Italian Literature: A Very Short
Introduction
By Peter Hainsworth
First page of part The Divine Comedy,
written by Dante Alighieri, via Wikimedia Commons
Most English-speakers who read literature
have heard of Dante (c 1265–1321). Eliot, Pound, and a host of other modern
poets, critics, and translators have made sure of that, though it’s a moot
point whether many readers have followed Dante very far out of his dark wood.
When it comes to other classic Italian writers, the darkness thickens. There’s
Petrarch (1304-1374), famous for his sonnets; Boccaccio (1313-1375), known for
risqué stories; Machiavelli (1469-1527), associated with realpolitik, and
precious little else, until you get to Pirandello (1867-1936), the classic of
the Modern Theatre. Then, from around the 1970s, Italy becomes part of a
recognisable modern world and Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and the
detective novelists are actually quite widely read. Scholars and
poetry-enthusiasts of course probe further, and some students who are forced to
dig into a classic for some European literature or culture course find
themselves pleasantly surprised.
But why isn’t Italian literature read more
widely? Is there a continuing English mistrust of ‘abroad’? Or should we be
citing linguistic incompetence? Neither is to be underestimated. Or, are we to
go on the attack and say that Italy’s not produced much that’s exciting or
innovative in intellectual or literary terms for a few hundred years? This is
about as convincing, when you look into it, as saying that Italians aren’t good
soldiers.
One starting point is the fact that classic
Italian literature (Dante included) isn’t much read by Italians either, unless
they have to, though they are often grandly patriotic about their great authors
in a way English literature enthusiasts rarely are. The reason for both the grandeur
and the non-reading is that Italian literature is written in a language that
most Italians have never spoken (literary Tuscan) and prefers to operate at
higher points on the rhetorical scale than is normal in ordinary language. So
abstraction and generalisation win out over concreteness and particularity, the
present is defined by reference to what predecessors have done, and again and
again the Latin classics are perceptible just below the surface. Petrarchan
poetry — and with it the great mass of Italian poetry after Petrarch — just
doesn’t do what modernism and modern English poetic practice expect poetry to
do (as the translators who have struggled with canonical lines of Petrarch and
Leopardi know all too well). Leopardi’s line, ‘Dolce e chiara è la notte e
senza vento’, is always going to turn out something like ‘Sweet and clear is
the night and with no wind’. Great poetry? Oh please! And yet it is.
What about the Italian novel, then? It was
a miracle that a French-educated Milanese, Alessandro Manzoni, managed to
produce an Italian realist novel of European stature in the gloomy decades
before the Austrians were finally thrown out of Northern Italy. It cost him
years of retooling literary Tuscan. The result was brilliant, but it was still
a language nobody spoke except maybe some Florentines. No wonder Manzoni only
wrote one novel and then decided after finishing it that mixing fact and
fiction made the historical novel a non-starter altogether. That’s apart from
the fact I Promessi sposi treats the betrothed lovers of its title with
breath-taking asexuality. The moral knots and the linguistic ones were
connected. The Italy in which Manzoni wrote was economically and socially
retrograde. The readership for any kind of literature (including the crucial
female readership) was exiguous and traditionalists were suspicious of the very
idea of the new-fangled genre. It would take more than a century for the novel
to become normalised, and even longer for women writers and readers, modern and
not so modern, to be given due recognition.
No wonder classic Italian literature looks
foreign and remote. But that is surely the point. If we go looking for
literature which reads like English literature, only with exotic names and
local colour, we are just hoping for a cut-price tour with everything made
easy. The Italian literary past (Dante again included) is very much a foreign
country where its inhabitants do things differently. As you get further into
it, you begin to find just how rich a country it is. Poetry looks different
after reading Petrarch and Ariosto, not least because you realise that great
poets can say a great deal without calling every spade a spade. The famous
musicality of the Italian language is not a given, but is constantly recreated
in different ways and to different ends. You also realise that the idea of a
line running through Italian literature back into the classical past and
forwards into the present is more than a schoolbook cliché. It’s a frail line
that keeps on breaking and being retied, but it is indeed one of the defining
strands in European (including English) culture. Picking up that line at some
of its highest points is fascinating, fun, and enlightening.
Peter
Hainsworth lectured in Italian at Hull and Kent Universities before moving to
Oxford in 1979. He remained there until he retired in 2003. He has published
widely on medieval and modern Italian literature, including Petrarch the Poet
(1986). He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. Peter
Hainsworth and David Robey co-edited the Oxford Companion to Italian Literature
(2002), and co-wrote Italian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012).
