Introduction: on capitalist scalability and poetic interruptions

Epitomized by the plantation economy or by the franchising business model, capitalist scalability relies on the material and ideological erasure of context-specific dynamics and interdependence relations. Drawing on a notion originally introduced by Mintz (Reference Mintz1985) in his work on the European colonial sugarcane plantations, Tsing (Reference Tsing2012, Reference Tsing2013, Reference Tsing2015) defines scalability as a mode of organizing labor and resource management through the creation of highly replicable units that can be extended to greater scales, without changing the business model. In this article, I propose a linguistic approach to this mode of capitalist valorization. I explore the nexus between translation and scalability and describe how projects of scalable expansion may be disbanded by poetic interruptions, that is, literary gestures and interactional practices whereby ideologies of untranslatability are mobilized as alternatives to intensive agriculture and as temporary disruptions of the hierarchical encompassment of regional parlance under a national linguistic standard.Footnote ¹ I draw on fieldwork in central Italy (Le Marche region) among neorural farmers (i.e., people formerly employed in industrial and service jobs who choose to undertake agroecological ventures) and on literary analysis to discuss how my interlocutors perform displays of untranslatability to achieve nostalgic and economically viable reenactments of vanishing agrolinguistic worlds.

Driven by fantasies of unlimited copycat replication, scalability hinges on presuppositions of perfect commensurability, seamless interchangeability, and on the standardization (and ideological erasure) “of cultural and biological diversity” (Tsing Reference Tsing2012, 507).Footnote ² In this sense, scalability, as a politicoeconomic process of valorization, underwrites a paradox: it is a specific “scale-making ideology” (Irvine Reference Irvine, Carr and Lempert2016, 224) based on the operational denial of “scale” (Carr and Lempert Reference Carr and Lempert2016a, Reference Carr, Lempert, E. Summerso and Michael2016b); put differently, it operates as if differences in size and context did not exist.Footnote ³ From a linguistic standpoint, scalability relies on three aspirations: (i) maximal translatability, which implies perfect equivalence and interchangeability between source text and target text; (ii) total portability, produced through pragmatic automation and massive circulation of decontextualized discursive protocols and textual artifacts; (iii) standardization, understood as the centripetal homogenization of linguistic variation, whereby the dissemination of an hegemonic linguistic variant (deemed as the “national standard”) is combined with the ideological encompassment of divergent regional forms within such standard (Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012, 29; Irvine Reference Irvine, Carr and Lempert2016; Gal and Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2019, 133–134).Footnote ⁴

Like any project, “scalability is never complete” (Tsing Reference Tsing2012, 510) and always requires a “huge amount of work” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 294). Indeed, scalability demands constant organizational efforts aimed at standardizing the workflow through the regimentation of linguistic conduct and labor practices. Its goal is expansion through copycat replication variously achieved via varied processes, which range from discursive entextualization to botanical cloning.Footnote ⁵ While the former technology concerns the circulation of portable procedural templates and textual artifacts that can be easily detached from their original context and transplanted into a new institutional environment (Park and Bucholtz Reference Park and Bucholtz2009; Donzelli Reference Donzelli2023), the latter entails the creation of new plants from a single ancestor by means of replanting cuttings, as was the case for the sugarcane plantations discussed by Mintz (Reference Mintz1985). Scalability also requires a series of semiotic operations, such as the erasure of scalar distinctions, the incorporation (through token-type regimentation) of specific elements into general categories, and the production of an “axis of differentiation,” that is, a schema for the typification and contrastive organization of complementary qualities (Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012, 22; Gal and Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2019, 19). Scalability is, thus, always pitted against alternative projects and divergent centrifugal forces (Tsing Reference Tsing2012).

Drawing on fieldwork in central Italy, this article focuses on a specific language-based configuration of the interplay between scalable and nonscalable elements: namely, the processes of agrolinguistic scalability started after the Second World War and the contemporary spread of neorural livelihoods and niche agri-food markets, which rely on displays of nonscalability mediated by the deployment of regional linguistic variants. To do so, I focus on the complex relationship between two apparently unrelated phenomena: the contemporary back-to-the-land movement, whereby an increasing number of individuals from different social and professional backgrounds seek to reconnect with land-based livelihoods (Istat 2010, 2020; Coldiretti 2017; Coldiretti/Censis 2024) and neodialect poetry, a composite and multigenerational field of literary production—begun in the 1940s and continued through the new millennium—made of poets who elected regional languages (conventionally called “dialects”) as their primary medium of poetic expression (Bonaffini and Serrao Reference Bonaffini and Serrao2001; Brevini Reference Brevini1987, Reference Brevini1990; Dell’Arco and Pasolini Reference Pasolini, Pasolini and dell’Arco1952; Contini Reference Contini1943, Reference Contini1968; Mengaldo Reference Mengaldo1978; Pasolini Reference Pasolini1955).Footnote ⁶

Combining fieldwork among Marchesan neorural farmers with the analysis of poems and metalinguistic theories developed by neodialect poets since the half of the twentieth century, my aim is to highlight the connection between translation and scalability and describe how performances and ideologies of untranslatability may produce poetic and economic rearticulations of two parallel processes: the encompassment of regional parlance under a national linguistic standard and the subsumption of labor under capital.Footnote ⁷ I argue that the analytical juxtaposition of the metapragmatics of untranslatability enacted by neorural farmers and neodialect poets may shed light on the political economy of language in contemporary Italy and thus illuminate the centrality of language within capitalist transformations in Italy and beyond.

