IE poetics

[Alberto Lombardo]

[ Moderator's note:
  I would like to thank both Mr. Piva and Mr. Lombardo for their contributions.
  Further discussion of Italian politics is, as Mr. Lombardo points out below,
  not truly relevant to the purpose of this list, and should be moved either to
  private mail or to a different mailing list.  Nothing further on the topic
  will be posted to the Indo-European list.
  --rma ]

I read the angry reaction of mr. Piva to my review. Replying to him, I'd like
first of all to add some further informations about the context where it was
published.  In my last mail I wrote:

> There's another very interesting book about the subject above, it's
> Gabriele Costa, Le origini della lingua poetica indoeuropea. Voce, coscienza
> e transizione neolitica, Leo S. Olschki editore, Firenze 1998, lire 95.000.
> My review http://www.lapadania.com/2001/febbraio/06/06022001p11a2.htm where
> you could find a very big bibliography too.

Piva wrote:
"
1. The review doesn't contain a 'very big bibliography' - it contains no
bibliography at all. Just a few names are mentioned (Gimbutas, Eliade,
Jünger, Evola, Guénon, Devoto, Tilak, Fabre d'Olivet, H. Wirth), and not a
single title".

Obviously, the very big bibliography is included in Costa's book, not in my
review.

Piva also wrote:
"Lombardo's review has been published in a nationalist/regionalist daily
newspaper called 'La Padania - Mitteleuropa' (february 6, 2001) belonging to a
party with clearly fascistoid and racist tendencies and an irrational hate for
anything coming from outside Central or Northern Europe ... This party's
coalition may obtain the majority in the coming elections, next May (and the
situation would be even worse than in Austria)."

It's completely false. When someone writes something similar might just to
try to prove it, but Piva limits himself to insult me and the newspaper, and
speaks about italian political facts without any relationship with IE
studies.

A little more over, Piva writes:
"I feel that I have to react, when lies are reported, as is done in
Lombardo's review, in order to disseminate a certain political (i.e.
nationalist and racist) position."

If he really thinks to have to politically react, he might do it in the
right place, which certainly is not a mailing-list about IE studies.

Then he writes:
"Lombardo calls Gimbutas 'la studiosa sovietica che ha introdotto (...) una
sorta di dogma fra gli studiosi “progressisti” di archeologia e di
linguistica' (the Soviet scholar who introduced (...) sort of a dogma among
"progressive" scholars of archeology and linguistics). And he also imputes 'la
volont? di fornire lustro storico e nobili origini alla patria del comunismo
mondiale' (the aim to give some historical splendour and noble origins to the
fatherland of communism).  These assertions can't be true for several reasons.
M. Gimbutas can't be called a 'Soviet scholar': she joined the Lithuanian
underground resistance against the Soviet regime at the age of 20, in 1941, she
had then to hide in the woods for some time, and she finally fled from the
Soviet Union to Vienna, and later to Germany, in 1944, when the Nazis were
still ruling! (by the way: the 'fatherland of communism' should be Germany, as
Marx and Engels were Germans...)"

Although it's completely sure and clear, Piva doesn't understand (but
evidently he doesn't want to understand) what I meant: In my opinion, the
political orientation of M. Gimbutas broght her to wrong archeological
conclusions too.

The high-sounding conclusion of Piva is:
"The danger lies in the fact that it 'somehow sounds plausible', and therefore
'scientific', to the non-expert, and that one day we might have to handle with
politicians surrounded by such pseudo-scientists as their advisers - exactly
like in Germany only half a century ago."

I didn't think to be as powerful as dr. Goebbels!

It would be better, for Mr Piva, to avoid these hysterical mails, and to use
specific italian mailing-list for his political propaganda, leaving this one
to all these people who are interested in IE problems and not in italian
elections.

Best regards.

Alberto Lombardo