De Vulgari Eloquentia Franco Scataglini S Olimpo

The Italianist
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De vulgari eloquentia: Franco Scataglinis Olimpo
Emmanuela Tandello
To cite this article: Emmanuela Tandello (2010) De vulgari eloquentia: Franco Scataglinis
Olimpo, The Italianist, 30:sup2, 221-236, DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2010.11917488
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2010.11917488
Published online: 16 Oct 2017.
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De vulgari eloquentia:
Franco Scataglinis Olimpo
Emmanuela Tandello
Nobilior est volgaris quia naturalis est nobis

(the more noble is the vernacular because it is natural to us)
Downloaded by [31.182.209.38] at 05:15 14 November 2017
(De vulgari eloquentia, Book One)
la lingua poetica duna Nazione pu essere, in determinati momenti

storici, concepita in una qualunque delle sue piccole patrie dialettali.
(Giacomo Noventa)
It may seem unnecessary to stress, when talking about a poets individual

language his/her poetic (linguistic and stylistic) idiolect that this comes
into being through a complex, and often tense dialogue between the poets
own language of use and his or her stylistic models.1 Nevertheless, when
discussing the language of lyric poetry in the Italian tradition, this almost
platitudinous reminder will never, strictly speaking, be superfluous. Italian
lay down the rules for the lyric genre, and its language, it will never be
stressed often enough, bore for centuries, on the whole, very little relation
to any form of spoken language a creature most troublesome to define,
especially when dealing with the origins of the genre, and indeed of what we
call Italian itself. When it comes to the Italian tradition we must never forget
how at least since Dantes De vulgari eloquentia, writers who were not
Tuscans (major writers, such as Boiardo, Ariosto, Castiglione, Goldoni,
Manzoni, Svevo, Gadda) were native speakers of Italian dialects, i.e. of
languages different from Italian.2 Since Dante, that is, every Italian poet
has had to contend with a two-headed monster, and even in the twentieth
century, every poets (every Italian speakers) natural bilingualism has fed a
debate that goes well beyond the strictly poetic, affected by and affecting as
it does matters social, political, and anthropological. This is what makes our
tradition so different from, for example, the English one. The relationship
between the language of Shakespeares Sonnets and the English spoken by
their author and his contemporaries in London and Stratford is very different
from that between Petrarchs own language of use (his mother tongue,
222 Emmanuela Tandello
which was Tuscan) and the language of the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta.
We do know, to a large extent, what Shakespeares spoken language was
like, whilst we know relatively little about the spoken features of Dante or
Petrarchs mother tongue. In the end, we can only acknowledge that those
languages exist whose speakers state they are using them, and this happens
when they are written (rather than just spoken) languages, and they have a
name by which they are designated.3 This, in turn, carries important socio-
cultural and ideological weight in the establishment of a language nationally
connotated. The questione della lingua starts with questions posed by a poet
about that relationship between poetry and language that, as the need for
the codification of a linguistic identity grew, necessarily became embroiled
in a complex power game of boundaries, hierarchies and exclusions that

reaches well into the twentieth century. The crux lies not merely in the
relationship between dialect and language again notoriously complex,
within the context of Italian but in a crucial shift (not merely linguistic, but
ideological) that elects one dialect and its consequent written developments
as dominant, and, in the end, normative, and binding. The history of what
is again very problematically varyingly defined as poesia in dialetto/
poesia dialettale is a history of a pained, passionately felt exclusion based on
a fundamental linguistic colonization dictated by political and ideological
power. Such, in a nutshell, is the position taken by Pasolini in the debate
over language and dialect that he revived in the 1950s and 1960s,4 and the
driving argument behind the splendid and now in retrospect short-lived
season of contemporary Italian poetry defined (again not unproblematically)
as neodialettale.5
One of the undisputed protagonists of that season was the poet
Franco Scataglini (1930-1994), and this essay is devoted to the exploration
of a short essay that went virtually ignored when he was alive, and that
occurs today, at best, as the object of footnote references. On the eve
of his dbut as a poet,6 Scataglini published an edition of the poetry of
a near-conterraneo, the Renaissance poet Olimpo da Sassoferrato
(c.1486c.1540),7 that, as Massimo Raffaeli has written, reveals una
chiara identificazione da cui si irradia una dissimulata dichiarazione
di poetica.8 What the essay affirms in no uncertain terms, is that the
questions asked by a poet in the twentieth century, irrespective of his
linguistic provenance, and irrespective of his literary models, are the same
ones posed since Dante: what should the language of poetry be like? What
is the relationship between the language we communicate in generally
by speaking, but not only and the language we employ in a discourse
'De vulgari eloquentia': Franco Scataglini's Olimpo 223
that is so much more than mere communicating, a discourse that, more