In a short treatise titled Irreductions, Latour (Reference Latour[1984] 1993, 158; 1.1.1 and 1.1.3) claims that “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.” Because, continues Latour (Reference Latour[1984] 1993, 62; 1.2.1), “nothing is, by itself, the same as or different from anything else.That is, there are no equivalents, only translations.” Equivalents, thus, are not given but need to be produced and (according to Latour Reference Latour[1984] 1993, 170) without equivalences there is no market. Translation across languages and semiotic fields makes market possible and is a key dispositive of scalability and value production. In her study of supply chain capitalism, Tsing (Reference Tsing2013, Reference Tsing2015) foregrounds the role of translation as a main infrastructure for the rearticulation of contemporary capitalist modes of production, which are based on control over inventory rather than labor. In line with this special issue’s goal, this article is an invitation to take on Latour (Reference Latour[1984] 1993) and Tsing’s (Reference Tsing2013, Reference Tsing2015) insights and examine more closely (and more literally) the role of translation within capitalist worldmaking (Gal Reference Gal2015). By looking at the minutiae of specific acts of translation and at situated performances of untranslatability, we may achieve an understanding of how subjects participate in successful forms of capitalist valorization and simultaneously devise exit strategies from conventional wage labor arrangements, perceived as exploitative and unfulfilling.

Methodology: charting neorural and neodialect intersections

As Gal (Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012, 26), drawing on Agnew (Reference Agnew1986), has masterfully outlined, that between poetry and market is a foundational opposition within Euro-American intellectual history. In what follows, I reflect on how the intersection between translatability and scalability (and their antonyms) produces specific articulations of this opposition. My methodology is somewhat unconventional: I combine traditional linguistic anthropological fieldwork among neorurals with an ethnographically informed reading of the neodialect poems and critical essays. I draw on conversations I had and on the audiovisual data I collected during six years (2018–2024) of intermittent fieldwork in central Italy and on the reading, performed jointly with my Marchesan interlocutors, of neodialect poems.

The analysis of linguistic interactions occurring during farming and marketing activities reveals how informal economic spaces are produced through displays of pragmatic unscriptedness and acts of semantic untranslatability whereby neorural farmers simultaneously produce capitalist value and temporary disruptions of the subsumption of life under capital. These outcomes are related to the literary efforts and ideological work of neodialect poets. I argue that poets such as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), Andrea Zanzotto (1921–2011), Raffaello Baldini (1924–2005), Franco Scataglini (1930–1994), Franco Loi (1930–2021), Emilio Rentocchini (b. 1949), and Gian Mario Villalta (b. 1959), to name only a few, foreshadowed an axis of differentiation around which a series of ontological, politicoeconomic, moral, and aesthetic contrasts have become organized (and fractally replicated) as qualitative schemata for the interpretation of contemporary forms of social and linguistic conduct and neorural value productions. Driven by a reaction against the post-war encompassment of regional linguistic varieties within a national standard and the parallel pragmatic automation of language (Pasolini Reference Pasolini1964), the metapragmatics of untranslatability developed by the neodialect literary experiments has indirectly provided contemporary neoruralists with a “poetic capital” they can now draw on to craft profitable forms of agrolinguistic nonscalability and poetic incommensurability. During my fieldwork, I came across a series of semiotic and interactional practices, which conjure forms of effervescent intersubjectivity and informal “pericapitalist spaces,” located “simultaneously inside and outside capitalism” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 63). These sites, I argue, are variously produced through creative intersemiotic translations, displays of untranslatability, and relatively unscripted exchanges whereby neorural farmers retrieve ways of inhabiting language and craft meaningful social relations, which are both alternative to oppressive centripetal forces and economically advantageous.

Neodialect poets and neorural farmers share a nostalgic and highly reflexive construal of the rural exodus and linguistic transformation that have characterized Italian agrarian peripheries since the late 1940s. The metapragmatics of untranslatability they have elaborated in response is simultaneously aimed at rematerializing the language and subverting the encompassment of regional linguistic variants within standard Italian. Their respective projects are at once related and divergent. Rejecting the modernist “dematerialization of language” (Manning Reference Manning2006, 273) epitomized by the Saussurean separation of “the denotational sign […] from the material world” (Irvine Reference Irvine1989, 248), the neodialect experimentalists focused on asserting the inseparable connection between local referents and their dialect signifiers (Pasolini Reference Pasolini, Pasolini and dell’Arco1952; Scataglini Reference Scataglini1988). To do so, they, somewhat paradoxically, relied on sophisticated forms of translation (across different linguistic varieties) to craft a novel poetic language imbued with highly local (phonological, lexical, and syntactic) features to underscore the polyphonic effervescence of linguistic peripheries and proclaim the untranslatability of regional variants into standard Italian. Neorural farmers show a similar metapragmatic stance vis-à-vis the parallel processes of economic scalability and translational encompassment. Not only they focus on heritage foods and regional agrological varieties, but they also market their hyper-local products using a highly local lexicon and refuse to provide linguistic glosses in standard Italian. My interlocutors opt instead for ostensive definitions and complex forms of intersemiotic translation, offering food samples, suggesting recipes, and engaging in elaborate forms of interaction with their customers. While the neodialect poets are primarily concerned with developing forms of linguistic differentiation to salvage the generative potential of the poetic word (imaginatively epitomized by regional variants) from the sweeping centripetal and homogenizing forces of the language of modernization (standard Italian and its capitalist automation), the neorural farmers are interested in marketing their local products. Unlike the poets’ nostalgic and anticapitalist sabotage of the collusion between centripetal linguistic standardization and intensive agribusiness scalability, the farmers’ reactions to seamless intertranslatability are both an exit strategy from unfulfilling wage-labor arrangements and a project of capitalist valorization. These neorurals’ goals are, however, strictly connected to poets’ endeavors not only because they tap on the materialist semiotic ideology and axis of differentiation developed by poets but also because their pericapitalist experiments stem from the long-term effects of the rural exodus and linguistic hegemonic displacement discussed by the poets.

