Sicilian Dialect Research Articles

Translating Non-standard Language

Andrea Camilleri has gained significant success in the last decades with his works written in a special language: by creating a language similar to Sicilian dialect but understandable to other Italian speakers he heavily involved his Sicilian cultural heritage as well and brought it closer not only to an Italian, but a worldwide audience. How are this idiolect and the cultural elements translatable into other languages? There are various approaches, as shown in Quaderni camilleriani 3, and the techniques depend greatly on the target language. In Camilleri’s novels, not only the aforementioned diatopic, but also diastratic and diaphasic variation are characteristic, which is another factor the translator has to take into consideration. In this paper I would like to examine the translator’s choices in Hungarian regarding this multilingualism. Currently there are seven volumes available in Hungary, four of them translated by Margit Lukácsi, one by Noémi Kovács and Kornél Zaránd, and the last two by Ádám András Kürthy. The paper is also a parallel work to Giulia Magazzù’s, which aims to examine the translations in English of three novels, two of which are in common with this paper: Il cane di terracotta and La forma dell’acqua.

Strategies of Indefiniteness Marking in Central Sicilian—Evidence from the Dialect of Delia

This paper is meant as a contribution to the research project on variation and optionality in the determiner system in Italo-Romance, with novel data from the Sicilian dialect of Delia. The study is based on fieldwork interviews and the construction of a small corpus of 850 observations by 24 native speakers of Deliano (mean age: 36.37; age range: 19–72). The participants were asked to (i) describe in Deliano a 3 min videotape of an Italian speaking woman during her shopping session at a supermarket and (ii) talk about their own shopping routines in Deliano. These activities were designed mainly to detect the following strategies to express indefiniteness: (i) ART, i.e., a definite article with an indefinite interpretation; (ii) ZERO, a zero determiner for bare nouns; (iii) DI+ART, the so-called “partitive article”; (iv) pseudo-partitives such as ‘a bit of’; (v) the grammaticalised cardinal ‘two’; and (vi) the grammaticalised cardinal ‘four’. The data confirm (i) the preference for ZERO in negative episodic sentences in the past; (ii) the general lack of bare DI and DI+ART, and of certo ‘certain’ used as an indefinite; (iii) the use of different specialised forms of pseudo-partitive ‘a bit of’ in older speakers of Deliano; (iv) the neutralisation of this pseudo-partitive specialisation and the consequent emergence of some true optionality in younger speakers.

To translate or not to translate dialects in subtitling? The case of Pif’s La mafia uccide solo d’estate

The difficulty of translating dialects has been extensively studied over the years, firstly by scholars who focused on the (un)translatability of dialects in literature, and more recently by an increasing number of academics who have been investigating the issue within the field of audiovisual translation, both in dubbing and in subtitling. This study aims to analyse the strategies used in subtitling to translate into English the Sicilian dialect spoken in the Italian film La mafia uccide solo d’estate, directed by Pif in 2013. In this film, the use of dialect is not simply a tool to indicate the geographical origins of the characters, but it is exploited to construe their identity. Indeed, language variation is a device used purposefully to distinguish the ‘good’ characters from the ‘bad’ ones, and, as such, it is a means of identification. The results of the analysis will also be compared to those of previous studies conducted in this research area. Finally, the paper will attempt to provide some potential solutions that might be adopted in the subtitling of similar products, based on previous studies performed by the author on the original dialogues of some Hollywood films.