often than not, is self-referential, self-questioning, a universe in itself where
other major questions are asked: what is poetry for, what does it do, and
what does it say, and why does it say it in a particular way. Scataglinis
reply points to the need to redress the centuries-old segregation of spoken
languages, i.e. dialects, by reingaging with the pre-Bembian landscape of
Italian as consisting of different volgari, and to allow the register of lyric
poetry to re-create itself in an ample, complex movement backwards and
forwards through tradition that somehow will allow the linguistic reality
of those excluded by history because banished by ignorance from the by
now national language to infuse life and authenticity, believability, into
poetry.
Scataglinis introduction to Olimpo displays indeed a passionately
intimate personal and poetic identification distinctly reminiscent of
Giacomo Noventas own deeply idiosyncratic style9 and should be read
as indeed it was written, as a pointed, polemical statement about his own
poetry, its language, and his own role as a contemporary poet on the eve
of his poetic dbut. The implications of that reading are furthermore plain
to see in the linguistic and stylistic choices made in his own poetry.
This essay consists thus of three parts: (a) a very brief excursus of
the status of the Renaissance poet within the Italian tradition; (b)
Scataglinis reading of Olimpo; (c) a brief analysis, by way of a conclusion,
of how Olimpos example is carried into the poetry of Scataglinis first
two collections.
The existing scholarly assessment of Olimpo on the whole, a still
neglected figure of the Renaissance tends to stress his marginality within
the Italian literary canon, notwithstanding his unquestionable popularity
as a printed poet in his own time. Baldassarre Olimpo degli Alessandri,
born in Sassoferrato, in the province of Ancona, it is believed round about
1487, was an itinerant friar and preacher who travelled widely across
Central and Northern Italy. Frate predicatore e poeta erotico-popolare,
as Scataglini describes him, he is the author of religious, political and
secular works. Of these, Olimpia: strambotti damore,10 and Camilla11
(also madrigali and strambotti, dedicated to a Camilla ciciliana who on
her way to Loreto travelled through the Marche, purportedly capturing the
fancy of the enterprising and amorous friar) are the most well-known, and
worthy of note. In particular, the Frottola della pastorella , which became
known as the Brunettina, was included in books of frottole and canzoni a
ballo since 1560; this text was later attributed to Poliziano, until Carducci
raised doubts on its provenance, and Ferrari redressed the mistake in

1880.12 The Dizionario Biografico dei Marchigiani describes him as
uno dei madrigalisti pi noti della fine del XV secolo [] Fa parte di

un notevole gruppo di madrigalisti ai quali va annoverato il merito
di aver distinto nel primo trentennio del secolo XVI la figura del
poeta da quello del cantante-compositore.13
Like Serafino Aquilano, he sang his madrigals accompanying himself on

his lute, and like Aquilanos, his work appeared in print and enjoyed very
wide circulation during his lifetime, thanks to his successful connection
with the Venetian printer Maffeo Pasini. This in itself, as Brian Richardson
has shown, was a damning indictment in his own time, because although
much of the poetry printed was of broad appeal, coming from writers
such as Serafino Aquilano and Olimpo da Sassoferrato, much distrust
was shown by lyric poets towards the press; indeed, Bembo himself, the
one who by his example set the standard for the rigorous imitation and
emulation of his fourteenth-century model, and who decided to break
with such dislike and distrust,14 nevertheless, as Richardson suggests,
in real life he seems to have frowned on this method of publication
because of its associations with popular poetry and hasty composition.15
Printed books, Richardson explains, inevitably had an association with
commerce, whereas even manuscripts written by a professional scribe
were not necessarily distinguishable from those copied by amateurs.16
Furthermore, scribal publication, as Lauro Martines points out, was a
form of practical action17 and it fulfilled an important social function:
texts [] were originally diffused singly because they were linked

with particular social moments [], lyric verse was increasingly
addressed to or concerned with the poets friends (both male and
female) and protectors. [] Poets also wrote for a peer group
made up of known and even unknown people with like tastes, and
publication in manuscript allowed them to nourish their relationship
with these readers.18
Verse could thus have a social function:
Performances by the poet Serafino Aquilano [] had the power to

move listeners of all kinds []. Serafino sang his verse to music
which was, it seems deliberately understated (stesa e piana [])
[]. Such skill in recitation was [] probably the most important
factor in the success of courtly poets. Many instrumentalists and

singers saw that it was performance rather than composition that
had brought Serafino fame [] and that his manner pleased rulers,
learned men, and fair women alike.19
Olimpo appears thus to have been a most popular, yet controversial figure
in his own time, rather quickly forgotten, or banished to the realm of the
literary minor. The problems posed by the very many editions of his
work add to the slightly peculiar nature of his language, which shows that
although he was indeed conversant with all the major literary sources of
Renaissance culture, from the classics to Petrarch, the self-taught nature of
that culture emerges from cracks and pitfalls in the use of Italian, crossed
by vernacular forms which later on, once he took to publishing in Venice,

