Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Inside the holes between words. On the poetry of Nino Pedretti.
in IL PARLAR FRANCO (Frankly speaking)
Review of vernacular culture and literary criticism
year VII - 2007

abstract

[…] In the first collection of Nino Perdetti, Al vòusi (The voices), dialect stages its countermelody: the portrait of a small village and its inhabitants is also the portrait of a nucleus with a highly deterrent power, one where life breaks out with all its defectiveness and where, most often, its ferine nature; one where primordial drives and taboos, small obsessions and meanness come out into the open, similar to a material that has been finally freed from the masked prison of decorum and convenience, or to a body that achieves its full self-possession thanks to language. This is the countermelody opposed to the hegemonic language and to its imposed culture: such a language is perceived by local villagers as a deceitful instrument for prevarication, as a nuance hiding hoax and scorn, as a language one can never trust, precisely because of its grammatical precision (“st’ilt sla boca dòulza”, “the others with their sweet language”). Hegemonic language is characterised by the insignificant lack of a true referent, one that has left its mark in the streets’ names, or in the Fascist or German injunctions during the war. As Alfredo Stussi argues, the presence of standard language within these poems always introduces “an anonymous and external perspective”, that is, the anonymity of power, of a bureaucratic and estranging machine that exploits language with a coercive agenda, by subordinating it to its own inscrutability.
The poetic argument that motivates the borrowing of a voice, as well as the stylistic adoption of a monologue, is founded on this conflict: the poet entrusts his voice to the chorus of the excluded and the marginalised (“– bravo, t’a l’è détt / própri cume mè / s’a putéss scrèiv –”, “– bravo, you said it just the way I would / If only I could write –”), and limits himself to recording what comes, live and direct, from life itself. What he records indeed offers itself as a poetic substance (“Still this work of mine, it is as if it didn’t belong to me, as if there were other voices writing it”, he confided to Rina Macrelli in a letter dated 1973).
The motif of a recording activity – which was indeed the transcription sic et simpliciter of the reality before his eyes – allowed language to develop itself without any falsification whatsoever, by completely providing that “strong dosage of truth” that was its intrinsic quality. […]