Mario Montalbetti and the Nightmare of Language
“I suppose I always knew I didn’t come here to have a good time. But after four years, language has become what history was to Stephen Dedalus: a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”
-MARIO MONTALBETTI
“I was never aware of another option but to question everything,” wrote the linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky. His former philosophy student, the celebrated poet Mario Montalbetti, would probably attest to the same experience. Both Montalbetti and Chomsky share a general distrust of language and its potential for creating meaning, a distrust which may derive from their careers as linguists or may have driven them toward that career from the beginning. Chomsky’s distrust of language was channeled into a life of political activism, of exposing the lies and half-truths which politicians and journalists can disguise with jargon and syntax. For Montalbetti, the more urgent problem (the nightmare from which he cannot escape) has always been language itself, and for that he writes poetry, either to wake up from the nightmare or submerge himself within it as deeply as possible.
Montalbetti doesn’t believe in certainties, because the nature of language itself makes them impossible. Meaning is not something that can be shared directly and exactly. It can only be created in an indirect and subjective manner that…
