DescriptionMy dissertation clarifies the psychological importance of words and language in Dolores Prato's works Giù la piazza non c'è nessuno and Le ore. An analysis of these works helps to demonstrate the decisive impact that language had on Prato's perception of her childhood. Fortunately, this analysis was made lucid by the "unfortunate" editorial cuts that Natalia Ginzburg made in Giù la piazza non c'è nessuno as published in 1980.
For both editorial conviction and personal ideas on what literature is, Ginzburg decided to reduce the original manuscript by two thirds and in the process eliminated most of the linguistic richness of the author's original manuscript. This reduction clearly demonstrates Ginzburg's benightedness of the psychological involvement that Prato's childhood language had in her impulse to start writing in the first place.
Prato's negation of her childhood language, and later recuperation of that language in the original manuscript resulted in Prato rediscovering her identity, i.e., the identity of her childhood. In fact, to recuperate her childhood Prato reconciled herself with her past and in the process regained the language of Treia, the small village where she spent the first ten years of her life. The prohibition of the Treia dialect at Prato's local boarding school and the editorial cuts made by Natalia Ginzburg were both done for reasons of linguistic prestige. Therefore, Prato's boarding school linguistic proscriptions as well as these editorial interdictions represent "violent acts" against the maintenance, recuperation and rediscovery of that childhood identity.
Ultimately, given the history of publishing houses at the time the book was published, without Natalia Ginzburg's editorial cuts the book would have never come out. Therefore, while we can debate the type of cuts that were made, what we cannot debate is that without Ginzburg's drastic reduction of Prato's book it never would have come to light.