Mimì Aguglia e Marinella Bragaglia alla prova della fotografia

The pictures featuring Mimì Aguglia and Marinella Bragaglia, actresses from the Sicilian dialect theatre, blur the boundaries between stage and life, fiction and reality. The interior and poetic space of the theatrical action is identified with the physical space, discovering, in the geography of a face, in the arcane outline of an expression, the traces of a submerged landscape. Photos that also allow us to explore the way in which the island (and national) theatre was visually narrated from the second half of the 19th century to the very early years of the 20th century. Starting from photographic documents of the time, the contribution will attempt to outline – taking into account a few, but essential, biographical elements – the portrait of these two significant figures of a more general dramaturgy of actresses. Inhabiting the stories of these actresses means attempting to tune «voices and souls, bodies and writings», in a fertile interweaving, according to the indications left by Claudio Meldolesi, between «intimate images», the «level of techniques» and the «level of the given conditions». We will see, going beyond the image of the actress, how the photos become a model of femininity, success or more generally of life (the performer becomes the object of attention far beyond the stage, as an example of woman, wife and mother), among the female spectators.

The Influence of the Arabic Language in the Sicilian Dialect and in Camilleri’s Vigatese

This paper highlights the richness associated with having several dialects within the same Italian language system, and specifically discusses the Sicilian dialect that was highly affected by Arabic. The article will also go back historically to introduce “Siqilliya,” examining the Arabic Sicilian lexicology to demonstrate syntactic constructions typically relevant to the Arabic language, and thus exposing the Sicilian Arabism. My main target is to show, through different examples, the interaction between the Sicilian and Arabic languages at the cultural, syntactic, lexicological and grammatical levels. I will also trace some terms used by Andrea Camilleri through his “Commissario Montalbano,” which have become a “modo di dire” or way of speaking that has become an integral part of the Italian language.

Ameri-Sicula: Sicilian Culture in America

This book was originally envisaged as a collection of anecdotes by Sicilian immigrants, and these indeed make up its most substantial part. With few exceptions, such as one on Sicilian dialect expressions, the chapters, written by various generations of immigrants, recount the personal experience of Sicilian traditions that survived the crossing to America. One of the stated aims of the book is to contribute to ensuring that “rich traditions would not be lost”; these traditions provide the focus for many of the authors.Without overgeneralization, these accounts bear witness to an extraordinary similarity of experience. Sentiments such as “family was everything” are expressed by many of the contributors, sometimes using these exact words. Similarly, many stress the idea of community perceived as an enlarged family, summed up by one as, “We viewed our friends’ homes as extensions of our own. A drop-by always entailed an offer of some type of food” (p. 50). We sense not only nostalgia for a more innocent past but a conception of family and social life that centered on the kitchen, where nourishment for both the soul and body were dispensed. One writer mentions that “my most comforting memories are associated with food” (p. 141), a view shared by many of the contributors, who mention key maternal figures, particularly grandmothers, for whom food was not only a source of physical sustenance but an expression of love, and remembered as such. “This was what it was all about: family sharing life and food together” (p. 79), notes one author. The foods in question are rolled out in lists, which invariably include braciole, sugu, meatballs in tomato sauce, sausages, thick Sicilian pizza, and caponata. The inclusion of meatballs in tomato sauce is curious, since this dish is neither in the past nor today considered typically Sicilian; it is closer to Neapolitan or even Italian American—yet for these immigrants, it became highly representative of their culinary culture. Many reminisce about sweet pastries, nearly always purchased rather than made at home, as is still the case in Sicily today. Christmas, especially Christmas Eve, is another recurrent theme, along with religious festivals, such as St. Joseph's (March 19) and St. Lucy's (December 13). Various authors mention the Christmas Eve “feast of the seven fishes,” a tradition that has sadly been almost universally abandoned in contemporary Sicily.It might seem, then, that Ameri-Sicula could be summed up in the expression “family, food, and feste,” and this is, on one level, undoubtedly true. Few of the testimonies fail to touch on at least one of these aspects of life; many revolve around all three, this indissoluble Sicilian trinity. Yet to reduce this anthology to three words would be to miss its enormous charm. It is precisely the thread of common experience, the importance of festivals, that provides, in an aptly Sicilian way, a sense of family and community and gives a binding unity to this collection.The nostalgia palpable in these stories is not only for Sicily but also for the past, seen often through the eyes of childhood experiences. Yet time has moved on, in Sicily too. Tradition, like culture, evolves. Although the relationship to tradition in the “old country” may have changed, we sense in these accounts a strong desire to perpetuate and protect the essence of these traditions as a cornerstone of identity. As one contributor comments, “I made it a mission to ensure we ate together as a family and that the food reflected our cultural identity” (p. 61). And it is this longing to reconnect with and consolidate a sense of identity wherein lies the real heart of this book.

