The Poetry of Nino De Vita: A Bilingual Anthology by Nino De Vita.

Nino De Vita was born in 1950 on the western side of Sicily near the town of Marsala. Among his many books of poetry, he has published three children’s books. Over the last fifteen years, he has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes awarded in Italy, among them the Alberto Moravia Prize.  He is a major voice in Sicilian poetry. 

 

Consistent with Legas’s long publication history, The Poetry of Nino De Vita is a tri-lingual edition. De Vita’s poetry appears on facing pages in both the original Sicilian and English. At the bottom of the page Prof. Cipolla has also translated the poems into Italian. 

 

De Vita writes in the preface to the current volume that he was born in Cutusiu, a small collection of houses near Marsala. He explains that his family had no electricity, books, or newspapers in the house. At home and with his friends, he spoke only the local dialect. While learning Italian at school, he lived in between two cultures, his local culture and that of the larger world outside his village.  

 

After graduating from college, he began teaching at the Liceo Scientifico of Trapani. Until he was thirty, in the evenings he wrote poetry in Italian. Then one day in class he instinctively told one of his students in the local dialect, “Unn’ a lassari a ciaccazzedda:Don’t leave the door open.” The boy, De Vita says, wheeled around and asked him in Italian, “Professor, what are you speaking, Arabic?”  Other students present were equally puzzled by what their professor had said. 

 

On the way home from class that day, De Vita realized that the dialect that he had spoken all his life and that was so important to his region’s culture and history was rapidly disappearing. He pledged from then on “to save the words of the dialect of Marsala.”

 

In his free-verse narratives, De Vita is not interested in the mechanics of poetic form or in experimentation. Rather, his Sicilian dialect serves as the avenue into the culture that he portrays in his poems. His volume is divided into four sections: Cutusìu/Cutusiu, Cuntura/ Tales, Nnòmura/ Names, and Òmini/ Men. 

 

In the first poem of the collection, he begins at the beginning, with his own birth. Of course, he must have learned all that he relates years later from his parents. In many ways what he relates was typical of the culture at the time. It is a difficult birth, one that occurs at home, not in a hospital. After hours of trying, the doctor finally gives up on the baby and is only intent upon saving the mother. Then after hours of trying, the doctor, miraculously, is successful in delivering Nino; but he does not breathe for two hours. “Poi, finarmenti/nivuru/chiancii: Then finally, all black and blue, I wailed.” 

 

He goes on in the following poems to relate stories of his life as a boy growing up in Cutusiu: the tricks he and his boyhood friends played on each other and the games that they played. It was a simple life, free from the electronic distractions that dominate children’s lives today: “Chi bbiddizza quann’eru / ngangà”(What a joyful time I had / when I was a young boy).  In other poems about his family and the community, he recounts stories of his grandmother, who even on her death bed is concerned that the barn door is not locked. 

 

He evokes a simpler way of life, but one that also has a tragic side as well. He writes about the village people, such as Angiulu, who is insane and runs freely around the village creating mischief until one day he is finally committed. In Binirittedda, the teenage daughter of the village flour vendor gets pregnant and dies giving birth.  Disgraced and isolated, she could not turn to anyone for help. The subtext to each tale suggests the social conditions and the values that conditioned the lives of the village people, especially their lack of basic medical and psychological services. 

 

In “That Can Destroy Us,” De Vita writes in the first person and recounts a story in which he takes a trip around Sicily and ends up at Ballarò, where an expensive car hits and damages his car. He parks where he is told not to by a local man. But De Vita reads the situation well. As a stranger in the village, he knows enough not to make a fuss. He has coffee with the man who owns the big car and leaves without asking for payment for the damage. When he later has the car repaired in the village, the repairman tells him that there is no charge.

 

We are left to understand, as De Vita did at the time, that the man paid the bill. In another such incident, a group of writers, including Leonardo Sciascia and De Vita, attends a ceremony where the mayor of Palermo, Salvo Lima, is present. One of the writers strongly objects to Lima’s presence because of his known association with the Mafia. (Years later in 1992 Lima was, in fact, killed by an unknown assassin).  It is a familiar story: the Mafia remains a threatening presence in Sicily, ubiquitous in its control of Sicilian life, from the island’s top politicians to its powerless local people.  

 

And finally in a humorous tale, De Vita recounts an incident at the sea shore in which the famous poet and historian Giuseppe Quatriglio is repeatedly attacked by an obstreperous squid, until he dispatches it with the comment: “Tut alia stu lazzaruni; e chi cci’ a fattu. / Chhiù carogna ri l’òmini / sunnu sti purpa. (Damn, look at this wily scoundrel. / What did I do to him? These squid are more outrageous than men are”). 

 

In the section entitled Cuntura/Tales, De Vita recounts several folk tales, all of which express the values of the local culture. In The Magpies, the pesky birds raid other birds’ nests and eat the farmers’ grain. While leaving a Goldfinch nest alone, the peasants feel justified in robbing the nest of a pair of Magpies in a tree near their house. The Magpies have no sense of community and pay for their selfishness.

 

In Angel, a little boy is visited by his guardian angel, who recounts the number of times he has saved him from harm. In Everyone Was on the Threshing Floor, De Vita retells an animal fable in which a neutered pig, without a family of his own, is finally brought to slaughter. To live and die alone without siblings and parents in a culture that values the family above all else is the worst of fates.  In The Earthworm, a farmer threatens to poison all the insects in his field for ruining his crops. Terrified, the insects hold an emergency convention.

 

In their self-serving ignorance, the insects blame the poor earthworm, the most beneficial creature for farmland, for ruining the farmer’s crops. They vote to condemn him to a slow death.  Like all folk tales and fables from any culture, from Aesop and the Brothers Grimm to Hans Christen Andersen, De Vita’s Sicilian tales reinforce the core values of the community: humility, frugality, family, faith, and community. 

 

De Vita’s poems are a window into a regional culture that has all but disappeared.  Thanks to Prof. Cipolla, with the tri-lingual text, readers can experience De Vita’s poems on any level they choose. The American poet Robert Frost once said that poetry is what is lost in translation. But in De Vita’s poems there is much to discover in the English or Italian, even if you cannot read the subtleties expressed in his Sicilian dialect.