To illustrate these points, let me provide some ethnographic snapshots of the insurgent interactional and semiotic practices whereby my neorural interlocutors try to recalibrate to their advantage over the hegemonic orders of centripetal scalable standardization.

Cherries, sort of… On agrolinguistic (un-)translatabilities

They look at once familiar and strange, somewhat resembling cherries, yet different. They are smaller, and their iridescent and significantly thinner skin veers from bright vermillion to rich carmine and near-black (Figure 1). Their most distinctive qualities are the dark inner pulp and their tart flavor. For most speakers of standard Italian, the lexical term visciola (pl. visciole) is an empty signifier, a name lacking any specific denotatum. When, speaking with most of my Italian colleagues and acquaintances, I happen to mention that my current fieldwork involves working with neorural farmers specialized in cultivating visciole, I inevitably receive puzzled looks and blank stares. This is not the case, however, when I mention the term to people dwelling in central Italy, where the word visciola is commonly used to refer to what in Linnaean terminology is called Prunus cerasus (i.e., sour cherry), that is, a wild species of Prunus (genus) in the Cerasus (cherry) subgenus considered to be one of the ancestors of cultivated cherries.Footnote ⁸

Figure 1.

Freshly picked visciole. Courtesy of the author 2024.

Visciole are one of the several local ingredients that are increasingly in vogue within gourmet-niche culinary circles in contemporary Italy. In the high-end local food stores proliferating in my current field site in the Ancona and Macerata provinces of Le Marche (a region located on the eastern side of central Italy), bottles of visciola-flavored wine and jars of visciola jam are juxtaposed to other indigenous food items and names: glass containers filled with pickled paccasassi (sea fennel, or Crithmum maritimum), bottles of sapa (a reduction of grape juice, akin to vinegar allegedly used in ancient Roman cuisine), jute bags containing cicerchia (Lathyrus sativus, an ancient legume once common in central and southern Italian peasant cuisine), and so forth (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Regional delicatessens on display in a high-end grocery store in Numana (Ancona province). Courtesy of the author 2023.

While extensive literature (see Beriss Reference Beriss2019 for a recent review) has discussed the worldwide growing market for organic, traditional, and zero-mile foods,Footnote ⁹ this article focuses on a less explored dimension of this phenomenon: the role of language in shaping humans’ agro-ecological imagination and the role of translation (across linguistic codes and semiotic domains) in crafting niche agri-food markets and regional “commodity registers” (Agha Reference Agha2011), as well as in structuring the social lives of their producers and consumers.

As we were driving to inspect the company’s fields during a hot summer morning, Claudia, who is in charge of social media managing for a sea fennel company, began to explain to me the challenges of marketing a product whose vernacular name—paccasassi (literary “rock breakers”)—is completely obscure outside the region and whose edibility has been long forgotten by locals. Typical of coastal ecosystems, paccasassi (a.k.a. C. maritimum in Linnean terminology) is a wild edible plant found throughout the Mediterranean, Pacific, and Atlantic coasts (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Sea fennel. Courtesy of the author 2023.

Since its establishment in 2015, this small artisanal company’s main brand concept has pivoted on using the local term (paccasassi) to launch its flagship product. Commenting on the company’s commercial strategy to “bet it all” on the oil-pickled paccasassi, their most expensive product (selling for about 10 euros a jar), Claudia pointed out how il vasetto—a glass jar in which all the details of the small succulent leaves are clearly visible—works as their name card (biglietto da visita), especially when they deal with American importers who have never encountered the plant or its derived products. The analogy between an object (il vasetto) and a textual artifact (biglietto da visita) is revealing of the labor of intersemiotic translations (across semiotic domains) performed by the neorural entrepreneurs I work with. A similar strategy is at play in the promotional flyer, which displays full color images of possible paccasassi culinary uses: on bruschetta, with focaccia, in a series of salads, etc. The crafting of what Agha (Reference Agha2011) calls a “commodity register,” that is, the task of connecting an unfamiliar token (a jar of pickled paccasassi) with the company’s brand type and with a forgotten social and culinary world, requires complex semiotic procedures and cannot simply rely on verbal language (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012). Claudia further articulated the challenges she faces in marketing a product whose name is unknown, forgotten, or even unintelligible:

Despite these challenges, the neorural entrepreneurs who decided to quit their 9 to 5 jobs to start a new professional life as farmers of these highly local delicatessens firmly insist on using the regional terminology to refer to these hyper-local products. When I asked Giorgio, the cofounder of a family-run wild-cherry-based agricultural company, how does he market his products to customers who are not familiar with the term visciola, he explained to me how, in approaching novices, he mostly relies on nonverbal explanations and on ostensive definitions (i.e., showing the item instead of providing a metalinguistic gloss for it):

A key role is played by the display of the company’s limited production of glass jars filled with fermented sour cherries (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Visciole fermenting in sugar. Cingoli (Macerata province). Courtesy of the author 2024.