bear also the mark of northern written varieties. These are all aspects that
Scataglini himself picks up on, but polemically adopts as examples of a
resistance to the canon that was laudable and courageous rather than
poetically damnable, turning Olimpo into a model of poeta popolare who
could produce highly original poetry that bore a closeness to his audiences
and a loyalty to his own social and linguistic provenance.
The Madrigali e altre poesie damore edited by Scataglini appeared
in 1973 as a limited edition for LAstrogallo, a small publishing house from
Ancona enthusiastically directed by Carlo Antognini, a much admired and
revered figure who, like his protge, believed that literature, and poetry in
particular has always been born out of what Noventa (and later Pasolini)
defined as piccole patrie, microcosms like Recanati, for example. (The
greatest book of modern Italian poetry, Leopardis Canti, Scataglini himself
liked to stress with again an autobiographical identification that is easily
recognizable in his own work is the universal exploration of a grieving and
damaged humanity that perhaps only a backwater might have produced).
The volume does not claim to be a scholarly exercise: it does not
bear references to the history of Olimpo in print, nor does it indicate its
textual source(s), nor the philological criteria adopted in the compilation
of the text. Instead, Olimpos biography, his poetry and language are read
through the contemporary eye of a poet from the Marche as the work
of a marginalized poet, self-taught and self-educated, who engages with
an acquired discourse (that of the Italian Renaissance) and colours it
felicitously more often than not through his own vernacular.
Olimpo emerges from this appraisal as standing alone in increasingly
corrupt times, straining to accept a model that he felt unnatural because
so markedly divorced from his own experience as a virtually self-taught

poet: le tendenze sempre pi aristocratiche dei tempi, culminate nelle
dissipazioni umanistico-decorative di Leone X, dovettero imporgli il
modello mal digeribile per lui di una conforme letteratura, perfezionata
sui classici e sulla pi alta produzione in volgare (OSI, p. 9). The
identification with Olimpo is here very close: Scataglini himself came, as
he proudly but also sadly acknowledged, from a most deprived lumpen-
proletariat background that might have offered as its only escape a life of
crime. Education was something he slowly, and with difficulty, built over
years of private reading and self-teaching, as he performed a mundane
job as an employee of the local Council. The classics, and in particular
the pi alta produzione in volgare inspire his poetry, especially because

of their elegant sonorities, that he feels chime with his own vernacular:
Il mio dialetto [] corrisponde al parlato [] solo nelle sonorit che lo
fondano. E attraverso quello io risalgo a somiglianze originarie: i miei
modelli sono duecenteschi.20 But they were nevertheless felt as the product
of a privileged social class, who literally spoke a very different language
from his own. As he was to say about his first encounter with the poetry of
Montale, A sedici anni ho letto per caso, in una biblioteca circolante dove
andavo a portare per mano la mia solitudine [] fu come se i pi deietti
oggetti delluniverso quotidiano si mettessero a parlare in sanscrito.21
Olimpo, himself a reluctant practitioner of illustrious sources (Il
testo di Olimpo da Sassoferrato rinvia per molti suoi aspetti ai modi di
una poesia illustre avidamente e troppo fugacemente appresa (OSI, p.13))
represents a different type of poet, one whose eloquentia was rooted in
the knowledge of the language people spoke, through his profession as
itinerant preacher:
il mestiere consumato del predicatore, ovvero di quel volgarizzatore

di sacre littere che egli fu tra la gente delle nostre campagne che
voleva e in qualche luogo remoto ancora vuole essere rapita da
unoratoria come se pregna di un sapere irraggiungibile, e che godeva
essa gente delle pi audaci e malfide proliferazioni concettuali e
linguistiche con il candore con cui si consegnava, complice di se stessa
e della sua avidit di meraviglie, ai gabbamondo di piazza e di mercato
durante le pi alte ricorrenze del liturgico calendario. (OSI, p. 10)
It is almost impossible to separate Scataglini from Olimpo in the unease

over the social monopoly of the places of learning and of art expressed
through a brief account of the rinascimento della Marca:
una straordinaria fioritura della vita intellettuale, culturale ed artistica

[] interess anche la Marca []. Le piccole corti si intonavano a
quelle di Camerino e di Urbino; a Fabriano si formava un interessante
cenacolo di letterati e dovunque vi fosse signoria nasceva unaccademia
coi suoi umanisti e filologi, precettori, giuristi, pubblici lettori, poeti,
studiosi di Dante e Petrarca, illustri o dimenticati. Tuttavia, questa
cultura comunemente chiamata del rinascimento della Marca come
dappertutto interess le grandi citt e le piccole sedi delle corti e delle
accademie: pertenne soltanto alle classi dirigenti urbane con la piena
e totale esclusione della classe contadina. (OSI, p.11)
The unmistakably Marxist analysis (see the deliberately anachronistic

use of the notion and term proletariato and piccolo borghese in the
quotation below) of the exclusion of the masses is very reminiscent of
the Pasolini of the 1950s. It is an approach that leads him to address the
status of the poet, and the role of poetry in the provinces and in the most
remote areas of the Marche in a way that constantly chimes with his own
time: Olimpo [] predic con gaudio ai contadini e fu poeta popolare per
eccellenza, cio poeta che iscrisse la sua poesia allinterno delluniverso
contadino delle campagne e delluniverso proletario e piccolo borghese
delle minute cittadine marchigiane (OSI, pp. 11-12). This leads him to
drawing an important distinction between poesia popolare and poesia
popolaresca, in the attempt to redress the misleading synonymity suffered
by one definition at the hands of the other:
Le canzoncine, le villanelle, le frottole e le barzellette che i cultissimi