Far from the homeland: Dishonour and redemption in Mario Monicelli's The Girl with the Gun

The journey undertaken by the protagonist Assunta Patanè in Mario Monicelli's film The Girl with the Gun is far more than a mere spatial displacement fired by a desire for revenge, but it gradually takes the form of an itinerary of an individualistic and cultural nature that is eventually to overturn the stereotypes of Assunta's native Sicilian community, thus enabling her to embrace modernity and, in particular, emancipation, both of which are totally alien to her at the opening of the film. The metamorphosis of the protagonist passes through various phases that will lead her towards self-awareness and self-determination, following her arrival in Great Britain with the intent to take revenge on Vincenzo, the man responsible for her dishonour. The polyhedral use of language (Sicilian dialect, Standard Italian and English), the impact of a new society and culture, not to mention the series of relations, above all with male characters so different from each other (Vincenzo, John, Frank and Doctor Osborne), will mark Assunta's gradual path towards maturity. In an atmosphere initially overhung with tragedy but gradually transformed through comedy and humour, the Sicilian woman will succeed in freeing herself from the prejudices and customs of an archaic world, so as to affirm her presence and personal identity, now liberated from the simplistic male–female binary and from the respective roles decreed since antiquity.

КОДОВЫЕ ПЕРЕКЛЮЧЕНИЯ НА СИЦИЛИЙСКИЙ ДИАЛЕКТ В РОМАНЕ ДЖ. КУЛИККЬЯ «SICILIA, O CARA. UN VIAGGIO SENTIMENTALE»

The aim of this article is to identify the pragmatic functions of code-switching to the Sicilian dialect of the Italian language in the autobiography of the contemporary Italian writer G. Culicchia. Code switches studied by contact linguistics are the embedded language units of different levels in the matrix language utterance. The author uses I. Y. Mishintseva and G. N. Chirsheva's classification of pragmatic functions for studying code switches in literary works. The foreign language units in G. Culicchia’s work perform two groups of functions: functions characteristic of fiction (creating the effect of communication in the Embedded Language in the literary work) and those characteristic of spoken language (topic-related, metalinguistic, citing and emotional functions). The topic-related function of codeswitches is used to convey Sicilian culture realities as well as the direct speech of the author’s Sicilian relatives. The metalinguistic function of the code-switches under analysis involves introducing the reader to pronunciation and lexical features of the Sicilian dialect. The citing function means the author’s citing of Sicilian proverbs and sayings. The emotional function consists in expressing the author’s emotions and feelings towards Sicily and Sicilian relatives. Thus, the pragmatic functions show that the code-switches under analysis are the source of subjective and objective information in the novel. The Sicilian code-switches have a graphic feature in the novel: all of them are printed in italics. The italic type as a graphic stylistic device is used to logically separate Sicilian words from Italian lexis, to convey emotions, to separate the author’s Italian speech from the other characters’ Sicilian dialect.

Специфика использования сицилийского диалекта в современной художественной литературе

Специфика использования сицилийского диалекта в современной художественной литературе

Traduzioni belles infidèles. Commenti a quelle dei componimenti lubrici di Domenico Tempio

Belles infidèles is a French expression highlighting a well-known problem in translating from one language to another. This is true especially in the field of literature and particularly in poetry, where the exterior aspects of the words (for example, the harmony of rhymes, the images, the emotional vibrations, the semantic fields, the polysemy, and so on) become substantial and hardly translatable. The essay focuses on some bad translations of some selected verses from the obscene poems by a 18th-century Sicilian dialect poet, Domenico Tempio: they clearly show the translators’ intervention, who took many liberties and betrayed the formulation, the sense and the effect of the original texts. The essay proposes some more faithful translations of them.
 

