggestions.
This, however, should not unnerve either Mengaldo or Brevini, who have neglected Di Giacomo's importance⁶; the tradition of dialect poetry in Naples is deeply rooted and persistent, and even if we refused to accept Alberto Consiglio's thesis ⁷ ("the first vernacular poetry was Sicilian"), who found the information in Del Dialetto napoletano by Galiano and Meola⁸, or those put forth by Mario Sansone⁹, there still remain the texts of authors such as Velardiniello, Giulio Cesare Cortese, Giambattista Basile, Filippo Sgruttendio, Giambattista Velentino, Andrea Perrucci, Francesco Biondi, Nicolò Lombardo, Nicola Capasso, Nunziante Pagano, Sant'Alfonso Maria de' Liguori, Giacomo Antonio Palmieri, Antonio Villani, Carlo Mormile, Duca Carlo Morbilli, Domenico Piccinini, Giulio Genoino, Michele Zezza, Rocco Mormile, Raffaele Sacco, Marchese di Cavaccone, Gabriele Quattromani, Marco D'Arienzo, Luigi Chiurazzi, Pasquale Cinquegrana, Raffaele Ragione, Alfonso Fiordelisi, Giovanni Capurro¹⁰ and Rimatori napoletani del Quattrocento [Neapolitan Poets of the Fifteenth Century]¹¹ to attest to a continuity, a constancy, a patrimony, in sum, in whose veining one can read connections and developments, inquiries and choices that have later engendered a poetry to be considered in all its scope. Plainly put, Di Giacomo is to the Twentieth Century as Porta is to the Nineteenth, and this takes nothing away from the poetry of Belli, who looks to Porta, nor from the poetry of Giotti, of Tessa, of Marin, of Noventa, which has Di Giacomo behind it.
Having firmly established this point, one can tackle all possible arguments in order to unravel correlations, allegiances, affiliations and Freudian patricides; what is certain is that Di Giacomo is "something unique"¹² and is also a great precursor of underworld poetry, which flourished in European literature in the Twenties¹³.
His recognition as a founding figure, as can be seen, comes from various parts, and looking at the studies by Benedetto Croce, Francesco Gaeta, Borgese, Bracco, Cecchi, Contini, Doria, Gatto, De Robertis, Galletti, Pancrazi, Montale, Pasolini, Luigi Russo, Serra, Serao, Vossler, Vinciguerra, Flora, one immediately forms the right impression of the "magical quality" of the poet who, even among conflicting judgments, remains for everyone "the sentimental verista," as he liked to describe himself, the writer who never refrains from giving words and expressions their primal meaning, their simplicity devoid of the accumulations that time, for ill or good, has deposited on them. It is true, Di Giacomo's poetry is intrinsically musical, fresh, almost olfactory, but musicality and freshness are never produced through vagueness and indefiniteness; in the poet there is a strong sense of measure, which allows him to paint at his pleasure with more brilliant colors and the most persuasive notes without the risk of overdoing it. It has been chorally written that he was able to untangle himself from the knotted skein of Verismo and was able to free himself from the limitations of the local sketch, thanks to that very innate grace that prompted him to measure theatrical effects without distorting into caricatures or "figurines" certain portraits smelling of times past, but also capable of gazing beyond the curtain of the present. His works should be examined as they evolved, in order to understand that he was gradually able to find adequate means to express content and subject matter fashionable at the time, but without turning them into stereotypes or depriving them of that subjective dimension capable of breathing life into a description, a sentiment, an emotion. The subject matter of his verse is that of the southern repertory of the time, yet the obvious and the trite have no place in the songs of the farmers, of the street vendors, of the idlers and those who loiter in the streets, in the slums and in the harbor, living by their wits.
On the contrary, he was able in my opinion to restore a distant poetic truth through "Canzone 'e copp' 'o tamurro," in which he "invokes," silently and gently, the necessity of bringing back into piazze and alleyways the "carnascialeschi" of ancient memory. But this time not only with the intent to offer spectacle and amusement, but to share with the people the shivers of the never-spent fire reflected in everyday occurrences.