letterati delle corti scrivevano nei momenti di riposo elevando a
maniera dintrattenimento i costumi e talora il parlato delle classi
soggette, ed in particolare quella Contadina, costituivano una
sottosezione folclorica della poesia dotta. Tali compiaciuti esercizi
si protrarranno negli anni [] sino al principio di questo secolo
come rituali degli antichi cenacoli e loro sconsolati compagni
nellinterminabile decadenza che sfocer nella triste versificazione
pseudo-dialettale dei borghesi dediti alla caricatura del volgo. La
poesia popolaresca, come si vede, ebbe dubbi natali ed ambigue
esequie. (OSI, p. 12)
Scataglinis appraisal of the increasing marginalization of dialect indeed

correctly here il parlato delle classi soggette to a subaltern feature
of mimesis in poesia colta or in comic genres, is as accurate as it is
indignant. Popolaresco marks a style, a manner, a mask, that degrades

and vilifies the reality of the uneducated and the poor.22 Popolare, on the
other hand, celebrates the language and culture of all those villages and
communities living far from the centres of art and poetry, their lives and
their traditions:
Altra cosa la poesia popolare che si tramanda, per lo pi oralmente,

nelle campagne e nei borghi e che un grande poeta come Leopardi
trascriveva []. Una poesia, quella popolare, che cela nelle sue
pieghe lo struggente sentimento del tempo, della brevit amara e
folgorante della vita, dellirrealt e caducit di una bellezza minata
dalla coscienza delluniversale sfruttamento, in cui dssipa lesistenza
della creatura condannata alla nuda e cruda riproduzione di ci che

, di ci che sempre stato: il dolore. (OSI, p. 12)
Suffering is the major focus of Scataglinis own poetry, and we can hear
through this passionate statement how human sympathy and poetic
identification are firmly sutured. If Olimpos poetry is la poesia di chi
avrebbe dovuto essere muto per decreto della storia, che storia del
dominio: muto come le piante e gli animali, asservito allimmanenza della
natura asservita (OSI, p.13), Scataglinis, as he would state more than a
decade later, also is: Lassunzione del dialetto connessa a una segreta
identificazione della mia vicenda di intellettuale solitario e isolato con
quella degli uomini che vengono posti ai margini della storia.23 Poesia
popolare thus has a specific mission, that of somehow reclaiming the
status of volgare to the many vernaculars that make up the linguistic
reality of Italian:
Quella del poeta che pur formato alla cultura della classe dominante
assume, per elezione, la lingua e luniverso delle classi soggette
traducendovi se medesimo e cio ogni dispiegata o remota esigenza
di espressione, ricca delle interrelazioni che tessono a un tempo
la sua imagine duomo e il frammento di mondo (creature e cose)
in cui quellimmagine di rispecchia. Questa forma di poesia, non
verbigerante come lautentica poesia dialettale [] assume il profilo
rustico e prezioso di una poesia come se volgarizzata. (OSI, p. 13)
Olimpos poetry is an eminent model of how this is achieved what critics

consider to be a limitation in Olimpo, the inability to practise the models of
the illustrious tradition, Scataglini recognizes an important poetic strategy.
See, he says, how Olimpo engages with that illustrious tradition whilst
remaining loyal to his own. See the difference with Bembos Io ardo, dissi,
e la risposta invano: dove esemplarmente, nei termini di un gioco cortese,
la comunicazione amorosa di accettazione come di ripulsa ha luogo nel
linguaggio silenzioso e figurale dei gesti e delle cose, and compare it with
some of Olimpos best-known poems, El prsico gentil che dato mhai,
Non possendo Madonna a me parlare, Cognobbi nel principio che troppo
alto: dove gli amanti si scambiano promesse e ripulse nel linguaggio della
domestica flora del frutteto e dellorto: il prsico, il moscatello, il rametto
di finocchio, la fava (OSI, p. 14).
It is not the topos, writes Scataglini, to denounce veritable collisions
with the poesia illustre, ma certa orditura ritmica e rimica, certo uso
di figure di costruzione strutturalmente connesse, come liperbato,

allapprendimento della lingua e della letteratura latine. If Olimpo
betrays un eccesso di mal appresa perizia che sorte a vere sconnessioni del
discorso, this is far from being a defect, quite the opposite. Olimpos desire
to write exercises in poesia addottorante condemns him felicemente to
write poesia popolare to betray his origins, to allow to come to the
surface, happily indeed, but also, in Scataglinis own reading, polemically,
the infinitely more tangible, authentic reality of the domestic, the familiar,
the maternal that the language of in this case flora carries with it.
There is no ambiguity here as to where Scataglini stands in relation to
lyric poetry: he is with Olimpo, nothwithstanding his ungainliness and
pretentiousness, and certainly not with Bembo, whose aristocraticit
glaciale, was, as he writes further on in the essay, infects the whole
of Italian literature becoming sempre pi arcignamente classista,
rinchiusa in se stessa e persa dietro le pompe mortuarie delle imitazioni
ed escogitazioni retoriche (OSI, p. 17).
The poet has actually moved here into the contemporary debate, his
indictment boldly flies the colours of the then new poetic revolution. In a
passage that echoes very closely Montales own famous appreciation of
Gozzanos cozzare di aulico col prosastico, as well as betray his passionate
admiration for poets such as Saba, and Caproni (their leggerezza and
freschezza) he points out: chi in quel tempo dotto che estenuava il gi
rarefatto canzoniere del Petrarca avrebbe mai sviluppato in fresche e
leggere terzine la paronomasia che lega il nome Camilla a camomilla,
il biondo fiore dal soccorrevole decotto? (OSI, p. 15). And indeed the
essays final statement is a celebration of Olimpos modernity as a lesson
for the present:
Al presente [] nel momento in cui la nostra letteratura, smaltiti i