Problemi di traduzione di due romanzi italiani in norvegese: tra la lingua e il dialetto

This article linguistically analyzes how the Sicilian dialect is used in conjunction with Italian in the books Il cane di terracotta (The Terracotta Dog) by Andrea Camilleri and La Mennulara (The Almond Picker) by Simonetta Agnello Hornby. The analysis considers how the dialect is represented at various levels: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical. In addition, the Norwegian translations of these books are also analyzed: Terrakottahunden, translated by Jon Rognlien, and Mandelplukkersken by Tommy Watz, respectively. It focuses on how the translators solved the challenge of the original books’ text alternating between Italian and Sicilian dialect. The translators’ account of their choices is presented following each analysis.

Jolanda Insana: una lingua per scuotere le menti

In the following essay, we explore many sources of the poetic language of Jolanda Insana, considered one of the most fascinating poetic voices of the contemporary literary landscape, focusing in particular on the use of the Sicilian dialect. The different sources from which the author's creativity draws her compositional methods allow us to fully investigate some of the core topics that characterize her literary production, which are in some cases difficult to interpret. The analysis thus conducted is key to a better understanding of the purpose of Insana's verses, to the identification of some of the authors who have most influenced her writing, and to the outlining of the poetics of this eclectic author. This study places Insana in the tradition of plurilingualism, which takes origin from Dante, and shows the contamination of her poetry with the theatrical genre.

Language, silence and translation in Emanuele Crialese’s polyglot migration film Nuovomondo – Golden Door (2006)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2017v37n1p119 O presente artigo centra-se na análise do filme Nuovomondo– Golden Door (Itália-França, 2006), de Emanuele Crialese, dando particular atenção ao uso de diferentes idiomas (inglês, italiano e dialeto siciliano) neste filme sobre migração e à respetiva tradução para legendagem do filme em DVD. As interações linguísticas que têm lugar em Nuovomondo colocam uma série de questões relativamente à possibilidade – e impossibilidade – de traduzir material culturalmente específico de um produto multi-semiótico para uma outra língua/cultura. Ao assumir a importância transnacional do filme como epítome de (in)traduzibilidade cultural, este ensaio examinará e discutirá questões relacionadas com o papel da língua, do silêncio e da tradução. O filme constitui um exemplo perfeito de como a língua desempenhou um papel central na definição das relações de poder entre migrantes e norte-americanos no porto “(in)desejável” novecentista. Também discute de que modo formas de inclusão, subversão e legitimação são articuladas numa cultura dominante, como a dos Estados Unidos, em resposta à alteridade e o papel da tradução como exercício de poder e de (re)negociação identitária.

Age-related Variation in Code-switching between Italian and the Sicilian Dialect

Age-related Variation in Code-switching between Italian and the Sicilian Dialect

The Indomitable Giuseppe Pitrè

Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), who was a medical doctor, professor, and senator in Sicily, was one of the most gifted and significant folklorists of the nineteenth century. However, very little is known about his life and works. This essay is an endeavour to explore the significance of Pitrè's vast production as a collector of Sicilian dialect tales and a scholar of Sicilian customs and traditions. In many respects, Pitrè's major work, Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani [Sicilian Fairy Tales, Folktales and Stories] of 1875, is the culmination of the great European folklore scholarship that began earlier in the nineteenth century. In fact, Sicily was a haven for folktales that stemmed from both the European and Middle Eastern cultures. Against the cultural grain of his times, Pitrè dedicated himself to the Sicilian people and their customs and produced volumes of folktales that shed more light on the oral tradition of folktales than the works of the Brothers Grimm or any other collectors in the nineteenth century.

