In collaboration with Quodlibet
 
Readings by Emilio Rentocchini
 

The design of the ardilut (wild lamb’s lettuce), chosen by the young Pier Paolo Pasolini for his publications in Friuli dialect, has been adopted as the symbol of a bilingual poetry collection edited by Giorgio Agamben with a view to pursuing and to counter-checking Pasolini’s reflection on the relationship between language and dialect in the light of the new linguistic reality of the 21st century, more than forty years after the poet and filmmaker’s death.

It was Dante who first set the birth of Italian poetry under the sign of bilingualism, contrasting in his De Vulgari Eloquentia the vulgar tongue which “children pick up from those around them as soon as they begin to make out voices” and which “we absorb without any rules of grammar from our nurse”, with “the secondary tongue which the Romans called grammar, in which we are governed and instructed only over time and through persistent study”. Yet in opting to write his own great poem in the vulgar tongue, Dante effectively supplemented this first form of bilingualism with a second kind between local variants of the spoken language and the illustrious vulgar tongue that he likens to a perfumed panther “which spreads its fragrance in every city yet resides in none”.

The hypothesis that the collection posits is that the contemporary equivalent of Dante’s grammar is Italian as a national language while the vulgar tongue consists of the so-called dialects, and that then as now, Italian poetry which appears to be going through a period of crisis or stasis can only be reborn if this deep-seated bilingualism is refuelled. It is certainly no accident that the great flowering of Italian poetry in the 20th century was discreetly accompanied by an equally splendid flowering of poetry in dialect, in fact the two are likely to have been so closely intertwined that we would never have had the one without the other. That is why, alongside the work of new poets, the collection will be republishing the classics, starting with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Andrea Zanzotto who published their work in both Italian and dialect, and will be closely tracking the search for a poetic language turning its back on the monolingual approach. The “decline down the steps of being” which Pasolini talks about in respect of his own dialect is, when all is said and done, primarily a decline down the steps of language that allows the poet to leapfrog over the corrupted and no longer living language by which he is surrounded on all sides, in order to move towards a language that already exists and always has, yet still does not exist: the language of poetry. The parallel text, a feature of the collection, imparts visibility to the movement – almost a toing and froing from dialect to language and back – that defines the poetic gesture, as though poetry’s true place were neither in one nor in the other but in the arduous, incessant tension between the two.

www.quodlibet.it

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and writer. His work has been translated and commented throughout the world. His project Homo sacer has marked a turning point in contemporary political thought. His work published by Quodlibet includes: Categorie italiane. Studi di poetica e di letteratura (2021), A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica (2020), Intelletto d’amore (with Jean-Baptiste Brenet, 2020), Homo sacer. Edizione integrale (2018), Che cos’è la filosofia? (2016), Gusto (2015), Idea della prosa (new augmented edition, 2002-2013, 2020), L’uomo senza contenuto (1994, 2013) and Bartleby, la formula della creazione (with Gilles Deleuze, 1993, 2012). He edits Quodlibet’s Ardilut collection.

 
Photo by Flaminia Nobili
 

 
The event is part of the PPP100-Roma Racconta Pasolini programme promoted by Rome the Capital City – Department of Cultural Affairs with the coordination of the Department of Cultural Activities.
 

Informazioni

Admission with the exhibition ticket

Auditorium

Admission via steps in via Milano 9a