Take a Norwegian poet who speaks little or no English. Send that poet to live in a tiny, half-abandoned village in Mayo for a year. Then ask the poet to recall his/her experience. What is the result likely to be? Probably a gentle, subjective book that is strong on atmosphere and colour but weak when it attempts to draw sweeping conclusions about Ireland, the Irish or, indeed, "the real Ireland".
Such a book is poet Harry Clifton's On the Spine of Italy, recounting a year spent in what he himself calls a "demoralised village" high up in the mountains in the central Italian region of Abruzzo (the Abruzzi). Clifton and his wife, novelist Deirdre Madden , went to the Abruzzo in search of an environment, a "static atmosphere" in which to write. They found that and much more, ending up their year (and the book) genuinely grateful for the "good thing our life had been there". Notwithstanding both the obvious handicaps posed by self-professed shortcomings in Italian and the peculiar nature of his village, Clifton's ability to observe accurately and his enthusiasm for the "freezing iron of necessity, with real energies flowing through it" that Abruzzo represents for him make this book one that can be read with pleasure by Italophile or non-Italophile alike.
The sub-title, "A Year in the Abruzzi", immediately prompted fears of an Italian re-run of Peter Mayle's patronising, ill-informed and arrogant monsterpiece, A Year In Provence. Fortunately, this is far from the case. Even allowing for mistaken perceptions, Clifton is too sensitive, too intelligent to sink to that type of "survey of Italian life by British authors looking through a haze of condescension brought on by food and wine" which he cites early on.
Clifton may well insist on referring to the Abruzzo region as the "South" when, in fact, Italians consider it to be in central Italy. He may well have believed that old chestnut suggesting that "only on television is there a standard Italian" since everyone still speaks "the dialect of their region, incomprehensible to each other".
Our Norwegian friend out in Mayo could well make the same mistakes. He, too, might believe his village to have been in the "South" and also believe that Dubliners have difficulty understanding people from Donegal, Clare or Kerry. All nonsense. Modern Italian is spoken by everyone, its dominance re-inforced by post-war educational programmes long before the advent of television.
SUCH mistakes matter little in the context of a book which so fully embraces the hardships of mountain life in Abruzzo, a point underlined by the foreword, which claims that "the greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world" (Wallace Stevens). Lest this make Clifton sound like a latter-day follower of Rousseau, it should be pointed out that his accounts of village life do not depict a bucolic, rural myth of comely maidens dancing in the piazza. He describes the triumph of finally getting an old oil-stove to work in the sub-zero cold of winter. He notes the bitter pettiness of quarrelsome neighbours. He clocks the loneliness of a woman from far-away Turin whose husband had brought her to live in the alien surrounds of the village. He learns, painfully, the importance of getting your firewood in early.
Through the people the Cliftons got to know, they also "touched on the true humanity of Italy, the generosity, without anything considered about it, that comes straight from the heart". Clifton's account of life in the household of Alessandra, the postmistress, with its lack of books and its dominant TV set, is all too familiar, while his realisation that in the Italian family "the child's desires are more central than the adult's" touches on one of the great unsung virtues of modern Italian life - namely, that Italy had a genuinely child-oriented and child-friendly culture long before the terms were invented.
Finally, Harry Clifton went to his Abruzzo village to write. On the Spine of Italy contains tantalising titbits of the result, so tantalising that this reviewer fully intends to go looking for the relevant book of his (Abruzzo) poetry.
Paddy Agnew is the Irish Times Rome correspondent and has lived and worked in Italy since 1985