As he continues to discuss his marketing and translating techniques, Giorgio describes his two other main procedures: sampling and pairing. He explains how, after showing an emblematic product-token visciole in syrup, he proceeds to create (through pairing) syntagmatic relations with other nonverbal elements (i.e., other food items) and thus forge meaningful tasting connections capable of rendering (through sampling) the sensorial and social world of his signature product: visciola dessert wine:

As I first-hand noticed while observing Giorgio interacting with customers at food festivals and farmers’ markets, his first marketing move is at once a nonverbal attempt at translating the unfamiliar regional term and a food-offering act, in which the core ingredient of his niche production is connected to rural practices of domestic production and food-mediated hospitality, still vivid in the memory of all my Marchesan interlocutors in the 45–85 age range. It is through showing, pairing, and sampling that Giorgio establishes the semantic extension (i.e., referential range) of the term and crafts a (regional) commodity register (Agha Reference Agha2011) wherein to inscribe his products. As revealed by their little gasps of surprise and delight, the natives of the region immediately recognize the social world evoked by the precious dark and viscous content of the jar. “Haaah! Le visciole de nonna!” Exclaimed in awe (and in a distinctive regional accent) a visitor of Giorgio’s stand at the farmers’ market where I first met him. The comment signaled the visitor’s uptake (Austin Reference Austin1962) of the rural sharecropping imaginary that Giorgio sought to evoke through the display of the jar, that is, through a multimodal transductive act: from object, to memory, to utterance.

As was the case for most of central Italy, Marchesan agriculture pivoted on sharecropping (mezzadria). Every sharecropper’s family owned at least one visciolo tree. In June, when the trees were harvested, the fruits would be generally placed in large glass jars and covered with sugar. The jars would be exposed to the sun for about two months and periodically stirred and shaken to facilitate the fermentation process, during which the sugar would dissolve morphing into a dark red syrup. The process, which was generally a prerogative of the older women in the household, would result in a syrupy blend of whole unpitted visciole floating in sweet and tart juice. The product of this informal work of care by women would become a welcoming gift dispensed in parsimonious amounts to the household’s visitors. Like paccasassi hand-picked by women and kids from the rocks along the coast where they spontaneously grow, visciole occupied a distinctive peripheral status in the political economy of sharecropping: the hobby product of a side job aimed at circulating as a gift and as a token of culinary (and picking!) talent. As Roberto, one of my elderly (79 years old) interlocutors, put it: “Visciole and paccasassi could not be bought, they were picked and they were given. But if you wanted to buy them… well they were not for sale.” In a similar fashion, recalling her childhood summer memories of paccassassi picking, Margherita now in her early 60s, described how her great-uncle would give her and her cousins a boat ride to the most secluded and inaccessible beaches along the coast for them to pick from the rocks the thick, fleshy leaves needed to prepare the pickles (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Margherita and her cousins picking paccasassi along the Conero Coast, early seventies. Courtesy of Margherita Guarnerio.

As Tsing points out (Tsing Reference Tsing2013, 21), capitalism is incapable of producing most of what it needs to function, it “depends on converting stuff created in varied ways […] into capitalist commodities” and thus has to rely on translation. To turn visciole wine and paccasassi pickles into commodities, the people I work with deploy complex forms of intersemiotic translation across modalities and semiotic fields whereby gift/hobby products are turned into meaningful and intelligible desirable commodities. To be successful, however, these operations require preserving some of the informal semiotic activities and gift-like sociality that originally surrounded these products. An informal and gift-like quality strongly infuses social interactions around the production and distribution of these delicatessens and is key in turning them into regional commodities through crafting connections between a local food item and “fragments of sensorial experience, specific social activities, modes of conduct, fashions of speaking” (Agha Reference Agha2011, 27). My interlocutors are often busy organizing eventi (“events”): afternoon hikes in the woods culminating with an al fresco dinner or aperitif at a panoramic location, participation (with food and wine sampling) in fundraising events for the most diverse causes, outdoor activities, and hands-on nature explorations to enhance children’s botanical knowledge and environmental awareness, etc. Although the commercial gain is generally minimal, these social and linguistic activities are fundamental in producing both regional commodity formulations and pericapitalist linguistic spaces, which both farmers and their customers seem to greatly appreciate.

