<div dir="ltr"><div class=""><img class="" id=":ut" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif" alt="">forwarded from Wfierman@Indiana.du<br><br></div><p class="MsoNormal">Speaking to My Father in a Dead Dialect</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By JOSEPH LUZZI </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">June 25, 2014 8:16 pm</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Private Lives</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.</p><div class="im">
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <br></p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
</div><p class="MsoNormal">The 18th-century Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico believed that as a civilization progressed, it lost
touch with its creative origins. An ancient warrior would never declare
“I’m angry”; he would wax metaphorical with “my blood boils.”
The Roman poet Horace went a step further, believing that when words
died they took memories with them. Just as forests change their leaves
each year, so, too, do words: new languages “bloom and thrive” but only
after “the old race dies.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Growing up, I could feel the language of my parents
wither and die like autumn leaves. They had immigrated to the United
States from Calabria in the late 1950s and continued to speak the
dialect of their poor southern Italian region, but
it was a tongue frozen in time by exile and filled with words that no
longer existed in their homeland.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After a decade in America, my father decided to buy
a fancy car. The Italian for a car is “una macchina,” and the Calabrian
equivalent is “’na macchina.” But in the car-crazy suburbs of postwar
America, an immigrant such as my father was
bound to defer to his host nation. He went to the Chevy dealership and
asked for “’nu carru.” The Calabrian “’nu” sounds like new, and “carro”
means cart. But the dealership knew what he meant, and sold my father a
maroon 1967 Chevy Impala. He bought it the
year that I, his first American child, was born.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My father’s dialect flourished only in fits of
anger: “mala nuova ti vo’ venire” (“may a new harm befall you”), when
you annoyed him; “ti vo’ pigliare ’na shcuppettata” (“may you be shot”)
and “ti vo’ brusciare l’erba” (“may the ground
beneath you combust”) when you really got under his skin. It’s
difficult to translate these makeshift phrases. Better just to imagine
them uttered by a man who could pick up a small backyard shed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My mother faced her own herculean linguistic
challenges. There were no freezers in her Italy, so when she wanted to
preserve goods on ice, she talked about “frizzare,” to freeze, rather
than the standard “congelare.” When her six children
got the best of her, she threw her hands up and added an extra vowel to
the ends of her Americanized words. We washed our clothes in a
“uascinga mascina,” vacuumed the carpet with a “vachiuma cleena,” and
drank lemonade on the “porciu” — the porch.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Luke Best</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My parents’ skirmishes with standard Italian were
nothing compared to the all-out war they waged on English. They would
answer calls for their sons by saying “she’s a no’ home.” I took this
gender-bending as an assertion of my individuality,
my access to a world that separated me from all the other kids on the
block. I may have lived in a three-bedroom ranch just like everyone
else, but we were different. My family had no need to worship the idols
of the second- and third-generation immigrants,
with their cries of “mamma mia.” When my father swore at me in Italian,
he did so out of anger and not nostalgia.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This authenticity extended to the table. While my
friends with grandparents from Sicily talked about Italian food, my
parents produced it. Each year they churned out hundreds of jars of
preserved peaches, pears and tomatoes; gallons of
red wine; and bushels of cucumbers, peas and potatoes. Plus the
showpiece crop, squash.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One year the local paper took a photo of my father
and his prizewinning, five-foot-long gourds. Sensing he was on display,
he stayed silent for the whole shoot. He didn’t understand how feeding
your family could translate into a human-interest
story. But make no mistake: he was proud to have created such a
prodigious vegetable, and he made sure the part in his hair was just so
when the picture was snapped. His face was wrinkled, and he had to lean
on his cane when he reached for the prize gourd.
He was only in his 60s but old age had been forced upon him prematurely
by a massive stroke that paralyzed most of his left side.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My father struggled to explain to the photographer
how he grew his vegetables. He had only Calabrian words for the plants,
procedures and tools. Each of his children had attained some form of
higher education and, with it, freedom from
the strife and poverty that had chased him from Italy. We now found his
background primitive and remote. He had translated or “carried over”
both a family and a dialect. After all this, he believed it was his
right to talk about his squash on his own terms.
Around the time of the photo, he poured a cement base for a picnic
table near his garden. Before it dried, he signed it with a branch: P.L.
Nato Acri 1923. Pasquale Luzzi, born in Acri, Italy, 1923. He died just
months later, at the end of summer in 1995.
In the obituary, my father’s passion for gardening was listed as his
“hobby,” a word that didn’t exist in his Calabrian.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After his death, I would hear my father’s voice but
didn’t know how to respond. When I imagined myself speaking to him in
English, it sounded pedantic and prissy. Answering in Italian was no
less stilted, either when I tried to revive my
Calabrian or when I used the textbook grammar that was unnatural to
both of us. I had so much to tell him but no way to say it, a reflection
of our relationship during his lifetime. Without his words, I was
losing a way to describe the world. Memories suddenly
mattered more than ever before, and I didn’t know if I could find the
language to keep them alive.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Dante wrote in his treatise on language that though
men and women must communicate with words, angels can talk to one
another in silence. Speaking with someone who has died is similar. You
learn early on that it is best to concentrate on
the person you’ve lost with as little verbal clutter as possible.
Perhaps this Calabrian I now speak with my father is the truly dead
dialect, the language that neither changes nor translates.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When I think of him now, I see him digging in his
garden, unearthing the ficuzza, Calabrian for his beloved fig tree, from
its winter slumber and propping it up for the coming spring. But once I
put a word to this picture, once this “ficuzza”
becomes a “fico,” standard Italian for fig tree, he will have left me.
This is when mourning becomes memory, and when it’s time to say goodbye
to a language and a person I knew all too briefly.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
Joseph Luzzi teaches at Bard and is the author of the forthcoming memoir “My Two Italies,” from which this essay was adapted<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br>
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br>
<br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------
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