Abstract
Τhis dissertation thesis examines the crucial and thorny problem of the bilingual nature of Dionysios Solomos’s expression (Italian-Greek), a problem which becomes even more crucial taking into account that Solomos is the “national poet” of Modern Greece par excellence, the first major writer of the New Hellenism after the War of Independence. The study is divided in three parts. The first part provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon of bilingualism / multilingualism. These aspects are: (a) the historic-linguistic point of view: the grammatical uniformity of standard languages as a means of regularizing the plurilingualism of ethnic communities and/or of individuals in the context of the “language question” of the modern nation-states of the 19th century onwards. (b) The socio-linguistic aspect: the distinction between individual “bilingualism” and social “diglossia”; language variation and strategies of bilingual performance (code-switching, code ...
Τhis dissertation thesis examines the crucial and thorny problem of the bilingual nature of Dionysios Solomos’s expression (Italian-Greek), a problem which becomes even more crucial taking into account that Solomos is the “national poet” of Modern Greece par excellence, the first major writer of the New Hellenism after the War of Independence. The study is divided in three parts. The first part provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon of bilingualism / multilingualism. These aspects are: (a) the historic-linguistic point of view: the grammatical uniformity of standard languages as a means of regularizing the plurilingualism of ethnic communities and/or of individuals in the context of the “language question” of the modern nation-states of the 19th century onwards. (b) The socio-linguistic aspect: the distinction between individual “bilingualism” and social “diglossia”; language variation and strategies of bilingual performance (code-switching, code-mixing) in formal and informal contexts: high / low variety, family / school etc. (c) The psycho-linguistic and neuro-linguistic aspect: how two or more languages co-exist and co-operate in the human brain and, finally, (d) the aesthetic-linguistic aspect: negative and positive aspects of the impact of bilingualism on creativity and the formation of an author’s style.The second part of the study examines Solomos’s bilingualism in its historical and social context, investigating in general terms the linguistic situation both in his homeland (Ionian islands) and in the newly created Modern Greek state of the first half of the 19th century. From this survey emerges the hypothesis – open to further inquiry – that Solomos’s bilingualism is not a unique phenomenon but rather that it constitutes a case study (or a notorious example, if we wish, given his supremacy), which implies the presence of a wider spectrum of similar phenomena either of social diglossia or individual bilingualism within the historical-literary context described above. The last section of this part provides an overview of the critics’ attitudes towards Solomos’s bilingualism from the editio princeps of the poet’s oeuvre by Iakovos Polylas (1859) onwards. The dominant line of interpretation that emerges is that of a clear distinction in the use of Greek and of Italian made by Solomos in different cases and contexts, according to which the poet spoke and wrote to his friends in Italian and he conceived the blueprint of his poems in Italian, but ultimately wrote his poems in Greek. The third part of the essay addresses the credibility of this interpretation focusing on the direct, and hence more reliable, source of the poet’s work, i.e. his manuscripts edited by Linos Politis (Αυτόγραφα Έργα, 1964). The autographs revealed without a doubt not the distinction but the interference between the two languages, Italian being the “dominant language” of his edification and culture and Greek being a “mother tongue”, which was however acquired as a second language by the poet after his long-term studies in Italy. The language interference between Greek and Italian can be traced in a wide range of code-switched and code-mixed productions, from which there emerges unambiguously the real nature of Solomos’s poetic expression. In order to describe the most significant of these phenomena as presented in his Autographs in a systematic way, I adopted the basic methodological principles and terms of my description from formal Linguistics, adapting them to my research object: I propose, for instance, two terms for the fundamental distinction between “surface interference” and “depth interference” in order to describe phenomena of evident and latent code-mixing, correspondingly, in Solomos’s expression. In short, my intent, and attempt, in this third part of the study, was to (re)construct, if possible, the “grammar” of the poet’s mixed or fused language.To conclude, this study has no intention to question the poet’s “Greekness”, an issue resolved by his own conscious decision to leave Italy and to become “Dante” of Modern Greek Literature. The aim of the study, on the contrary, is to show how important was this decision for the Modern Greek literature, because Solomos was bilingual and because, being bilingual, seems to have provided him with a much more acute sense of language matters and stylistic issues, because of which he became a devotee of the “perfect expression”; this eventually allows one to evaluate differently, in a positive light, the notorious problem of Solomos’s unpublished fragmentary poetic work, which usually is attributed to his “poor” Greek and to the “interference” of Italian as a means of supporting this inefficiency.
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