I’ve been reading a fascinating book by the Italian-American author, Pietro di Donato. Its highly unusual language and foreign-sounding syntax, which seemed to blend multiple styles and registers into a composite narrative voice, intrigued me from the start. That, combined with the themes of migrant labour and diasporic identity made me want to read around the subject and learn about the history of this novel’s production, translation, circulation, and transnational significance.
Christ in Concrete was published in 1939 by Pietro di Donato – a second generation Italian-American whose experiences as a foreign worker on US soil informed the highly autobiographical content of his novel. It is both a testimony to the harsh lives led by migrants in twentieth-century America, and an ethnic narrative about ‘Italianness’ abroad. The surprising language of the novel wasn’t a stylistic choice, rather reflecting the multiple cultural influences the author was exposed to. Written in English, it nevertheless contains Italian expressions left untranslated, and has therefore been categorised by critics as a heterolingual work. As one critic put it, the language is what forms the bridge between the ‘lost and mythical Italy, and the real but never realised America.’ This novel is a curious case; translation was a part of its production, not just of its circulation. As a work of literature, it hangs somewhere in between the American and Italian canons, failing to fully qualify for either, occupying the niche category of ‘minor literature’ – a deterritorialised form of art. By relating the migrant experience of its author, both linguistically and content-wise, Christ in Concrete can be described as a transnational object that defines clear-cut cultural boundaries.
I was interested to note that the novel was subject to two different interpretations, both of which attempted to claim the work in service of a certain cause. The first of these interpretations labelled Christ in Concrete the ‘ultimate working-class novel’, focusing on the atrocious working conditions of manual labourers in 1930s America and adopting the novel for the proletarian cause. Unsurprisingly, early Italian translations of the novel, conducted under Mussolini’s fascist regime, were determined to downplay this socialist interpretation. Di Donatio’s labelling as a ‘bricklayer-writer’ and ‘worker-as-artist’ therefore did not travel across the Atlantic to the author’s ethnic homeland.
The other interpretation focused on the ethnic origins of the novel, celebrating it as a mediation of Italian cultural heritage: a homage to ‘Italian greatness in distress’. It is also interesting to appraise Italian translations of the novel from this perspective, since they reflect an effort to limit the American references and experimental language, foregrounding instead the ‘Italianness’ at its heart. In the 1990s, a new wave of translations and a growth in Italian American studies gave credit to the regional specificities of the novel. Christ in Concrete became seen as neither Italian nor American, but a masterpiece born from the collision of these two cultural spheres.