Dialect Literature in Neapolitan …the dialect tends to be inflected with realism, as the language of anger and curse, of social protest and transgression, and also as the language of play and satire, of buffoonery and plebeian mockery, celebrating life in a feast of tongues.  If you study Italian as a foreign
language,
you learn the
national language of the modern nation state of Italy. As a bit of
history, you may also learn that modern Italian developed, first,
from Dante’s brilliant justification in De Vulgari Eloquentia (1305) of
writing in the vernacular language— in his case, Tuscan— instead of
Latin
and, second, from his
Divine Comedy,
a work that showed that the
vernacular could, indeed, produce great literature. Yet, if you examine
the premise of De Vulgari Eloquentia,
it makes perfect sense that the
same freedom to write vernacular literature extended to those whose
native language was some variety of medieval Latin vernacular other
than Tuscan. Thus, the Italian peninsula developed, on the one
hand, a drive towards a standard language and, on the
other, a strong tradition towards maintaining regional dialects. Even
today, only about one-third of the population of Italy uses the
standard language all the time, that is, in all circumstances, domestic
and official. Most Italians, at least some of the time, use a regional
dialect. In that respect, then, most Italians are “bilingual”—or
“bidialectal.” (Note that Italian dialects may differ from
one another considerably, so much so that they are mutually
incomprehensible; thus,
we are not talking simply about different “accents” of the same
language, but rather different languages.) Naples is one of those areas in Italy that has had a considerable history over the past 700 years of independent development as a vehicle for literature, poetry, song and theater. There is a definable body of literature as far back as Croniche de la inclita Cità de Napole (attributed to Giovanni Villani) from around 1300—that is, the time of Dante. It is here that we learn of the origins of Virgil's reputed powers of legerdemain. (It does not go without saying that Neapolitan was also the language of the court and of official documents— depending on who was running the kingdom at the time—on and off for centuries, from as early as the late 1200s when Matteo Spinello of Giovenazzo maintained court journals for Manfred of Sicily all the way down to documents of the Bourbon dynasty, the last to rule the kingdom of Naples.)  Along with other
dialects
in Italy,
Neapolitan has at times enjoyed great success; for example (in the case
of Naples) the 1700s and the great period of dialect musical
theater. At other times —for example, during the authoritarian period
of
Fascism and its drive towards standardization in all things— the
dialect
had less
success. Today, dialects are again going strong in Italy, riding the
wave of cultural diversity in Europe, in general. If you
look at the dialect films of Italian neo-Realism
from around 1950 such
as Sciuscià or La terra trema (in Neapolitan and
Sicilian,
respectively) dialects seem to emphasize, almost to the point of
despair, the differences among Italians in post-war Italy. Yet, more
recent films, such as Il Postino
(1994), which features the Neapolitan
comic actor Massimo Troisi (speaking
dialect throughout) seem to have a
thread of national unity running through them, as if to say that
perhaps dialect differences don’t really matter that much. In other
words, the use of a dialect is not a political statement of protest or
rebellion; it’s simply a guy speaking the way he speaks. The same can
be said for Troisi/Neapolitan and Roberto Benigni/Tuscan carrying on
conversations with each other in essentially two different languages in
the film Non ci resta che piangere
(1985).  In Naples, the most obvious recent
examples
of dialect success are the
theatrical works of Eduardo de Filippo,
many of which are realist plays
employing diglossia (shifting back and forth from dialect to standard
language)—realist because that is just the way real language happens on
the streets of Naples. Other 19th and early 20th-century examples of
dialect success in Neapolitan are Antonio
Petito (1824-76) (the
actor/playwright who updated and made famous internationally the iconic
Neapolitan character of Pulcinella), Eduardo Scarpetta, Salvatore Di
Giacomo, Raffaele Viviani, Libero Bovio, Ferdinando Russo, and dozens
of lyricists in the vast repertoire of the “Neapolitan
Song,” a genre
so successful abroad as a symbol of Italy, that virtually all non-Italians think that ‘O
sole mio
is Italian when it is really
Neapolitan. It is also the case that many dialect actors and
playwrights from the early 1900s passed the tradition on to their
children, such that today there are still revered "family theaters"
carried on by the likes of, for example, Luigi de Filippo, son of Peppino de Filippo. Also, contemporary
musicologist, Roberto de Simone, has
been significant in reviving dialect literature and comic opera from
the 1700s. Dialects have been
used
over the centuries to make social statements,
as when the 16th-century Neapolitan poet and musician, Velardiniello,
wrote Farza de li massare, in
which peasant characters denounced in
dialect their social condition under Spanish rule. Or, it has simply
produced non-political literature (see this
related entry) in the hands
of authors such as Giovanni Basile) and
Giulio Cesare Cortese
(1570-1640), one of Basile’s contemporaries and one of the great
dialect writers in the age of the Neapolitan Baroque. A lesser-known
example is Pompeo Sarnelli,
whose Polisecheata (1684)
about Posillipo
is a “frame story” such as those by Chaucer, Boccaccio and Sarnelli’s
contemporary, Basile.As noted, the 1700s produced dialect musical theater (that later turned into the Italian-language “Comic Opera” of Naples. One of the great librettists of the day was Francesco Antonio Tullio (1660-1737). He collaborated with musicians such as A. Scarlatti and worked easily in both dialect and standard language. (He was, in fact, the librettist in 1718 for the first non-dialect opera buffa, Scarlatti’s Il trionfo dell’onore, billed at the time as being in “Tuscan” (!) and not dialect.) Tullio’s younger contemporary, Pietro Trinchera (1702-55) often used dialect for social purposes; in his La moneca fauza—the villains speak Tuscan and the good guys speak Neapolitan. He wrote against clerical abuse and wound up in jail for his protests on a number of occasions.  The 1600s produced all over Italy a
great
number of erudite treatises
on why “our” dialect is better than the Tuscan of Dante. The Neapolitan
version was L’eccellenza della
lingua napoletana con la maggioranza
alla Toscana by Partenio Tosco,
written 1662. The 1700s also produced
any number of handbooks and guides to Neapolitan grammar and style.
Also, since the 1600s, a number of classics have been translated into
Neapolitan, including The Illiad,
The Aeneid, Tasso’s Jerusalem
Liberated, Vergil’s Bucolics
and Georgics, and even The Divine Comedy. Modern foreign
language classics (such as Alice in
Wonderland, seen in the above illustration) have also been
translated. Finally, the
Bible in Neapolitan now exists, thanks to the
translating efforts of don Matteo Coppola, a priest from the Sorrento
diocese. It took him 10 years, but he has finished the entire
Bible. He also holds forth on the Scriptures twice a week on
Metropolis Tv, Sky channel 902 —in dialect,
naturally.------------------------- *note: I am indebted to The Other Italy: the Literary Canon in Dialect, the book cited at the top of this page; it is a work of monumental thoroughness and scholarship. An unsigned article, "Provincialisms of the European languages," in The Edinburgh Review (April, 1844) was also useful. Also see The Neapolitan Language. to: Subject portal for literature |