Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian Poetry

Left: Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913 Right: De Cherico in 1936, photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Despite living in New York City for more than five decades, my ninety-three-year-old grandfather still doesn’t speak English. No, that’s not quite right. During my childhood, his language did have some English in it. He used a relatively common, if idiosyncratic, commixture of words from his native and adopted tongues. Linguists have studied this pidgin: the way it grafts Italian endings onto English building blocks, the inflection and pronunciation that come from the speaker’s more intimate regional dialect. For him it was Roccolano, the near-extinct language from his small town in Italy’s Molise region. “R’abbassamend’,” my grandfather calls the basement he never had before New York; that opening “r” is Roccolano’s masculine article replacing both “il” and “the,” the following “a” maybe a logical connection to Italian’s “” (“to lower”). This kind of language is a historical phenomenon—the product of migration patterns and economics, schooling and lack thereof. It is born from necessity: urgent speech with a social services provider, with a bus driver, with a recalcitrant young grandchild seemingly deaf to the