Linguistic revision

In a passage in the Appendix to his Report on the question of the unified language (1869), the elderly Manzoni recalls his own labours while writing his novel, from 1821 onwards. His labours were those of “a non-Tuscan writer who had started to write a work that was half-historical and half-invented, with the firm idea of composing it if possible in a language that was actually spoken, but whose mind was automatically assailed by his own expressions which, however well-suited to the concept, were nonetheless from his own vernacular, or a foreign language, or even from Latin, and of course he chased them away as with temptations”. Manzoni’s problem, with his two “mother tongues”, Milanese and French, was to find a language for the prose of his novel: a common Italian language, popular and conversational rather than the noble and refined language of tradition (the language used also in Ortis, Foscolo’s epistolary novel). The language of Fermo e Lucia was eclectic, a mix of Tuscanisms, Lombardisms, Gallicisms and even Latinisms (as the author complained in his second Introduzione, written in 1823). In the rewriting of his draft, Manzoni went from an artificial language to a real one, the Tuscan language, which he learned by working intensively as annotator of Tuscan, Milanese and French dictionaries, and by reading numerous texts in Tuscan, especially humorous texts and those inspired by popular tradition. But this new language (which Manzoni described as “Milanese Tuscan”) was still a “bookish” kind of language. It was only during a third phase, described by Manzoni as a “rinsing in the Arno”, that his novel acquired its definitive linguistic form, modelled on the spoken Tuscan of the time and prevalently Florentine. In this phase (and in particular towards the end of the 1830s, near the time of the illustrated edition), Manzoni turned to the new friends he had made during his journey to Tuscany in 1827. He was also assisted by Emilia Luti, who lived with Manzoni’s family as governess to his daughters but was also a very useful source of spoken Florentine.