Letter to A
Not surprisingly, whatever merits my work may have, they are definitely “obscured” (the darkening of my work in Friuli is not only visible but also manufactured) by linguistic politics. For the agencies that get all the financing from Rome, my work is very much an inconvenience. These agencies work on the assumption that Friulian has to be standardized and unified, and that therefore any variant from what they regard as koiné is a hindrance and has to be given the thumbs down. And my Friulian doesn't conform—and very much deliberately so, since my view is simple: that if you put on a pedestal one variant of the language, then all other variants suffer and, through lack of recognition or non-use, in time they will go the way of the dodo. (I have no objection to Central Friulian, by the way; none at all: I just don't like the fact that Western Friulian is not given proper recognition. Even my argument that by far the greatest poet Friuli has ever produced—Pier Paolo Pasolini—used my brand of Friulian, not Central Friulian, as his poetic medium, even this argument doesn't work.
Meantime, though, I just carry on.
My Milton work, by the way, sort of takes off from Blake's claim that “Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.” Totally agree with Blake. Pretty hard to deny that—if poetic intensity means anything—Milton is at his best when he he tells us about the devil and his mischiefs and—especially—his seduction of Eve in Books 4, 9, and 10 of PL. (That's why, btw, Paradise Regained is not really in my sights right now.) Same can be said about Dante: he is at his best, poetically, when he tosses in hell characters (like Francesca da Rimini, Count Ugolino, and Ulysses) whom he finds very attractive and appealing despite—or maybe because of—their nonconformity.
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