Speaking to my father in a dead Italian dialect
My Calabrian parents’ skirmishes with standard Italian were nothing compared to the all-out war they waged on English
The 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico believed that as a civilization progressed, it lost touch with its creative origins. An ancient warrior would never declare “I’m angry”; he would wax metaphorical with “my blood boils.” The Roman poet Horace went a step further, believing that when words died they took memories with them. Just as forests change their leaves each year, so, too, do words: New languages “bloom and thrive,” but only after “the old race dies.”
Growing up, I could feel the language of my parents wither and die like autumn leaves. They had immigrated to the United States from Calabria in the late 1950s and continued to speak the dialect of their poor southern Italian region, but it was a tongue frozen in time by exile and filled with words that no longer existed in their homeland.
After a decade in America, my father decided to buy a fancy car. The Italian for a car is una macchina, and the Calabrian equivalent is ’na macchina. But in the car-crazy suburbs of postwar America, an immigrant such as my father was bound to defer to his host nation. He went to the Chevy dealership and asked for ’nu carru. The Calabrian ’nu sounds like new, and carro means cart. But the dealership knew what he meant, and sold my father a maroon 1967 Chevy Impala. He bought it the year that I, his first American child, was born.
My father’s dialect flourished only in fits of anger: Mala nuova ti vo’ venire (“may a new harm befall you”), when you annoyed him; ti vo’ pigliare ‘na shcuppettata (“may you be shot”) and ti vo’ brusciare l’erba (“may the ground beneath you combust”) when you really got under his skin. It’s difficult to translate these makeshift phrases. Better just to imagine them uttered by a man who could pick up a small backyard shed.
My mother faced her own herculean linguistic challenges. There were no freezers in her Italy, so when she wanted to preserve goods on ice, she talked about frizzare, to freeze, rather than the standard congelare. When her six children got the best of her, she threw her hands up and added an extra vowel to the ends of her Americanized words. We washed our clothes in an uascinga mascina, vacuumed the carpet with a vachiuma cleena, and drank lemonade on the porciu — the porch.
My parents’ skirmishes with standard Italian were nothing compared to the all-out war they waged on English. They would answer calls for their sons by saying “she’s a no’ home.” I took this gender-bending as an assertion of my individuality, my access to a world that separated me from all the other kids on the block. I may have lived in a three-bedroom ranch just like everyone else, but we were different. My family had no need to worship the idols of the secondand third-generation immigrants, with their cries of “mamma mia.” When my father swore at me in Italian, he did so out of anger and not nostalgia.
This authenticity extended to the table. While my friends with grandparents from Sicily talked about Italian food, my parents produced it. Each year they churned out hundreds of jars of preserved peaches, pears and tomatoes; gallons of red wine; and bushels of cucumbers, peas and potatoes. Plus the showpiece crop, squash.
One year, the local paper took a photo of my father and his prize-winning, five-footlong gourds. Sensing he was on display, he stayed silent for the whole shoot. He didn’t understand how feeding your family could translate into a human-interest story. But make no mistake: He was proud to have created such a prodigious vegetable, and he made sure the part in his hair was just so when the picture was snapped. His face was wrinkled, and he had to lean on his cane when he reached for the prize gourd. He was only in his 60s but old age had been forced upon him prematurely by a massive stroke that paralyzed most of his left side.
My father struggled to explain to the photographer how he grew his vegetables. He had only Calabrian words for the plants, procedures and tools. Each of his children had attained some form of higher education and, with it, freedom from the strife and poverty that had chased him from Italy. We now found his background primitive and remote. He had translated or “carried over” both a family and a dialect. After all this, he believed it was his right to talk about his squash on his own terms. Around the time of the photo, he poured a cement base for a picnic table near his garden. Before it dried, he signed it with a branch: P.L. Nato Acri 1923. Pasquale Luzzi, born in Acri, Italy, 1923. He died just months later, at the end of summer in 1995. In the obituary, my father’s passion for gardening was listed as his “hobby,” a word that didn’t exist in his Calabrian.
After his death, I would hear my father’s voice but didn’t know how to respond. When I imagined myself speaking to him in English, it sounded pedantic and prissy. Answering in Italian was no less stilted, either when I tried to revive my Calabrian or when I used the textbook grammar that was unnatural to both of us. I had so much to tell him but no way to say it, a reflection of our relationship during his lifetime. Without his words, I was losing a way to describe the world. Memories suddenly mattered more than ever before, and I didn’t know if I could find the language to keep them alive.
Dante wrote in his treatise on language that though men and women must communicate with words, angels can talk to one another in silence. Speaking with someone who has died is similar. You learn early on that it is best to concentrate on the person you’ve lost with as little verbal clutter as possible. Perhaps this Calabrian I now speak with my father is the truly dead dialect, the language that neither changes nor translates.
When I think of him now, I see him digging in his garden, unearthing the ficuzza, Calabrian for his beloved fig tree, from its winter slumber and propping it up for the coming spring. But once I put a word to this picture, once this ficuzza becomes a fico, standard Italian for fig tree, he will have left me.
This is when mourning becomes memory, and when it’s time to say goodbye to a language and a person I knew all too briefly.