Linguistic Diversity in the Border City of Split: Literary Representation of Multilingualism in Esilio by Enzo Bettiza and its Croatian Translation

ABSTRACT

In this article, the Croatian translation of Enzo Bettiza’s autobiography, Esilio (“The Exile”), originally written in Italian, is analysed. Bettiza, himself bilingual (Italian, Croatian), was born in pre-war Split and lived in Dalmatia until 1945. His autobiographical accounts describe the Split of 1930s as a multicultural and multilingual space but at the same time, implicitly, demonstrate how multilingualism (including the use of linguonyms) can be disputed and defined as a means of nationalism and colonialism, which is proved by the analysis of fierce discussions about this book in Croatia. It is demonstrated in this article how multilingualism is represented both in the source and target languages, Italian and Croatian, and what consequences it has for the process of mediation.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• Multilingualism
• Dalmatian Literature
• Enzo Bettiza
• Croatian Language
• Sociolinguistic Settings

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

2 In the paper, English quotations from Bettiza’s novel are given after the Italian original (Bettiza 1996a) and are translated by the author of the article.

3 Spalato and Zara are Italian names for the towns (and are thus used by the Bettiza in his book), whereas Split and Zadar are the towns’ Croatian names.

4 When the Republic of Venice started to rule in Dalmatia, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the population of the coastal cities, like Zadar and Split, was already linguistically mixed with Romance and Slavic idioms.

5 I use quotation marks “” when referring to languages as umbrella terms grouping all possible varieties.

6 The same applies to the situation of the fifteenth century in Dalmatian urban centres. As underlined by Sadovski-Kornprobst (2021, 221), “there was no clear social division between allegedly higher-standing Romance- and lower-standing Slavic-speakers.”

7 The term was not used in the Northern Croatia (around Zagreb), as the linguonym slovenski prevailed, but in the eighteenth century the term horvatski emerges (Stolac 1996).

8 There were some other names commonly used in Italian (like lingua dalmata, lingua s(c)lava and cro(v)ata), but they were much less frequent.

9 Bettiza only once uses the term Chakavian and never the term Shtokavian. He prefers dialetto croato spalatino (Croatian Split dialect) (Bettiza 1996a, 152) and dialetto croato (Croatian dialect) (Bettiza 1996a, 153, 248).