postumi della neoavanguardia, scopre al di l della sua tradizionale
e discriminatoria araldica i poveri segni della povera vita, quelli
dellaltra Italia, nel momento in cui si intuisce la possibilit di far
fluire dallimpatto tra lingua e dialetti quanto meno il presagio di
un italiano popolare, di una lingua nazionale cio tirata fuori
dai suoi mausolei e capace finalmente di rispecchiare senza ipocrisia
anche la storia, la poesia di Olimpo si propone nella sua modernit,
scrittura che volge linguisticamente al futuro il dono di una virile
inquietudine. (OSI, p. 17)
The hint at the experience of the neoavantgarde as a kind of heady literary

drunkenness is pure Pasolini, the great advocate of laltra Italia, whose

voice can also be heard in poveri segni [] povera vita, reminiscent of the
passionate advocacy of Le Ceneri di Gramsci, and Ragazzi di vita (both
1955). It will not go amiss here to quote from Montales historic review of
Pasolinis Antologia della poesia dialettale:
gi appaiono poeti nei quali il dialetto sentito come una super-

lingua, suscettibile di raffinatezze che lattuale linguaggio poetico
italiano non consente; poeti che dovrebbero essere, in un certo
senso, i precursori di una nuova lingua letteraria, in attesa che
questa, sempre un po lenta e impacciata, si rimetta in marcia. Poeti
simili sono, inevitabilmente, letteratissimi.24
Montale meant the young Pasolini, of course, but the statement is to say
the least prophetic, as the the essay on Olimpo poignantly shows.
The essay ends, in a sense, where the poetry begins. Il presagio di
una lingua popolare emerges from a language not dialect, and not
litaliano dei mausolei that carries within its texture the wonder,
and the suffering, of a bellezza minata dalla coscienza delluniversale
sfruttamento, such as Olimpo inspired in his admirer. Risalire as
Massimo Raffaeli has written
equivale per lui a tornare al grande alveo della parlata e della

officina romanza, a prima della violenta cesura operata dal Bembo:
la lettura dei Poeti del Duecento curati da Contini allinizio degli
anni sessanta e degli spericolati filologismi dello Spirito Romanzo
di Ezra Pound precedono di poco la scoperta di un un antecedente e
quasi conterraneo, il Quattrocentesco Olimpo da Sassoferrato.25
Scataglinis first three collections E per un frutto piace tutto un orto, So

rimaso la spina and Laudario, later collected under the title Rimario
agontano (1968-1986) show indeed the influence of disparate sources,
from Troubadour poets like Fauquet, to the Roman de la rose authored by
Guillaume De Lorris (a text that Scataglini was to rewrite into agontano
a decade later, and publish with the title La rosa, with an important
preface by Cesare Segre); then come the poets included in Continis Poeti
del Duecento, foremost Giacomo da Lentini, and Ezra Pounds Spirit of
Romance; as well as the great masters of poetry in dialect, like Giacomo
Noventa, Biagio Marin, the Pasolini of La nuova giovent and Poesie
a Casarsa. The result is, as Franco Brevini has aptly described it, un
peculiare anconetano, aristocratico e plebeo where tradizione letteraria

e inclinazione popolare, storia e geografia si incontrano e si fondono.26 A
proper study of such complex intertextuality deserves an essay if not a
monograph of its own. What I would like to do, by way of a conclusion,
is to briefly look at one poem from So rimaso la spina, where the debt to
Olimpo as well as to the romance tradition mentioned earlier seems to
me to be most originally developed.
Vita e scritura
Per me vita e scritura
ne compagni, el sai,
tuta scancelatura
dopo dulor de sbai.
Se cerca n sno lindo
drento de s e se trova
el biatol dun dindo
sprsose nte la piova.
Vita e scritura represents in itself what in Italian criticism is known as an

affermazione di poetica. Written in the characteristic quartine di settenari
a rime incrociate that Mengaldo has eloquently identified as the modello
astratto of Scataglinis metre,27 it draws on a much frequented simile in
medieval poetry the closeness between a birds lament and the sound and
music of poetry itself. A strambotto by Olimpo, included in Scataglinis
edition, is praised in the introduction for the dramatic effect created by its
central similitude: Nel gioco divertito delle similitudini egli trova accenti
di sincera drammaticit come nello strambotto del plorante fasian che
discende al basso impulso del falcone e smarrito nasconde il capo sotto

