“Libro italiano come pochi altri libri di lingua italiana lo sono": Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and the Language of "Italianness"

When in 1941 Bompiani published the Italian translation of Christ in Concrete (1939) by Pietro di Donato, Elio Vittorini’s introduction stated that “intimamente, spiritualmente, lo vedrà bene il lettore, è libro italiano come pochi altri libri di lingua italiana lo sono. Italiano è il sentimento che, di vertebra in vertebra, lo percorre.” What Bompiani and Vittorini detected as distinctly “Italian” in Christ in Concrete was also the specific pulse of Di Donato’s language, that Fred Gardaphé has described as “neither Italian nor English, but an amalgam of the two.” The sense of precarious in-betweenness that permeates the book is in fact a direct result of di Donato’s linguistic strategies, based on a complex procedure of (never fully completed) self-translation and aimed at representing the paradoxical location of Italian Americans, situated as they were in the 1920s and 1930s at the margins of American society but at the same time working at the very heart of its cities, even sacrificing their lives for the (re-) construction of modern USA before and during the Great Depression.