Abstract
“Verstummung” (silencing, unvoicing) is the term used by Gino Chiellino—an Italian first-language speaker living and writing in Germany—to convey a sense of how a national language allows both non-native voices to fall into silence yet paradoxically offers lexical and morphological options for its undoing. Chiellino writes to “dislocate” the German language through the invention of linguistic forms that give unique expression to the migrant presence in German(y). This chapter investigates the critical cultural work of “dislocative” linguistic practices in the fiction, essays, and poetry of Carmine Abate, one of many Southern Italians who moved to Germany to work in the postwar period. (Abate’s first work was published in German, but since the late 1980s he has written in Italian.) His work deals primarily with intergenerational patterns of migration from his native Calabria and its effects. His writing is punctuated with traces of German but also with Arbëresh, the language of the historic Albanian-speaking community in Southern Italy in which he grew up. His work layers the experience of the postwar Gastarbeiter onto memories of earlier patterns of mobility. The presence of languages other than standard Italian in his text is the stubborn residue of these experiences of economic need and cultural marginalization. This presence also functions as a creative resource testing the limits of the Italian national idiom.
Era è il ventovento è Windwo dove kumi trovo in questomo(vi)mento
—Carmine Abate,Terra di andata (2011)
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Notes
- 1.
For a very useful discussion of the group’s aims and its relatively short history in the context of migration to German and literary culture more broadly, see Chin (2007), esp. 114–117. Suhr (1989) presents a very detailed discussion of how writing in German by non-Germans was being received at that time. Luchtenberg (1989) discusses the uses of this literature in intercultural pedagogy. Matthes (in this volume) offers a succinct and up-to-date summary of how approaches to this literature have been subsequently revised by transnational and global German Studies.
- 2.
I am grateful to my colleagues Bettina Bildhauer and Orhan Elmaz for their insights into the nuances of this term.
- 3.
In an interview with Federica Marzi, Chiellino says that “although he had become able to express himself fully in German, his aesthetic boundaries continued to be misunderstood by the monocultural reader” (2012b, n.p.)
- 4.
These communities were formed in the late fifteenth century by people fleeing Albania after resistance to the Ottoman occupation ended with the death of Skanderbeg, the mythical national hero often mentioned as a cultural reference point in Abate’s work, albeit not one immediately recognized by many Italian readers. Focussing primarily on Abate’s novels, Berberi (2018) offers an insightful reading of their cultural depth embedded equally in the Calabrian landscape and in the language and traditions of Arbëresh communities.
- 5.
Abate’s own website is a useful reference point for his work and critical responses to it: http://www.carmineabate.net/
- 6.
- 7.
Most of the stories in Il muro dei muri were included in the earlier German edition Den Koffer und weg, which takes its title from one of the collection’s eight stories. All but one appear in the Italian version published almost ten years later with a further six stories added, one of which, “Il muro dei muri,” gives the Italian collection its title. Both collections start with the same story “Das ferne nahe Idol”/“L’idolo lontano lontano,” which, as noted above, establishes some of Abate’s recurrent thematic concerns.
- 8.
The management of language difference in translations of Abate’s work is a fascinating topic in itself and worthy of an in-depth analysis which space prevents me from undertaking here. The solutions adopted provide an incisive commentary on the practice and maintenance of monolingualism itself.
- 9.
This story exemplifies Mezzadra and Neilson’s comments of the radical effects of foreign workers’ “improvised patois” forged “forever in translation and rooted in material practices of co-operation, organization and struggle” (2013, 275).
- 10.
In Vivere per addizione, the later collection, two stories, “Il Duomo di Colonia” and “Naziskin,” reprise and rework this story.
- 11.
The reference is to Roland Barthes’ (1981) concept of the “punctum” developed in relation to the photographic image. The “punctum” is detail which bears personal meaning for a viewer of the image, but which doesn’t belong to a familiar system of representation. It also has a strong affective impact on the viewer who recognizes it.
- 12.
It should be noted that the stories in Abate’s Den Koffer und weg had been translated into German from (unpublished) Italian originals which are not identical to the versions subsequently published in Italian. This “dislocative overlapping” questions conventional notions of translation and the priority of the original version.
- 13.
I take the concept of “post-lingual” from the recent, pathbreaking work of elhariry and Walkowitz (2021) and the challenges it poses to exclusive formations of so-called national literatures.
- 14.
For a compelling and illuminating account of transnational culinary translation and socio-cultural transformation in a different, but not unrelated context, see Diner (2003).
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Duncan, D. (2024). “Verstummung”: Carmine Abate’s Dislocative Voices. In: Stan, C., Sussman, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_24
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