The several small-sized companies currently burgeoning across the Marchesan countryside aim at revitalizing old culinary practices that had consistently remained outside of the commercial sphere by turning them into niche gastronomic commodities. To do so, they forge a regional commodity register whereby their activities are made at once financially profitable and existentially meaningful. Key in this process is the production of a representational economy of qualitative incommensuration centered on acts of semiotic labor, which combine proclaims of linguistic untranslatability and material gestures of sensuous translation. To understand how these practices and ideologies of (un-)translatability inform the nexus between language, ecological imagination, and neorural revivals, we should turn to the interplay between linguistic standardization and agricultural scalability within Italy’s social and economic life since the aftermath of WWII.

Linguistic standardization, rural exodus, and neodialect poetry

Renowned for its great linguistic diversity and fragmented for centuries into a multiplicity of city-states and regional polities, Italy became a unified state (under the Savoy Dynasty) only in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is estimated that when the newly unified kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, only less than 10% of the population mastered the national language, while the rest of the country spoke linguistic varieties, commonly referred to as “dialects” (Maiden and Parry Reference Maiden and Parry1997; Tosi Reference Tosi2001). For almost a century, most of the population only spoke local languages and had limited knowledge of Italian. The situation changed dramatically after the end of World War II, due to a series of factors, such as compulsory schooling and military service, the rise of broadcast media (television and radio), as well as the unprecedented language contact prompted by the massive rural exodus and the migration from northeastern and southern Italy to the industrial North (De Mauro Reference De Mauro1970).

Within a few decades, Italy shifted from a context in which “dialects” were the most common form of everyday spoken communication to a situation in which they became relegated to informal and in-group situations and stigmatized as the parlance of lower classes and elderly people (Cavanaugh Reference Cavanaugh2004; Berruto Reference Berruto, Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers2018). Interestingly, it was precisely during the 1940s and 1950s, that a new generation of prominent Italian writers and poets, stimulated by the fast-paced industrialization and the erosion of entrenched sociolinguistic ecologies, began to turn to local linguistic varieties as the main source of literary expression. Starting in the 1940s, various poets began to express a renewed interest in regional codes and colloquial registers, giving form to the heterogenous and long-lasting (till the present day) field of “neodialect” poetry (Brevini Reference Brevini1990). Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), one of the most renowned Italian writers and public intellectuals, played a key role in spearheading the post-war neodialect trend. Spread over three-plus decades, Pasolini’s efforts to revitalize local languages and poetic traditions include his own poetic production in Friulan (Pasolini Reference Pasolini1942), a series of critical essays in Italian (Pasolini Reference Pasolini, Siti and Laude1999), curatorial works—see the two major poetic anthologies he edited in 1952 (with Mario Dell’Arco) and in 1955, as well as a nearly ethnological enquiry, published in three different issues of the journal Il Belli (AA.VV 1952-1953) with the title “Our Referendum.” Here, 12 prominent poets writing in different regional languages were invited to respond to three questions on their literary and social choices.Footnote ¹⁰

As several literary critics and poets have highlighted, this dialect revival was all but a naïve return to an original mother tongue (Benvegnù Reference Benvegnù2017; Brevini Reference Brevini1990; Pasolini Reference Pasolini, Siti and Laude[1951] 1999, 375; Villalta Reference Villalta1995a; Zanzotto Reference Zanzotto2011, 510). Rather, it was the outcome of a highly deliberate and reflexive metalinguistic meditation on the socioeconomic frictions and linguistic tensions triggered by the parallel standardization of the Italian language (De Mauro Reference De Mauro1970) and the mechanization of rural labor aimed at scaling up production (Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg1990).

In several of his critical essays, Pasolini (Reference Pasolini, Siti and Laude1999) framed his neodialect call as a deliberate ‘regression’ (regresso) along the “degrees of being […] toward a language closer to the world (una lingua più vicina al mondo)” (Pasolini Reference Pasolini, Pasolini and dell’Arco1952, CXVIII–CXIX). Pasolini’s (Reference Pasolini1942) groundbreaking literary debut was, indeed, a collection of poems in Friulan, a language he did not speak natively nor fluently (Pasolini Reference Pasolini, Pasolini and dell’Arco1952, CXVIII). Imbued with political and psychoanalytic overtones, Pasolini’s (Reference Pasolini, Siti and Laude[1951] 1999, 375) “regression” from standard Italian to Friulan mediated a different mode of experiencing the world and inhabiting language, which may be understood as a process of identification with the linguistic and phenomenological experience of rural speakers to advance the poet’s awareness of reality and the peasant’s political consciousness.Footnote ¹¹ Another more contemporary Northeastern poet, Gian Mario Villalta (born in 1959), often declared his lack of fluency in the local parlance (Benvegnù Reference Benvegnù2017). The Ancona native Franco Scataglini drew on the language of Dante, and other prominent Vulgar and troubadour poets of the Middle Ages (e.g., Guido Cavalcanti, Jacopo da Lentini, and Jacopone da Todi) and the Renaissance (Olimpo da Sassoferrato) to distill a linguistic alternative to standard Italian, which he deemed unfit for poetic expression (Scataglini Reference Scataglini1988; Tandello Reference Tandello2010; Mengaldo Reference Mengaldo and Paolo2022).

