"The spoken language is governed by practice, the literary language by tradition: both practice and tradition are inauthentic elements, applied to reality, not expressions of it. Or, better, they express a reality that is not a national reality; they express the historical reality of the bourgeoisie, which from the first decades of (national) unification until today has not known to identify itself with the whole of Italian society."

(Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Heretical Empiricism. Trans. by Louise K. Barnett and Ben Lawton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1988 4.)
**

La nostra epoca e caratterizzata da questa contraddizione: da una parte abbiamo bisogno che tutto quel che viene deto sia immediatamente traducibile in altre lingue; dall’altra abbiamo la coscienza di che ogni lingua e un sistema di pensiero a se stante, intraducibile per definizione.

"Our era is characterized by this contradiction: On one side we profess that all is being said can be immediately translatable; on the other hand we are aware that every language is a system of thought by itself, not easy to translate by definition"

G Guarnieri translating Calvino, the italian^

via X