In this sense we could interpret Di Giacomo as one of those theatrical specimen (Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Calderón, Goldoni, Molière, Pirandello) who in every instance feel the vibrations of the stage and find a way of putting on a show. Di Giacomo, however, was also a journalist and careful student of events, of Neapolitan history, what one might call an erudite, who did not miss the particulars of a people and a culture thirsting for truth, though never meant to become tyrannical. The journalist, the man of theater, the erudite, then, do their inlay work in the "ariette," in the sonnets, in the short poems, in which we find alternating voices, allusions, suggestions; in which we perceive, in the background, the lament of a Chimera that devours men and things to make them new, perennially new. He hade made his debut with tales that he defined "Germanic," to the extent that he awoke the suspicion of plagiarism in Cafiero and Verdinois who had invited him to contribute to the Corriere del Mattino; they were "fantastic" stories, and if they showed something "photographic" (as did other works of his later on), it could not be regarded as a sort of "sin" other than to the eyes of Croce's Esthetics.
Di Giacomo, putting his various natures "on a burner," utilizing a more and more refined alchemy of language, tempered with a semantic density consonant with the varied linguistic experiments taking place in contemporary Italy, was able to find a personal voice, rare and authentic, that never degenerated or festered into the open boils taken from French literature (Zola or Maupassant), ever more pervasive and abundant. The Eighteenth Century no doubt enters his world, not only with the modulations of Metastasio, Zappi, Frugoni, Lamberti, Meli, Martello, but also with the energy of Giacomo Casanova, whom he translated with masterful discernment and whose style he admired.
Perhaps it was also these studies on the Eighteenth Century, these exercises addressing authors of international repute, that allowed him to be considered by Renato Serra already an innovator at the time of La Voce, as Giacinto Spagnoletti reminds us¹⁴; certainly Di Giacomo cannot be ignored or liquidated as one of the many minstrels that have infested Romantic, Verista and Decadent literature.
The weight of his personality, of his humanity, of his notoriety bothered quite a bit Ferdinando Russo who, at the outset, was not able to touch in the least Di Giacomo's presence. Critics remained almost indifferent to his early work which seemed to be taking belated populist positions of early Romanticism. Now the studies on Russo have become more numerous and the publication of his works (often ill-conceived and improvised) has created a new, revitalized interest which is establishing some order and disciplining a subject matter already varied and confused in itself due to the ease with which the author commented on different topics. As for the dialect, Luigi Reina remarks: "Without wishing to take up the well-known distinction between reflected dialect literature and spontaneous dialect literature, it must be noted how for Russo dialect was almost a sort of restoration of primitive, elementary language, with norms of its own, autonomous with respect to those of common language"¹⁵. This naturalness allows him a great freedom in his inventions and hyperboles, in his Baroque metaphors and in his full-relief portraits of heroes-protagonists caught in a superficial psychological posture. But Russo's world is not just tied to what has been described as his "Baroque surrealism," but spills over into many directions, advancing a sort of claim over all that concerned the maudit in the province, at times with dark tones. He also employs Ariosto's type of irony, and harks back to Pulci and Berni, going as far as the double theatralization of narration"¹⁶. In many respects he catches old and fresh aspects of the Neapolitan spirit, which however appears, from one book to the next, at times pathetic and at times melodramatic, at times humorous and at times festive, without ever coming face to face with the burning core of a feeling that smolders to the end and turns to ashes so it can rise again and regenerate itself, or vanish in the desert and live the sense of emptiness, abandonment, anguish.
The crisis of Decadentism seems to leave no trace in Russo; it passes over him and he remains intact in his cocoon as it gathers the remnants of old melodies, the heartfelt or violent calls of the slums, the rhythm of a slyness, of a dignity and heroism without future altars. Russo is the bard of a present entirely played in the cracking whips of the coachmen, in the cries of water-carriers, in the tavern scuffles, in the houses of common women, in the demeanor assumed in downtown streets. He is the bard of a solarity of twilight, the haughty backflow of a society that has its rites and feasts, its sad moments and repetitions, its particular thrills.
Carlo Bernari, while editing in 1984 Poesie del Russo¹⁷, has pointed out, besides the discrepancies in earlier editions, certain poetic postures of the Neapolitan attributed to his often evident "secularity". One thing is irrefutable: Russo does not browbeat his reader by turning to "nostalgia," even when it seems that he is willing to curl up in the spires and sighs of the good and beautiful sentiment of the past. His dialect is a chronicle, a diary of everyday ferment, as is his poetry, rich with echoes and allusions, often satisfied with wordplay and deftness.
