Incontri al Corso 18 – Theresia Prammer

As part of the event series INCONTRI AL CORSO 18, the current scholarship holder at Casa di Goethe, Theresia Prammer, will present her project ‘Die andere Sprache’ (The Other Language) in an open dialogue with Gregor H. Lersch and the audience.

“Why do I write in dialect?

Dante, Petrarca and Der-mit-den-zehn-Tagen

wrote in Tuscan.

I follow their example.”

Giacomo Noventa: Versi e poesie, 1956

“L’altra letteratura”, or “the other literature”, is the term used by the critic and editor Franco Brevini to describe the Italian poetry he has celebrated in major editions – works that emerged from the margins, outside the canon of the standard national language. Always steadfastly resistant to linguistic purism, poets such as Tonino Guerra and Giacomo Noventa countered the Petrarchan-influenced standard national language with ‘the power of the moles’ (Tonino Guerra), whilst in authors such as Franco Loi and Raffaello Baldini the choral-carnivalesque element predominates. From genuinely lyrical voices (Franco Scataglini) to the great ‘storytellers’, from realists through satirists to avant-gardists, dialect in Italy reveals itself as a highly specialised keyboard with many stylistic registers. Many of the authors who used dialect as an aesthetic device have themselves since become classics and have shaped entire generations after them. But who were the protagonists of ‘poesia dialettale’ and what future lies ahead for it?

Every day, as the Sicilian Ignazio Buttitta, who died in 1997, observed, the guitar of dialect loses a string. Theresia Prammer is spearheading an anthology project entirely dedicated to preserving the cultural memory of Italian dialects in verse. She aims to translate names such as Virgilio Giotti, Franca Grisoni, Tonino Guerra, Franco Loi and others – who, alongside Pasolini and Zanzotto, are still little known in German-speaking countries – into German, whilst also exploring the respective dialects as literary languages of Italy.

Theresia Prammer, born in 1973, studied Romance languages in Vienna and lives as an author, translator and event organiser in Berlin and Vienna. She writes essays on contemporary poetry and lectures at the Institut für Sprachkunst (Institute for Language Arts). In 2020, she founded the Dante Centre for Poetry and Poetics. Her most recent publications are her edition of Giovanni Pascoli’s poems (Nester, Wallstein 2024) and the volume Lectura Dantis. Zeitgenössische Dichtung im Dialog mit Dantes Commedia (2025).

With the kind support of the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.