Despite their many differences, neodialect poets share a common interest in a poetic medium capable of expressing a linguistic and sociopolitical resistance against the centripetal homogenization and loss of agrolinguistic diversity of post-war Italy. Theirs is a quest for a primal and originative word whereby to convey the increasingly evanescent experience of a direct connection between reality and language. The central theme of the disappearing socioeconomic and agrolinguistic worlds thus becomes a meditation on the (un-)translatability between linguistic codes and a reflection on the incommensurability between poetic language and the utilitarian techno-automatized idioms of scalable production.Footnote ¹²

Two decades after his 1942 poetic debut, Pasolini (Reference Pasolini1964) published, in the Communist periodical Rinascita, a passionate metalinguistic appraisal of Italy’s sociolinguistic context and a resolute accusation of what he defined as Italiano medio (‘average Italian’): a service lingua franca that lacked a community of native speakers and was reduced to the mere referential function (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960) of exchanging information as if it were currency. Pasolini’s (Reference Pasolini1964) dread for the average Italian was not simply motivated by his critical political stance toward the increasing marginalization of the spoken word and the social world of subaltern classes, but it also derived from a poetic concern for the centripetal pull of linguistic automatization. “Average Italian,” in Pasolini’s (Reference Pasolini1964: 35) view, was not a real national language but a “technical sub-language,” based on a metapragmatics of translational encompassment, whereby regional linguistic varieties could be subsumed within a maximally instrumental and minimally expressive national koiné.

Crafting nonscalability through acts of poetic untranslatability

Inspired by Pasolini’s poetic production and metalinguistic reflections, other post-war neodialect poets have developed a variety of literary responses to standard Italian’s linguistic scalability and translational encompassment. The widespread neodialect practice of autotranslation, for example, entails the juxtaposition of two or three versions of the same poem and is aimed at providing a display (at the same time material and linguistic) of the incommensurable and nonunilinear relationship between Italian and “dialect.” An example is Gian Mario Villalta’s (Reference Villalta1995b) collection of poems, Vose de vose/Voci di Voci (‘Voices of Voices’), composed in a Venetian–Friulan linguistic variant spoken in his village (Visinale). By providing almost every poem with a critical gloss and a translation, Villalta confronts his readers with juxtapositions of texts and lexicons meant to produce interruptions and frictions between the different linguistic variants. In so doing, Villalta foregrounds the irreducible and nonscalable existence of the local parlance and of its related ecological imagination, reasserting Pasolini’s conception of language as a vibrant core of political and social existence (Benvegnù Reference Benvegnù2017, 441).

In a similar yet different way, Franco Scataglini, one of the most renowned poets operating between the 1960s and the 1990s in the very region where I currently work with neorural farmers, articulated his own poetics of nonscalability by combining precarious forms of interlinguistic calibration with the deployments of poetic analogies framed through tight quatrains of septenarian verses. Deeply and explicitly influenced by Pasolini, to whom he dedicated a section of his poem Carta Laniena (Scataglini Reference Scataglini[1982] 2022, 223), Scataglini (Reference Scataglini1988) aimed at restoring a meaningful connection with locality, understood as the linguistic consciousness of the material existence of things in the world, or, in his own words: “the profound sense of saying in which the naming of things is tout court their essence” (il senso profondo del dire in cui la nominazione delle cose e’ tout court la loro sostanza).

Scataglini’s poetic oeuvre is characterized by the systematic insertion, in a central Italian substratum, of regional voices and expressions derived from Anconitan lexical, morphosyntactic, and phonological features. Namely, the degemination of consonant sounds (sepia instead of the standard Italian seppia, “cuttlefish”), the elision of final syllables (apocope), the inversion of sounds in a word (metathesis): drento instead of dentro (‘inside’), the lack of morphological agreement between plural noun phrases and singular third-person verbs.Footnote ¹³ Although he departed from more radical forms of neodialect linguistic alterity and bilingualism (such as the practice of auto-translation), Scataglini preserved a sense of linguistic and ontological otherness through the insertion, in his generally brief compositions made of one or two four-line stanzas, of one or two highly regional (and largely unintelligible) lexical items, to which he would assign a pivotal role in the text. A case in point is Vita e scritura ([1977] 2022, 70), which Scataglini (Reference Scataglini1988) considered to be his poetic manifesto, as well as an account of his formation as a poet through his own struggle with the bilingual environment of his youth.

In comparing himself to a humble bird (a clumsy turkey lost in the rain), the poet exposes different gradients of dialectal otherness: from the most foreign-sounding dindo (‘turkey’) and biatolar (‘lament’), to the near-Italian sbai (‘error’), and scancelature (‘erasures’). This work of interlinguistic tuning and calibrated translation is at once a display of “vernacular specificity” (Tandello Reference Tandello2010, 233) and a metalinguistic approximation, through errors and deletions, to an ultimate poetic language. As Scataglini (Reference Scataglini1988) pointed out in an extensive reflection on the relation between Italian and Anconitan, the poem also offers an account of the literary and linguistic travails of his youth, when, as he initially tried to write in his regional language, he was confronted with his teachers’ reprimands, which led him to suppress the language of his daily existence and simultaneously erase the painful mistakes of his failed poetic production in standard Italian:

This process of self-censorship, continued Scataglini (Reference Scataglini1988), finally came to an end when he realized that his path to poetic expression required learning how to inhabit, through processes of interlinguistic calibration, the liminal and precarious space produced by the difference between Italian and his own interpretation of the vernacular. Furthermore, by anchoring the existential meaning of his poems to hyper-local terms and/or referents, posited as untranslatable into standard Italian, Scataglini used the vernacular as a tool of analogic expression, whereby subjective affective states and intensities are objectified as elements of a specific physical and linguistic ecology. Rather than being mediated by elaborate adjectival structures, the description of subjective qualitative experiences is consigned to vernacular noun phrases. This procedure is exemplified in the poem below (Scataglini Reference Scataglini[1977] 2022, 107), in which, by means of a simile (i.e., a direct comparison between two unlike things), the poet explicitly compares his lovelorn self to the fishbone of a mugellina (a local fish).