The other poet in the anthology, if with only one text, is Raffaele Viviani. It was extremely difficult to choose after the happy season of Di Giacomo and Russo, especially because the world of song (an interesting chapter for further investigation on Neapolitan and other dialects) had produced authors of great dignity, such as Pasquale Ruocco, Tito Manlio, Emma Coppola di Canzano, Fusco, Bovio, G.B. De Curtis, E.A. Mario, Totò, De Filippo, Nicolardi,De Mura, Panza, De Gregorio, Pacifico Vento; Viviani, however, interprets better than anyone the change, the continuity and the synthesis of what took place approximately in the Twenties and Thirties until the flourishing of neodialect poetry, but he interprets even that spirit of a thousand spirits, that international Neapolitanness that saw him as a chansonnier, actor, author, mime, acrobat, playwright. His poetry, as was said, is unpredictable, it moves by fits and starts, in waves, creating at first a feeling of disorientation. At any rate, there is a predilection for the spoken word, that seems to assign to things and emotions an irreverent, conspiratorial sigh, as if Viviani were at the same time pupil and teacher, thief and policeman.
The list of poets becomes longer (even if the quality of the texts increases on average with respect to previous decades), but almost all follow the line drawn by Di Giacomo, Russo and Viviani, some emphasizing melody, others rhythm, others recapturing certain beguiling moods and feelings. The tradition of Neapolitan dialect poetry has no pauses, but, except for some poets tied to Piedigrotta, the standard of the texts remains identical to that of the past, as if quicksand were making it impossible to leave the assigned groove. Is Di Giacomo's era over? No doubt it is, but in the end it is always with him that one must come to terms.
So it was for Achille Serrao who, while born in Rome, uses the dialect of Caivano, in the province of Caserta. After an intense activity in Italian, he begins to write in dialect in 1990, with Mal'aria, and one immediately realizes that those texts have forcefully left behind the beguiling sirens of the ariette and Neapolitan songs and demand a new kind of attention, free of commonplaces. The significance of this has been noted by Franco Loi, by this writer, Spagnoletti, Vivaldi, Brevini, who underline the change taking place in a linguistic area in which the difficulty of change remained enormous, precisely because Naples and the surrounding areas had gone through several intense periods overflowing with poetry (the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth centuries, the beginning of the Twentieth).
Serrao, with his long, rugged verses, not devoid of tenderness and nuances, inaugurated a season which attests to the readiness of Campania's poetry to question everything in order to start moving forward again. In the musicality that unfolds not under the soft caresses of Donizetti and Bellini, but under the apparently metallic tumult of Stravinsky, we find a text that denies recognitions by the sea or Mt. Vesuvius, and stands on a promontory where there is no room for vagueness or lyrical and metaphysical indefiniteness. And yet pain and feelings abound, but they do not unthread in rivulets, in assonances, in plaintiveness: they intend to remain what they are, to exist without false unions.
Interesting, for a different reason, is the poetry in the dialect of Cappella, in the province of Naples, of Michele Sovente, who adopts the mother tongue after writing in Italian and Latin. Sovente, like almost all contemporary dialect poets, is a man of vast and refined culture, and his poetry (until now available only in journals and anthologies) is affected by this, maybe because his education was too grounded on the Latin classics, their quantitative music, their rigor. One gets the impression that he is amused in discovering in verses written in the Cappella dialect the hidden sense of a rhythm that would otherwise be a rigid and perfect hexameter. But one also senses that the motivations which prompt him to delve into his childhood self are authentic and conceal a dense core that at times sparkles and breaks into fireworks.
The anthology ends with Tommaso Pignatelli (pseudonym of an unidentified Italian politician) who with Pe cupia' 'o chiarfo appears as an authentic revelation of the poetry from Campania. Tullio De Mauro in the preface, Natalino Sapegno in the inside cover, and Franco Loi in Sole 24 Ore have cited Pignatelli as a high and extraordinary voice that at the opportune moment is able to leave behind the usual melodic flow of tradition and, at the same time, can organize an effective and vigorous poetic discourse which utilizes both ancient and recent Neapolitan patrimony by restructuring it in a new expressive fullness with convincing and, I would say, significant results. Sapegno points out that Pignatelli is "within tradition, but beyond the line of Di Giacomo and Russo, he knows how to take the humors of Neapolitanness without exploiting them, and transforms the Neapolitan language into a high instrument of poetry by infusing it with new freshness and renewing its expressive felicity."¹⁸ This seems to me a promising view for poetry, whether or not Neapolitan. De Mauro has also mentioned the "refined quality of these poems"¹⁹, stressing how they remain impressed in memory. This is still, if I am not mistaken, "the deep, exciting manifestation of a people, a nation."²⁰
Since the anthology is meant primarily for foreign readers, we have preferred to give a selection of rather well-known texts: many of these, in fact, have become tunes sung even by famous tenors or American singers.
