Journal of Italian Translation

Rina Ferrarelli
treat. These books are collectibles. Dialect poetry, until recently, was
marginalized in the Italian culture. For the reasons I mentioned. Italy was
perceived to be too fragmented and there was a movement toward union.
But also for other more practical reasons. When a poet writes in the Italian
language, his work can be read and understood by every Italian. When his
work is in his own dialect, not in ours, the rest of us will need notes or a
translation into Italian. But it’s hard to ignore the thrill, when a work is in
your own spoken tongue, the pleasure of the familiar, of the ordinary in an
extraordinary setting.
The other huge leap in my picaresque journey was switching from
Italian to English after I emigrated. Total immersion was easier in this setting.
I lived in a culture and in a household that spoke English—the uncle
and aunt with whom I lived for the first two years spoke Italian and did to
me at the beginning, but ran the household and communicated with each
other and their children in English. And I was fifteen and in school, at St.
Justin’s High School because my relatives didn’t think much of the public
high school. And school fills the whole day in this country. After a few
days or a week of orientation with a girl named Roberta who knew Italian,
I was on my own. In a fog, a dark wood. Fortunately, Sister Marcella, the
French teacher, convinced the principal that I’d do better if she tutored me,
and took me under her wing teaching me English through French. My school
girl French! But I did not know English and she did not Italian. French was
the only language we had in common.
Neither French nor Italian, however, helped me with the pronunciation
of English vowels, the a in cat, the o in got and i in pit being very difficult.
In some other cases I couldn’t even hear the difference and, in others,
words that were supposed to have the same vowel sound—like a grade
school child I was learning groups of related words-- did not when spoken
outside the classroom. Not to my ear. At that point, no one mentioned dialectal
variations.It was hard to lift words and phrases out the common run
of the spoken language.Anything with been and being, to give one example,
became slurred, and for a long time, I didn’t know which word had been
used.
For the next two or three years, while I was learning English in school
and first hand in the larger American community, I was also learning the
unofficial language that some of the older Italians spoke among themselves,
including my Aunt Mary, my mother’s sister, who was not old, but had
emigrated from Italy in her twenties and had not gone to school to learn
English. To understand my Aunt and the older Italians, especially my landlady
when I was in college, who did not speak English and did not speak
Italian, the father tongue, I had to learn the Italian-American dialect which
Ferdinando Alfonsi (Almanacco, 1992) has called Italese, and which is made
up of English words with Italian suffixes. And with English meanings even
when the made-up word corresponds to an actual word in the Italian language.
I learned that parkare means to park; storo store, giobba job, renta
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