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Articles & Essays
Online: Dialect to dialect translation: Belli, Burgess, Garioch by Jim Clarke
Language, like people, evolves in response to geographic location. In nations like
Ireland, Britain and Italy, dialectal language forms have thrived and continue to survive, despite the homogenising influence of mass media. And just as poetry is, as Edgar Allan
Poe held, “the rhythmical creation of beauty in words”, so those words may evade the tyranny of formal established language forms and adopt the dialectal variants of demotic speech.
Giuseppe Gioachino Belli was a Nineteenth century poet who composed nearly
2,300 sonnets entirely in his native Romanesco dialect, the language of the streets of
Trastevere in Rome where he resided. Inspired by the Milanese sonneteering of Carlo
Porta and others, he dedicated his literary life to capturing the essence of Roman life
in his poems. While some were avowedly anti-clerical, and aimed at the Vatican and its inhabitants, many more depicted street life and the condition of the poor, of whom
he was intermittently one. He often adapted Biblical themes to his Romanesco tongue,
demonstrating the counter-intuitive universality of the local. Belli’s sonnets almost invariably follow a rigid, but simple rhyme scheme. They tend to feature two quatrains and two tercets, in which the rhyme scheme follows ABBA ABBA CDC DCD, with occasional variation in the quatrains to ABAB ABAB.
Belli explained his work by stating that he wished to leave a monument to the Roman
plebe, the poor demotic underclass oppressed by church and state. In turn, Rome has dedicated a monument to him, which can be found, top-hatted and thoughtful, looking
down upon the eponymous Piazza G.G. Belli at the Trastevere end of the Ponte Garibaldi.
Constrained by the conditions of his employment, only one of his scurrilous and witty
sonnets was published during his lifetime, and like Kafka he asked that his papers be destroyed after his death. Fortunately, they were preserved and the first collection was published some two decades after he died, with a full collection only emerging in 1952.
Belli’s work has inspired and delighted generations of readers. Gogol laughed aloud
at them, D.H Lawrence wanted to translate them, and William Carlos Williams adored
them. For Pier Paolo Pasolini, Belli was the greatest of Italian poets. There have been many attempts to render them into English, including admirable selections by Eleanor
Clark, Harold Norse, Miller Williams, Peter Nicholas Dale (who has supposedly translated
all of Belli’s sonnets into ‘Strine’, the dialect of 1960s Australia) and Mike Stocks. Most interesting, however, are the attempts to transpose the pungent and authentic sense
of place in Belli’s work to other geographical locales and locutions. Writing on behalf of
the eternal city, Belli sought to render its people universal, and I suspect he may have