One should keep in mind that an anthology is always like sipping precious liquor, a small advance, a promise.



NOTES

¹Alberto Consiglio, Antologia dei poeti napoletani: Milan, Arnoldo Mondadori, 1973.
²Ibid, p.36
³Mario Chiesa-Giovanni Tesio, Le parole di legno. Poesia in Dialetto del '900 italiano: Milan, Oscar Mondadori, 2 vls., 1984.
⁴Ibid., p.8
⁵Ettore Bonora, "Il dibattito sulla letteratura dialettale dall'età veristica a oggi," in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CLVIII, 1981.
⁶Cf. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Poeti italiani del Novecento: Milano Mondadori, "I Meridiani", 1978. Franco Brevini, Poeti dialettali del Novecento: Turin, Einaudi, 1987.
⁷Alberto Consiglio, Antologia dei poeti napoletani, cit., pp.7-11.
⁸Ferdinando Galiani, Del dialetto napoletano, 1789 (new edition by Enrico Malato): Rome, Salerno Editrice, 1970.
⁹Mario Sansone, "Relazioni fra la letteratura italiana e le letterature dialettali," in Letterature comparate: Milan, Marzorati, 1948.
¹⁰Ettore De Mura, Poeti napoletani dal '600 a oggi, Naples, Conte Editore, 1950.
¹¹Mario Mandalari (ed.), Rimatori napoletani del Quattrocento: Caserta, Tip. Jaselli, 1885. (Anastatic reprint, Bologna, Forni, 1979).
¹²Elena Croce, Preface to Salvatore Di Giacomo, Poesie e prose: Milan, Mondadori, "I Meridiani", 1977 (IV ed. 1984) p.XV.
¹³Ivi, p. XXI.
¹⁴Giacinto Spagnoletti - Cesare Vivaldi, Poesia dialettale dal Rinascimento a oggi: Milan, Garzanti, 1991, vol.II, p.857.
¹⁵Luigi Reina, Ferdinando Russo - popolarità, dialetto, poesia: Naples, Ermanno Cassitto Editore, 1983, p.19.
¹⁶Ivi, p.24.
¹⁷Carlo Bernari (ed.), Ferdinando Russo, Le poesie: Naples, Guida, 1984.
¹⁸Natalino Sapegno, inside cover of Pe cupià 'o chiarfo: Rome, A.I.S.E., 1994.
¹⁹Tullio De Mauro, ibid., p.4.
²⁰Alberto Consiglio, Antologia dei poeti napoletani, cit., p.14.


ANTHOLOGIES AND DICTIONARIES

La poesia dialettale napoletana 1880--1930, edited by A. Tilgher, Rome 1930.
Napoli terra di poesia, edited by A. Donizetti, Napoli 1931.
Antologia di poeti napoletani. Ottocento e Novecento, edited by A. Consiglio, Rome 1945.
Poeti napoletani dal Seicento a oggi, edited by E. De Mura, Naples 1950.
Un secolo d'oro. Antologia della poesia napoletana dal 1860 al 1960, edited by I. De Feo e V. Talarico, Naples, 1968.
Antologia dei poeti napoletani, edited by A. Consiglio, Milan 1973.
L'inferno della poesia napoletana. Versi "proibiti" di poeti di ogni tempo, edited by A. Manna, Naples 1974.
Dizionario del dialetto napoletano, edited by A. Altamura, Naples, 1968.
Vocabolario napoletano-italiano, italiano-napoletano, edited by A. Salzano, Naples 1979.
Vocabolario napoletano-italiano, edited by P. P. Volpe, Naples 1970.


REGIONAL STUDIES

M. Rak, La tradizione letteraria popolare-dialettale napoletana tra la conquista spagnola e le rivoluzioni del 1647-48, in Storia di Napoli, IV, 1974.
A. Palermo, Le vie del dialetto. Letteratura e teatro nella Napoli post-unitaria in La letteratuta dialettale italiana, edited by P. Mazzamuto, Palermo 1984.
R. Giglio, Campania, Brescia, 1988