The Autobiography of a Language

Andrea Ciribuco

Description

The Autobiography of a Language is an exploration of the deep and powerful ties between language and identity, focusing on an Italian American author and addressing global themes of modern writing. This is the first extensive, book-length work on Emanuel Carnevali (1897–1942), the first Italian American to attain literary recognition. It is a study on how an Italian immigrant to New York became an author and a key figure in transnational modernism. Most importantly, though, it's a study of contacts between American and Italian literatures in the modernist era, and an exploration of the challenges of writing in a second language. Carnevali's works are almost exclusively in English, even though he spent only eight years in the United States before returning to Italy. Combining literary analysis with some of the latest findings in applied linguistics and the study of bilingualism, this book contributes to a very active debate in the fields of comparative literature and translation studies: the implications of translingual writing. Andrea Ciribuco considers both the linguistic and cultural aspects of writing in a second language, examining its potential and pitfalls, and bringing Carnevali's works in touch with the sociocultural context of the great wave of Italian emigration.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Translating Childhood, Decoding America

2. The Newcomer and the Splendid Commonplace: Using English as a Second Language

3. Representing Italy in America

4. A Language for Bazzano: An Italian American Returns Home

5. Between the Atlantic and Oblivion: Carnevali in the 1930s

Conclusion: Emanuel Carnevali in the 21st Century

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• États-Unis
• My Last Duchess
• Italy
• Ethnic studies
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438475264
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Autobiography of a Language
SUNY series in Italian/American Culture