lala restando casso della vita (OSI, p.16):
Qual plorante fasian da verde fronde

impulso dal falcon descende al basso,
el miser cor gli batte, el capo asconde
tcito e fermo sta, non move el passo,
riman pregion da poi et non sa donde
et cos resta della vita casso,
cos faccio: spento da costei,
mascondo et fugo e son pregion de lei. (Olimpo, p. 70)
The simile is recognizably of Provenal provenance, not only because of the

heraldic reference to falconry, but because of the participle plorante the
verb for piangere that the Siciliani, and in particular Da Lentini (one of
Scataglinis most beloved poets), were to import into their language. In his
own poem, not a love lyric but a meditation on loss in life, and in poetry
he chooses to lower the symbol to the level of that domesticity again admired
in Olimpo. The dindo a word for turkey which is common to most
northern and central vernaculars defines the humble domestic bird, who,
in an image of heart-breaking sadness, utters its very distinctive lament (the
turkey, again in northern vernaculars, is known also as, onomatopoetically,
pai). The verb biatolare, also a vernacular word, describes the birds
lament : el biatol del dindo, Scataglini explained in an interview, vuol
dire, da un lato, il querelarsi della vittima di uningiustizia e, dallaltro, vuol
dire fare la pittima, tirarla in lungo con il lagno, come i bambini addolorati
quando nessuno li ascolta e si sentono persi nellabbandono.28 The result
is in the poignancy of the two beautifully allitterating settenari. Olimpos
lesson is present here not only through the dialogue with his strambotto,
but through the way in which, as we have said, lyrical and popular come
together, making the voice and the experience it relates utterly believable.
The addressee is absent, or not explicit, and it is likely to be the poet himself,
and this is in full keeping with the lyric register so extensively and exclusively
adopted by this poet. The alive and listening tu is that of the solitary speaker,
lost himself in the poem, in the writing of it, in the search for a sno lindo,
a purity of diction that however is as language itself never fails to show
through its fragility and imperfection out of reach. The first quatraine
re-elaborates the existential condition as dulor de sbai, and the failure of
poetry to come nay closer to rendering it as scancelatura. It is inevitable
to hear an echo of the proemiale here. But look at the words used, which
come so close to Italian and yet diverge from it, themselves sounding almost
like the mistakes that a dialect-speaker would make. Scataglini wrote
Franco Brevini non ha scritto in dialetto: semplicemente non ha voluto
scrivere in lingua. Il suo dialetto uneffrazione.29 That divergence, that
variation on the lingua contains all the existential, human, social identity of
this poetry. This not-quite, the fault of this less-than-aberrant language
is almost geological, in the way in which it cracks open the language of
tradition and allows on the one hand the situation of poverty, deprivation,
marginalization, to come through, but on the other makes a statement about
the origins of the Italian language, the closeness between vernaculars, and
the centuries-old debate over prestige and literary status. Thus, sbai and not
error, scancelature and not rime sparse the message, however, seems to
me to be the same. And it is the second quatraine that allows us to see it. An
important simile close to the one we met in Olimpos text is established
between the poet and the bird this time not a noble bird, but a humble one,
one that will fall prey to human consumption; and between the lament of the
dindo and poetry itself. We have seen the vernacular specificity of dindo
and biatol, which coherently sustains the polemical scarto established
by scancelature and sbai. But let us look closer, and well see how the very
lexis of the lyric tradition, which seems to be rejected in the fisrt quatraine,
returns through a sound that is utterly pregnant with it. I am talking about
the rhyme in <-i> of sai and sbai, present in inverted form in bIAtol,
and in the assonance of <-io> in piova. The plaintive sound of the dindo
is uttered through the very words carrying the poets condition, of one who
piange e dice. This new addition to the poetic bestiary of Italian poetry
turns out to be very noble indeed. Since at least Ovids myth of Procne and
Philomela (Met. VI), the association between birdsong and lament has been
present in Western poetry, and Italian poets are certainly no exception.
See Virgil, both in the Eclogues (Book VI, ll.78 and foll.) and in particular
the Georgics, where the nightingale, deprived of its young by the farmers
cruel tilling, lonely sits on a branch crying its mournful song, ramoque
sedens miserabile carmen | integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet
(Geor. Book IV, ll. 513-15). And see how Dante himself moulds the two
sources into his own beautifully melodious line in Canto V e come i gru van
cantando i lor lai, and in the terzina in Purgatorio IX,
Ne lora che comincia i tristi lai