In another poem titled Insetto de Passió (‘insect of passion’), Scataglini (Reference Scataglini[1977] 2022, 140) compares himself to a June bug (ziza, in Anconitan), likening his dependence from a tenderly sadistic lover to that of June bugs local kids used to play with by tying a fine thread around the insects’ bodies. Understanding these fragments of lived experience and translating the regional lexicon that intersperses these poems require not a process of semantic decodification, but an existential proximity with the vernacular and nearly onomatopoeic linguistic environment, made of “small snails perched on purple grass” (C’è i bumbardeli apesi/in cima a l’erba viola; Scataglini Reference Scataglini[1977] 2022, 84), “flocks of seagulls fishing large sardines” (sta suspeso un affolo/de cocali che spiga/sardoncini; Scataglini Reference Scataglini[1982] 2022, 162), “dolphins-decapitated cuttlefish” (la sepia delfinata; Scataglini Reference Scataglini[1982] 2022, 223), “half-dead shrimp mantises with their legs scampering” (nochie che meze morte/sgrícula co’le zampe; Scataglini Reference Scataglini[1977] 2022, 74), etc. In this sense, the combination of self-enclosed quatrain stanzas with the analogical procedure variously realized through vernacular metaphors and onomatopoeic similes at once seeks to rematerialize language and conjure a sense of vernacular linguistic incommensurability and nonscalable life forms.

I argue that these poetic assertions of linguistic and ontological irreduction foreshadow the neorural displays of untranslatability discussed earlier. By hindering the encompassment of local (agro-)linguistic varieties and practices within higher-level national orders, these poetic procedures have, somewhat paradoxically, charted out “frameworks of semiotic engagement” (Agha Reference Agha2011, 25) wherein contemporary neorural farmers may craft economically profitable and existentially meaningful alternatives to intensive farming. Let us now return to them.

Free thinkers … On exit strategies and unscripted interactions around words and things

On a hot summer afternoon, I was picking visciole near Osimo with a rather heterogenous group of full-time and part-time farmers. As we were laboring over the same tree, Giancarlo (now in his early sixties) began to tell me the story of how, once he turned 50, he quit his job as a “commercial accountant” (revisiore contabile) to become a “free thinker” (libero pensatore). Despite their differences (in age, gender, social and educational background, etc.), the Marchesan farmers I work with share similar professional and existential trajectories: after inheriting a small plot of land from their family, they abandoned their jobs (or prospective employment opportunities) in the secondary or tertiary sector to start a new career as independent small farmers.Footnote ¹⁴ In every single conversation I had with my interlocutors about their professional trajectories, farming (be it full-time or part-time) was contrasted with wage labor and presented as a realm of personal independence and autonomous decision-making. Giancarlo’s account (from which the excerpt below is drawn) well conveys this existential posture.Footnote ¹⁵ Through an impressive historical parable, he compared his back-to-the-land trajectory with that of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (c. 519–c. 430 BC), a Roman patrician and military leader who lived during the early Roman Republic and became an emblem of civic virtue.

“I did like Cincinnatus.” Osimo, June 18, 2024.

Portrayed as a “temporary dictator” who alternated serving as a valiant military commander to withdrawing to his cherished life as a small farmer, Cincinnatus epitomizes the ideals of independence, understatement, and autonomy that my interlocutors associate with farming.

Giancarlo’s narrative is evocative of how most of my interlocutors see their existential choice as a way of avoiding (dependent) labor, or, even more radically, enacting a “strategy of refusal,” a theme that has long been discussed by (neo-)workerist theorists (Tronti Reference Tronti[1965] 1980; Fumagalli Reference Fumagalli, Fuchs and Fisher2015). Several of my interlocutors (in their mid-twenties to early-thirties) are at the beginning of their professional lives; others (in their early to mid-forties) have turned to full-time farming after a first part of their lives spent in different professions, while others are retirees who, after several decades spent as factory workers, are finally able to devote more time to what used to be their side job/hobby: farming. As revealed by the local term metalmezzadro—roughly translatable as ‘metalsharecropper’, a portmanteau of metalmeccanico (‘metalworker’) and mezzadro (‘sharecropper’)—a mixed pattern of livelihood has been widespread in the region: many of my middle-aged and elderly interlocutors used to combine a regular factory job (as metal factory workers) with more informal types of agricultural engagement, suggesting a longstanding connection between farming and personal autonomy (Wolf Reference Wolf1969) and between informality and rural revenues.Footnote ¹⁶