Fred L. Gardaphe, editor
The Autobiography of a Language
Emanuel Carnevali’s Italian/American Writing
Andrea Ciribuco
Cover image: Arianna Pagliara, Landscape with Man and Suitcase . Reprinted by permission of the artist.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ciribuco, Andrea, 1986– author.
Title: The autobiography of a language : Emanuel Carnevali’s Italian/American writing / Andrea Ciribuco.
Other titles: Emanuel Carnevali’s cultural translation
Description: Albany : State University of New York, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in Italian/American culture | Revision of author’s thesis (doctoral)—National University of Ireland, Galway, 2016, titled Emanuel Carnevali’s cultural translation : an Italian in Modernist America. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040417 | ISBN 9781438475257 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438475264 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Carnevali, Emanuel—Criticism and interpretation. | Italian American authors—20th century. | American literature—Italian influences.
Classification: LCC PS3505.A72752 Z56 2019 | DDC 818/.5203—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040417
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Translating Childhood, Decoding America
2. The Newcomer and the Splendid Commonplace: Using English as a Second Language
3. Representing Italy in America
4. A Language for Bazzano: An Italian American Returns Home
5. Between the Atlantic and Oblivion: Carnevali in the 1930s
Conclusion: Emanuel Carnevali in the 21st Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without the support of the people and institutions who accompanied me in the journey through Carnevali’s works, which started as part of my PhD research. I would like to thank the National University of Ireland in Galway, which believed in me enough to grant me the Hardiman scholarship in 2011; and all the friends and colleagues who made it feel like home. In particular, Anne O’Connor and Adrian Paterson proved to be the best thesis supervisors I could desire, providing endless support and useful advice, motivating me constantly to pursue my research goals and improve the quality of my work. Their support and friendship, during and after the PhD, is invaluable.
Special thanks go to all the scholars who offered advice and guidance during the path that led to this book—especially Paolo Bartoloni, Beryl Schlossman, Loredana Polezzi, and John Paul Russo.
I would like to thank the staff of the archives who, in America and Italy, have facilitated the search of material on Carnevali. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the great and continuous help I received from Aurelia Casagrande of the Archivio Comunale di Bazzano in Valsamoggia (BO), Italy—who did all she could to make my search of archival material easier.
I am deeply grateful to the estates of Emanuel Carnevali, Ezra Pound, and Kay Boyle for allowing me to quote and discuss material present in the archives.
Vorrei ringraziare la mia famiglia per avermi insegnato il valore dello studio e del lavoro; per avermi incoraggiato e aiutato negli studi, anche da lontano dopo che avevo lasciato l’Italia.
Then there is Anna, whom I will never be able to thank enough. Our marriage is, without any doubt, the greatest thing that came out of all this.
This book is dedicated to all those people who, in 2019 as it was in 1914, choose to leave their homes and embark on a journey in search of a better life.
Introduction
Emanuel Carnevali, in Search of a Language
Emanuel Carnevali was an Italian intellectual in America, and an American writer born in Italy. Neither definition describes him completely, and his career is the story of a long, troubled passage across linguistic and national borders. This troubled passage, on the other hand, was strikingly fertile: it gave us one of the first Italian-American bodies of work to be recognized in American literary circles, as well as a crucial document of the many possibilities and challenges that come with choosing one language over another.
Carnevali was born in Florence in 1897, his childhood a prelude to emigration: raised by his mother, Matilde Piano (who was separated from his father, Tullio), Carnevali lived in Pistoia and then in the Piedmont towns of Biella and Cossato. After his mother’s premature death in 1908, Carnevali was left in the care of his aunt Melania, and then of his father. He was sent to a boarding school in Venice in 1911 and then attended school in Bologna. Because of a conflictual relationship with his father, Emanuel decided to emigrate. In March 1914, he left for New York with his brother Augusto.
Carnevali lived in poverty in New York, doing menial jobs such as waiter and dishwasher. In 1917, he married another Italian immigrant, Emilia Valenza. He started writing poetry in English, and his first poems were published in 1918; soon he was publishing poetry, short fiction (most notably the series “Tales of a Hurried Man”) and criticism in literary reviews. His work appeared in many of the most important literary reviews in the modernist circles of New York and Chicago, including Poetry, a Magazine of Verse , The Little Review and Others . After moving to Chicago he was, for a very brief time between 1919 and 1920, the assistant editor of Poetry . He also translated a small number of Italian poets and intellectuals of his time (although not all of his translations were published). Carnevali rapidly established a reputation as poet and critic among American intellectuals, although he remained an outsider, and quite critical of modernist literature.
In February 1920, he experienced episodes of paranoia and delusion. Hospitalized, he was diagnosed with syphilis. He spent the following months between hospitals and clinics, with a brief experience living on the Indiana Dunes of Lake Michigan. When he returned to Italy in September 1922, the diagnosis was encephalitis lethargica, a neurological disease which left him affected by strong tremors for the rest of his life. Carnevali’s health seriously compromised his career. He was hospitalized in Bazzano, near Bologna, where his father worked. Carnevali’s American friends took to helping him financially (paying, for example, for a room in the Bologna clinic Villa Baruzziana in the years 1924–26). In 1925, his friend Robert McAlmon’s Paris-based Contact Editions published A Hurried Man , a collection of his poems, short stories, and criticism written until that moment. Carnevali spent most of the following years in Bazzano, bedridden and gradually losing touch with the literary milieu. On the other hand, he kept writing until his death in 1942, always in English, sporadically publishing new poetry and fiction as well as translations from Pound (into Italian) and Rimbaud. The first six chapters of his memoir appeared in the 1932 anthology Americans Abroad : he never finished the work, but his friend and editor Kay Boyle collected it in the 1960s. Boyle’s compiled Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali saw the light in 1967. In 1978, the poet’s stepsister Maria Pia Carnevali (with the help of opera conductor and Carnevali enthusiast David Stivender) collected and translated her own version of the memoir, together with other works by Carnevali, in the volume Il primo dio .
In the years after his death, Carnevali has drawn intermittent interest from intellectuals and scholars, going through a series of “rediscoveries.” Giuseppe Prezzolini, in one of the essays of his 1963 collection I trapiantati , expressed his interest in Carnevali as soon as he heard about this forgotten contemporary of his, but he also lamented the scarcity of sources on him at the time. In the following years, dedicated friends, admirers and scholars rescued Carnevali from oblivion: Boyle, Maria Pia Carnevali, Stivender and the journalist and critic Gabriel Cacho Millet, who did a great amount of work publishing Carnevali’s letters ( Voglio Disturbare l’America , 1981) as well as translating material left out by Maria Pia’s edition ( Saggi e Recensioni , 1994; Diario Bazzanese , 1994). This book would not exist without the dedicated intellectuals who almost singlehandedly rescued Carnevali from oblivion.
This book does not so much “rediscover” Carnevali as place him in the wider transatlantic context, looking at the challenges and possibilities that came with his choice of the English language over his native Italian. Carnevali’s relationship with English—as an object of desire, a tool for literary assimilation, and the repository of Italian echoes and memories—is the fulcrum of this book. While he was hardly the only Italian of his time to write in English after emigration (his contemporaries Pascal D’Angelo and Ar