La rondinella presso a la mattina,
Forse a memoria de suoi primi guai (ll. 12-15)
where the word cantare synonymous of poetry in the first case, and
the two rhyming words lai and guai bind together, in a fundamental,
immediately recognizable triangulation, the essence of lyric poetry,
which we find again, unsurprisingly, in Petrarchs Sonnet 353, where the
keywords cantando and dolorosi guai occur again:
Vago augelletto che cantando vai,

over piangendo, il tuo tempo passato,
vedendoti la notte e l verno a lato
e l d dopo le spalle e i mesi gai
se, come i tuoi gravosi affanni sai,
cos sapessi il mio simile stato,

verresti in grembo a questo sconsolato
a partir seco i dolorosi guai. (ll. 1-8)
And coming closer to Scataglinis own time, and home, Leopardi in turn
transforms the petrarchan source into the epitomy of melancholia and
poetry in Il passero solitario: the keywords, which occur in the poems
opening lines, are the same, and so is the rhyme: Din su la vetta della torre
antica, | passero solitario, alla campagna | cantando vai (ll. 1-3). <-ai> is
not merely onomatopoetic, it is thematic, it carries the memory of all those
keywords, incidentally expressive of plorare that the romance tradition
has established as the very essence of lyric poetry. Scataglinis text, in all
its refusal to bow to an established register, reinvents the context for that
rhyme, allowing his poem itself to rhyme with the illustrious lyric tradition
to which he feels bound to distance himself from.
Vita e scritura is paradigmatic of that blend of illustrious and
plebeian that characterizes Scataglinis poetic language, and displays
this poets unique virtuosity, his unique idiomatic language-contour,
as Helen Vendler says of Shakespeare,30 in dealing with the canonical
and the marginal, creating a status for himself and his poetry that exists
on the thin edge between language and silence in an utterly modern (if
not modernist) way, whilst managing to raise again, polemically and
poignantly, the importance of the eloquence of the vernacular in Italian
contemporary poetry. Olimpos lesson, in all this, is, as I hope to have
shown, central and instrumental.
University of Oxford
Notes
1
[E]siste un rapporto fra la posizione stilistica di (Sora: Edizioni dei Dioscuri di A. Bellettato, 1980);
un poeta e quella linguistica del suo dialetto, Pier Carta laniena (Ancona: Residenza, 1982); Rosa
Vincenzo Mengaldo, Problemi della poesia dialettale (1984-1986) (Pesaro: Editrice Flaminia, 1987);
italiana del Novecento, in Poesia dialettale e poesia Rimario agontano (1968-1986) (Milan: Scheiwiller,
in lingua nel Novecento. Intorno allopera di Marco 1987); La rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1992); El Sol (Milan:
Pola, ed. by Anna Dolfi (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1994), Mondadori,1995); Poesie scelte, ed. by Massimo
now in Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, La tradizione del Raffaeli (Ancona: Il lavoro editoriale, 2000).
Novecento. Quarta serie (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 7
Olimpo da Sassoferrato (c.1486-c.1540), Madrigali
pp. 1-14. e altre poesie damore, with an Introduction by
2
Giulio Lepschy, Mother Tongues in the Middle Ages Franco Scataglini, and six drawings by Orfeo Tamburi
and Dante, in Dantes Plurilingualism: Authority, (Ancona: LAstrogallo, 1973), limited edition of 1,000
Knowledge, Subjectivity, ed. by Sara Fortuna, copies, plus one hundred copies illustrated with four
Manuele Gragnolati and Jurgen Trabant (Oxford: original acqueforti by the artist Orfeo Tamburi. From
Legenda, forthcoming 2010), p. 16. hence, the essay will be quoted as OSI (Olimpo da
3
Giulio Lepschy, quoting Tore Jansons position in his Sassoferrato, Introduzione).
8
book Speak: A Short History of Language (Oxford: Massimo Raffaeli, Oltre il dialetto, in El vive domo.
Oxford University Press, 2002), in Lepschy, Mother Scritti su Franco Scataglini (Ancona: Transeuropa,
Tongues, in Dantes Plurilingualism, p. 16. 1998), p. 74.
4 9
Significantly through the publication of the two For an analysis of the style of Noventas critical
anthologies Antologia della poesia dialettale in essays, see Emmanuela Tandello, Giacomo Noventa,
1952, and the Canzoniere italiano, devoted to Heine and the Language of Poetry, in Reflexivity.
poesia popolare, in 1955. The former earned the Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition.
young Pasolini a historic review by Montale. Eugenio Essays by Members of the Department of Italian at
Montale, La musa dialettale, in Il secondo mestiere, University College London, ed. by Prue Shaw and John
ed. by Giorgio Zampa, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, Took (Ravenna: Longo, 2000), pp. 63-81.
1996), ii: Prose 1920-1979, pp. 1495-97. 10
Olimpia: Opera, nella quale si contiene diuerse
5
For a definition of this term, see Franco Brevini, Le serenate, capitoli, sonetti, madrigali e partenze. Tutte
parole perdute (Turin: Einaudi, 1990); for a discussion cose da giouani amanti, & fanciulle honeste ([Venice
of the terms neodialettale and neovolgare, see (?)], [1500 (?)]).
also Emmanuela Tandello, Il luogo precario della 11
Camilla opera piaceuole damore, Doue si contiene
differenza: language and dialect in the poetry of strambotti, mattinate, sonetti, canzone, e capitoli da
Franco Scataglini, in Italian Dialects and Literature giouani innamorati ([Venice (?)]: [1500-1575 (?)]).
from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by 12
Severino Ferrari, A proposito di Olimpo da
Emmanuela Tandello and Diego Zancani, Journal
Sassoferrato / risposta di Severino Ferrari al signor
of the Institute of Romance Studies, Supplement 1,
Alessandro Luzio (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1880).
London 1996, pp. 81-96.
13
6
Dizionario biografico dei marchigiani (Ancona:
Scataglinis first collection, E per un frutto piace tutto
Il Lavoro Editoriale, 2007 Terza Edizione in DVD,
un orto (Ancona: LAstrogallo, 1973); Scataglinis
2007), also in http://www.sassoferrato.tv/page32/
other works include: Echi (Ancona: Ata, 1950; 2nd
page20/page66/page66.html [accessed 18 April
edn LObliquo, Brescia, 1997), So rimaso la spina
2010].
(Ancona: LAstrogallo, 1977); Occorrimenti
14 23
Brian Richardson, From Scribal Publication to Print Scataglini, Diverse lingue, p. 28.
Publication: Pietro Bembos Rime 1529-1535, The 24
Montale, La musa dialettale, p. 1496.
Modern Language Review, 95, no. 3 (July 2000), 25
Raffaeli, El vive domo, p. 74.
684-90 (p. 684).
26
15
Brevini, Le parole perdute. Dialetti e poesia nel
Richardson, p. 690.
nostro secolo (Turin: Einaudi, 1990) p. 321.
16
Richardson, p. 687. 27
Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, La quartina e altri
17
Lauro Martines, Society and History in English tratti formali in Scataglini, in La poesia di Franco
Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Blackwells, 1985), p. 20, Scataglini. Atti del Convegno di Studi Ancona
quoted in Richardson, p. 688. 3-4 dicembre 1998, ed. by Massimo Raffaeli and
18
Richardson, pp. 688-89. Francesco Scarabicchi (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale,
19
Richardson, pp. 689-90. 2000), pp. 11-23; see also the lecture given in Ancona
20
on 12 November 2000 at the Centro Studi Scataglini,
Franco Scataglini, Intervista, Diverse lingue,
published as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Il cimitero
no. 1-2 (1986), 27-31 (p. 29).
abrevo, (Brescia: LObliquo, 2001).
21
Franco Scataglini, Intervista, Marka no. 6-7 28
Scataglini, Diverse lingue, p. 29.
(1983), 138-39 (p. 138).
29
22
Quoted in Mengaldo, Il cimitero abrevo, p. 13.
Scataglini almost certainly knew Silvia Venezians
30
monograph, Olimpo da Sassoferrato. Poesia Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets
popolaresca marchigiana nel secolo XVI (Bologna: (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University
Nicola Zanichelli, 1921), where the term is used Press, 1997) p. 18.
extensively, and exclusively.