Regardless of explicit pronouncements, the ambiguous blurring of the boundary between work and nonwork, which imbues the lives of the neorural farmers I study, is produced through situated moments of interaction, characterized by a marked degree of discursive unscriptedness and regional parlance. Whether recorded in the fields or in local farmers’ markets, the interactions in my corpus (approximately 150 hours of recordings) reveal strong parallels between the informal quality of (relatively) unregimented agricultural labor and the interactional effervescence in people’s modes of talk. While they manually pick visciole or paccasassi without the aid of noisy mechanical tools, the friends and acquaintances, who generally gather as a casual work team during the harvesting season, chat and joke, exchange farming tips and intimate narratives, gossip about common acquaintances, and recall the old times of sharecropping (mezzadria) social life, in an unpredictable succession of topics and affective intensities. Without any predetermined work plan, people choose a tree or a plant to harvest and talk as they steadily and somewhat distractedly pick cherries, their attention’s focus effortlessly shifting from manual to conversational labor (Figures 6 and 7). All this interactional activity is characterized by the deployment of markedly regional linguistic variants and is performed in a colloquial mode.

Figure 6.

Harvesting visciole in Osimo (Ancona Province). Courtesy of the author 2024.

Figure 7.

Harvesting visciole in Osimo (Ancona Province). Courtesy of the author 2024.

In the fragment of rural conversational activity and labor reproduced in the excerpt below (“Sugo del batte”), Gino begins to recollect a local recipe, for the benefit of three other local pickers and myself (an outsider). Interspersing the narrative with regional lexical terms and syntactic constructs, the participants recollect cooking and commensal practices of their youth, when major events in the farming cycle were marked by special communal meals. Back in the days, farmers would make the best of food scraps and turn them into fancy meals, a case in point was the “sugo del batte,” a special sauce made with chicken or duck entrails and used as a special dressing for the pasta-based meal communally consumed to celebrate the end of threshing (batte in the local language), which at that time was done manually.

“Sugo del batte.” Osimo, June 18, 2024.

In the interaction, the hiatus between the here-and-now and the there-and-then of a seemingly lost rural world is simultaneously emphasized and blurred. On the one hand, the imperfective tense and the ditransitive impersonal constructions (the so-called Italian impersonal-passive SI, which is here replaced by the regional variant SE) foreground the habitual and iterative character of the actions described and the semantic prominence of the recipe’s referents (the ingredients expressed by regional terms) over the human agents, conjuring an idyllic elsewhere located in a nonspecific past (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981, 225). On the other hand, by being embedded within an activity (picking visciole) associated with traditional rurality and by deploying a series of regional terms (ragai, zampo, ruspe, scorticavano, magnava, coceva, arosto, ciccetto) indexical of the participants’ membership in the local community of speech and practice, the narrative operates a “transduction” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Rosman and Rubel2003) into the present of embodied dispositions, cultural values, and social structures of the sharecropping lifeworld, which is, thus, not translated into present-day conceptual frameworks, but actualized through material and linguistic practices.Footnote ¹⁷ As was the case for the neodialect poetic procedures and the neorurals’ showing, sampling, and pairing practices discussed earlier.

This is particularly apparent at line 13, when Gino seeks confirmation (of the correctness of the recipe) from Maria (a fellow female picker) by addressing her with the exquisitely local title of vergara (‘landlady’), thus momentarily eliding the distinction between the here-and-now and the there-and-then and superimposing the sharecropping social structures onto the contemporary moment.

The capacity of regional and relatively obsolete linguistic expressions to materialize, once embedded within relevant farming practices, agrolinguistic social worlds nostalgically perceived as vanishing is even more apparent in the next excerpt. Here, Sandro draws an imaginary (“as if”) comparison (at line 3) between the leftovers from the cherries we were picking that day and the political economy of scarcity of the old times, when some people would survive by gleaning the grains dropped by harvesters. The combination of proximal deictics (adesso ‘now’ and questi qui ‘these here’) with a hypothetical conditional clause (introduced by the “as if” conjunction) evokes a comparative horizon of both continuity and discontinuity with former rural practices.

“Le purette da Monsano.” Osimo, June 18, 2024.

The use of regional terms and morphosyntactic constructions, such as the lack of agreement between (third person) plural subject and verb (inflected in the third person singular, see lines 6, 10, 11, and 15), is key for recuperating a lived sense of yesterday’s moral economy, of the social relations that underlay it, and even of its protagonists’ voices, as in the direct reported speech at line 14.

My interlocutors share a strong commitment to forms of agricultural labor (such as picking visciole by hand) that are not scalable and are targeted at “hyper-niche production,” as Francesco (one of the cofounders of a local artisanal company for the cultivation and transformation of sea fennel), once put it. They enjoy this approach to farming and most of them do not seem interested in scaling up and transitioning toward intensive forms of agribusiness. This commitment can be explained, at least in part, by their affective and ideological attachment to regional language, which, once combined with old-school farming practices, has the transductive capacity of actualizing seemingly vanishing social worlds and their related “attentional practices,” that is, embodied dispositions and “activity-specific ways of paying attention” (Duranti Reference Duranti2009, 212; see also Goodwin Reference Goodwin1994; La Mattina Reference La Mattina2023). The production of nonscalability, through acts and ideologies of (un-)translatability, is, however, also an effective form of capitalist valorization, as revealed by my previous analysis of marketing and commodity formulation practices.