The Robber with a Witch's Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach (review)

Reviewed by: The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach Francesca Maria Corrao (bio) The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach. Edited and translated by Jack Zipes . New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Laura Gonzenbach's is a wonderful collection of Sicilian oral tales as she heard them from the voices of traditional storytellers. Gonzenbach, a Swiss national who lived in Sicily at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wanted to explore and promote a "Sicilian" cultural and literary notion. In his two-volume edition, Jack Zipes makes available to English-language readers what is, in his opinion as well as in mine, the most startling literary discovery concerning folk- and fairy tales of recent years. The first volume, Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach, was published in 2003; this review will focus on the second volume only. The book is something more than a simple collection of folklore transcriptions. In fact, as Zipes underlines in his introduction, Gonzenbach gathers her tales mostly from women storytellers. At that time women used to narrate privately, only rarely telling their stories in public. Fluent in the Sicilian dialect, Gonzenbach was interested in listening to women's tales in order to get their point of view. She had a special interest in this approach; even though she was not a feminist, she built a bridge between the old and modern society. Zipes reorganizes the collection according to his own choice, and in so doing he conducts another interesting cultural operation, mostly responding to a literary taste rather than to a demotic criterion. This choice widens the gap between Gonzenbach's work and Giuseppe Pitrè's collections (Fiabe e leggende popolari siciliane, edited by A. Rigoli, Palermo: Il Vespro, 1978; and Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani, edited by A. Rigoli, Palermo: Il Vespro, 1978), with Pitrè being the other and more famous collector of nineteenth-century Sicilian tales. Gonzenbach's and Pitrè's works are to be considered the most important references for the Sicilian treasury of folk- and fairy tales. Their value is evident in the study by Sebastiano Lo Nigro, who used them in applying the Aantti Aarne index to Sicilian folklore. The differences between Pitrè's and Gonzenbach's [End Page 306] work are that the former has a more scientific approach; it is in the Sicilian language; it has not been edited for style; and anecdotes, proverbs, and jokes are interspersed with stories. Gonzenbach is more attentive to style, and in her collection we find a beautiful selection that makes it comparable to that of the Brothers Grimm. In Gonzenbach's collection we find stories that are not available elsewhere, because Pitrè refers mainly to tales gathered in the western part of the island. In Gonzenbach's stories we also recognize motifs from other important literary productions. This is the case with the tale "The Beautiful Maiden with the Seven Veils." Like the famous Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile (sixteenth century), this tale recounts the common motif of the heroine betrayed by a black slave; furthermore, the heroine in both narratives uses the telling of stories to reveal the trick to which she has been subjected. In the two stories the prince has been fooled by a black woman who has taken the place of the princess destined to be his wife. The betrayed woman is able to restore her rights by telling tales that reveal the truth to the prince. This story and closely related motifs are found in works belonging to the Italian "elite" literary culture. From the fifteenth century onward, Italian writers started writing famous stories of folklore in an elevated language and style. Boccaccio and Basile are the most famous, but we can also recall Masuccio Salernitano and Giulo Cesare Croce, the author of Bertoldo and Bertoldino. A similar project was carried out by Laura Gonzenbach and more recently by Italo Calvino in his Italian Folktales. In the present collection we have some tales, such as...

