| Abstract |
In this thesis I examine the crucial and thorny problem of the bilingual nature of Solomos’ 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 complex phenomenon of bilingualism / multilingualism. The aspects presented in this part are, briefly, the pure linguistic point of view (the grammatical uniformity of standard languages as a means of regularizing the plurilingualism of the individuals and of ethnotic communities); the socio-linguistic aspect (the distinction between individual “bilingualism” and social [-collective] “diglossia”; language variation and strategies of linguistic performance in formal and informal contexts: high / low variety, family / school etc.); the psycho-linguistic and neuro-linguistic aspect (how two or more languages co-exist and co-operate in the human brain) and, finally, 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 essay puts Solomos’ bilingualism in a historical-philological perspective, examining in general terms the linguistic situation both in his homeland (Eptanisa) and in the newly created Greek state of the first half of the 19th century. From this survey there emerges the hypothesis (open to further inquiry) that Solomos’ hybrid language 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 and complex continuum of similar phenomena either of social diglossia or individual bilingualism.
The last section of this part provides a synthesis of the critics’ attitudes towards Solomos’ “language problem”; the emerging scheme or the dominant line of interpretation is that of a clear distinction in the use of Italian or Greek made by Solomos in different cases and contexts (according to which the poet spoke / 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, and the implicit intent of my dissertation as a whole, addresses the credibility of this interpretation of Solomos’ bilingualism. For this reason, my inquiry was focused on the direct, and hence more reliable, source of the poet’s work, namely his manuscripts, as edited by Linos Politis (Αυτόγραφα Έργα), in order to investigate if the dominant belief in Greek bibliography about Solomos’ expression, involving an absolute distinction in the use of his two languages depending on context of use, was based on real facts (textual data) or whether it was a bias (an ideological construction). The autographs revealed without a doubt not the distinction but the interference between the two languages (Italian being the “dominant language” of his culture and Greek being a “mother tongue” which was however (re)acquired as a second language); this interference can be traced in a wide range of code-switched and code-mixed productions, from which there emerges unambiguously the real nature of Solomos’ poetic expression and style.
Given this fact, in the third part of the essay I attempt to describe the most significant phenomena of this continuum –in which Solomos’ bilingualism consists–, in a systematic way, adopting the basic methodological principles and terms of my description from formal Linguistics and adapting them to my research object: I propose, for instance, two terms for the fundamental distinction between “surface interference” (διαπλοκή επιφανείας) and “depth interference” (διαπλοκή βάθους) in order to describe phenomena of evident and latent code-mixing in Solomos’ mode of expression. In short, my intent, and attempt, was to (re)construct, if possible, the “grammar” of the poet’s mixed or fused language.
To conclude, this study has no intention of questioning the poet’s “Greekness” (ελληνικότητα), an issue resolved by his own decision to leave Italy and to become a “Greek poet”. The aim of the study, on the contrary, is to show how important this decision was 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 his unpublished fragmentary poetic work).
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