Chollie wrote:
> "So a pidgin with "Italo-Spanish-like lexifying" might be fun to create
and,
> indeed, have aesthetic appeal for Jonathan (and, I'd guess, could well
have
> aesthetic appeal for many anglophones), but don't expect it to have the
same
> aesthetic appeal for Italian & Spanish speakers ;)"
> One would think so, but I think czHANg is also attempting to work
within
> a time-honored tradition of mutilating the Italian language. He mentioned
> Marinetti and the Futurists - experimental artists who worked in language
as
> well as canvas. Here's an excerpt from Marinetti's "Bilancio delle
> analogie":
>
> (1.a SOMMA)
> Marcia del cannoneggiamento futurista
> colosso-leitmotif-maglio-genio-novatore-ottimismo-fame-ambizione
(TERRIFICO
> ASSOLUTO SOLENNE EROICO PESANTE IMPLACABILE FECONDANTE)
> zang tuumb tumb tumb
<snip>
I'd like to make you notice that the 99% of us Italians do not understand a
word of Marinetti's poetry! Even Jonathan's pidgin is far simpler : )
>
> One of the mottos of the Futurists was that art, in fact, can be
> nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice - Marinetti called upon the
> Italians to re-invent art for themselves, forging it from an appreciation
of
> machines, speed, and the new technology, as well as a glorification of
war.
> Marinetti also felt that the Italians needed to express themselves using
new
> language.
Marinetti was a fascist, to say the truth. And his effort to create a
'futuristic' Italian, AFAIK, hadn't great success. Noone of the great
writers of that era, outside the Futurist movement, picked up that butchered
tongue to use it in his writings or books.
> Futurist poetry was designed to project off the page like shot fired
> from a gun. For this reason, the so-called "parole in liberta" style of
> poetry contained no adjectives, adverbs, finite verbs, punctuation or
> anything else that might possibly slow down the pace - so a Futurist poem
> was essentially an uninterrupted sequence of nouns, operating off of
> onomatopoeia.
> While I'm not the biggest fan of futurism, I can respect their
> political and cultural impact upon Europe. It didn't stop with the
> Fascists, although apparently Mussolini was one of Marinetti's biggest
fans.
> I'm much more of an Ungaretti man myself (M'illumino d'immenso!).
Ungaretti was a great poet. 'Si sta come d'autunno sugli alberi le foglie',
'Natale' ... his poetry is called 'ermetica' because of its obscurity, but
at least it's Italian!
Luca