Buried Treasue or Fairy-Tale Verismo ? Framing Sicilian Women's Stories

Fairy-tale studies are made especially interesting by the controversies that inevitably accompany them. Accordingly, Marvels & Tales will publish critical exchanges between readers and authors. Concise, professional responses that augment, develop, or constructively challenge the substance of essays published in the journal may be submitted to the editor. Responses should be submitted as an e-mail attachment or on diskette. They should be limited to one thousand words or less and should contain no footnotes or other apparatus unless approved in advance by the editor. The author whose work is the subject of the response will be given the opportunity to reply. The editor maintains the right to reject or edit any response. From time to time, exchanges about specific topics may be invited. Buried Treasure or Fairy-Tale Verismo? Framing Sicilian Women's Stories Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach. Translated and edited by jack Zipes. Illustrations by Joellyn Rock. New York: Routledge, 2004. xxxii + 364 pp. Jack Zipes has found buried treasure. After a career spent detailing the sanitizing of the fairy tale by bourgeois literati, he has discovered a nineteenthcentury collection that preserves, with considerable fidelity, the voices of an indisputably subaltern population: Sicilian peasant women. On this ground, Zipes characterizes Laura Gonzenbachs Sizilianische Marchen as the most important collection of fairy tales, legends, and anecdotes in the nineteenth century, more important perhaps than the Brothers Grimm (xii). When the leading authority in the field puts forward so radical an assertion in so halting a fashion, his unease is evident. The peasant women who speak through the Gonzenbach collection, a remarkable work with a troubled history, outZipe Zipes in their denunciation of economic and gender violence, and Zipes is both greatly enthusiastic and a little disconcerted as he presents the stories for a general readership. When buried treasure is resurrected and rehoused as a great treasury, the lingering smell of the soil can be unsettling. There were good reasons to bury the Gonzenbach collection not long after its 1870 publication. It was unearthed-along with the complex history of its production and reception-by Rudolf Schenda and especially Luisa Rubini, whose magisterial contribution is properly and generously acknowledged by Zipes.1 The collection belongs to the much larger body of Mediterranean folktales collected and published in translation by nineteenth-century northern European scholars, with the original texts lost. Laura Gonzenbach was the daughter of the Swiss consul at Messina and younger sister of Magdalena Gonzenbach, a pioneer of feminism and women's education in Italy. Growing up in the German-speaking colony of textile manufacturers and merchants, she was cared for by Sicilian servants and spent her summers in the countryside playing among the peasants. At the behest of historian Otto Hartwig, who met her in 1860 when he came to serve for five years as chaplain to the Lutheran community in Messina, she began in 1868, at the age of twenty-six, to collect fairy tales. Hartwig was writing a history and expected the tales to provide evidence for his theories of the mixed cultural influences that shaped the Sicilian dialect and character in the Middle Ages. Working among the peasant women in the eastern provinces of Messina and Catania, Gonzenbach found the field so rich that within a year she provided Hartwig with a collection of a hundred stories, sufficient for an autonomous publication. Gonzenbach translated the tales into literary German and provided occasional footnotes with cultural, linguistic, and performance commentary. Hartwig arranged for the Leipzig publication of a two-volume edition of ninety-two of the tales (with two more still in dialect from an as-yet-unidentified Sicilian collaborator, Salvatore Morganti) and wrote a historical preface on the formation of the Sicilian language during the Norman period, recruiting the folklorist Reinhold Kohler to provide comparative notes. …

Verga and the Realist Cinema

VERGA AND THE REALIST CINEMA ROBERT ALAN SPIEGHI In Against Interpretation Susan Sontag writes that Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist's will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for works of art.' Verga 's writing had both the period his film a direct and indirect effect on the films of we cali Neorealist. When Visconti adapted l Malavoglia for to La Terra Trema, he was able change in plot or location between the story do so with practically no wdtten in 1881 and the life in film of 1948 because of the static nature of Aci Trezza. The film stands as a critique of the lack of solidarity among the exploited fishermen and an exposition of the way individuai pride leads to disaster. Verga had frequently attempted to little teli his stories from the point of view of his characters, with as intervention as possible on the part of the narrative ticity, voice. Visconti attempts a parallel authen- using the fishermen themselves and their tells own Sicilian dialect, is because, as he us in the prologue to the film, Italian not the language of the poor. Six years earlier Visconti had proposed Verga's L'Amante di Gra- but it migna to the fascist censors as the basis for the film Ossessione, was rejected by the authorities who were unwilling to accept a story based on the presence of bandits in Fascist Italy.^ Visconti then turned to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as the back- ground for his film, but the theme remains the same, the effect of