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De vulgari eloquentia: Franco Scataglinis Olimpo

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Nobilior est volgaris quia naturalis est nobis

(De vulgari eloquentia, Book One)

la lingua poetica duna Nazione pu essere, in determinati momenti

It may seem unnecessary to stress, when talking about a poets individual

in a complex power game of boundaries, hierarchies and exclusions that

that is so much more than mere communicating, a discourse that, more

raised doubts on its provenance, and Ferrari redressed the mistake in

uno dei madrigalisti pi noti della fine del XV secolo [] Fa parte di

Like Serafino Aquilano, he sang his madrigals accompanying himself on

texts [] were originally diffused singly because they were linked

Verse could thus have a social function:

Performances by the poet Serafino Aquilano [] had the power to

factor in the success of courtly poets. Many instrumentalists and

by vernacular forms which later on, once he took to publishing in Venice,

so markedly divorced from his own experience as a virtually self-taught

the pi alta produzione in volgare inspire his poetry, especially because

il mestiere consumato del predicatore, ovvero di quel volgarizzatore

It is almost impossible to separate Scataglini from Olimpo in the unease

una straordinaria fioritura della vita intellettuale, culturale ed artistica

The unmistakably Marxist analysis (see the deliberately anachronistic

Le canzoncine, le villanelle, le frottole e le barzellette che i cultissimi

Scataglinis appraisal of the increasing marginalization of dialect indeed

indignant. Popolaresco marks a style, a manner, a mask, that degrades

Altra cosa la poesia popolare che si tramanda, per lo pi oralmente,

della creatura condannata alla nuda e cruda riproduzione di ci che

Olimpos poetry is an eminent model of how this is achieved what critics

di figure di costruzione strutturalmente connesse, come liperbato,

Al presente [] nel momento in cui la nostra letteratura, smaltiti i

The hint at the experience of the neoavantgarde as a kind of heady literary

drunkenness is pure Pasolini, the great advocate of laltra Italia, whose

gi appaiono poeti nei quali il dialetto sentito come una super-

equivale per lui a tornare al grande alveo della parlata e della

Scataglinis first three collections E per un frutto piace tutto un orto, So

peculiare anconetano, aristocratico e plebeo where tradizione letteraria

Vita e scritura represents in itself what in Italian criticism is known as an

discende al basso impulso del falcone e smarrito nasconde il capo sotto

Qual plorante fasian da verde fronde

The simile is recognizably of Provenal provenance, not only because of the

Ne lora che comincia i tristi lai

Vago augelletto che cantando vai,

cos sapessi il mio simile stato,

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