Today is the tenth anniversary of Vincenzo Ancona’s death and I miss him tremendously. He was a man I met in 1979 as the “subject” of my nascent research on Italian-American folklore and folklife, but who became more than just an “ethnographic informant.”
We collaborated in the documentation and presentation of his Sicilian-language poetry and his wire tableaux in a published article, a book, and several exhibitions. The links below lead to various representations of his work. (His self-professed masterpiece, “St. George and the Dragon” is now in the permanent collection of the Fenimore Art Museum [2], Cooperstown, New York.) He helped my fledgling career more than I impacted his life.
That he shared parts of his life and his artistry with me is a gift I will always treasure. I visited him frequently in the basement kitchen of his Gravesend, Brooklyn home. I knew his late wife, Virginia, his children, his grandchildren, and even his great-grand children. My wife and I stayed with him in Castellammare del Golfo (Trapani province) during our 1985 trip and he showed us Scopello where he set off for the tonnara, or tuna fishing. I still have the olive branch basket he wove during our stay in Sicily.
On the tenth anniversary of his death, Arba Sicula [3]is republishing Vincenzo’s bilingual collection, Malidittu la lingua/Damned Language [4] (1990), that Anna L. Chairetakis (now Anna Lomax Wood) and I edited. The book will contain a CD of Vincenzo reciting his poetry. In addition, my article “Locating Memory: Longing, Place, and Autobiography in Vincenzo Ancona’s Sicilian Poetry” will appear this year in the book Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives [5](Fordham University Press). Vincenzo Ancona lives on through the many gifts he left us.
Source URL: http://iitaly.org/magazine/focus/life-people/article/ricordando-vincenzo-ancona
Links
[1] http://iitaly.org/files/13366vincenzoancona1266960301jpg
[2] http://www.fenimoreartmuseum.org
[3] http://www.arbasicula.org
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Malidittu-linga-Damned-Language-Cassettes/dp/0921252145/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266989159&sr=1-1
[5] http://www.fordhampress.com/detail.html?id=9780823232666
[6] http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.aspx?itemid=32861
[7] http://dieli.net/SicilyPage/SicilianLanguage/SicilianLang.html
[8] http://scn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenzo_Ancona
[9] http://dieli.net/SicilyPage/Poetry/Ancona.html
[10] http://www.nyfolklore.org/pubs/news/newsltrs/1991-vol12-no2.pdf
[11] http://books.google.com/books?id=9BGkJ5RQ5jEC&pg=PA122&lpg=PA122&dq=Vincenzo%20Ancona%20sicilian&source=bl&ots=lK5DYK39Vp&sig=H6u0t-Nb90kRxBG23G29onEdqSs&hl=en&ei=zACES7fCGc3T8AaGiIC_Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=Vincen
[12] http://books.google.com/books?id=azKhA_OCafcC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=Vincenzo%20Ancona%20sicilian&source=bl&ots=fitEaFeInT&sig=01NzF4GaQ9WTvLXXha6NhhkGX8w&hl=en&ei=EwGES7qlB9LL8Qa0xfmiAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAgQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=Vincen
[13] http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/14/nyregion/neighborhood-report-bensonhurst-honors-for-poet-who-turns-life-into-verse.html
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/16/nyregion/bensonhurst-journal-poet-is-people-s-voice-even-in-a-foreign-tongue.html?pagewanted=1
[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/05/nyregion/vincenzo-ancona-a-poet-is-dead-at-84.html?pagewanted=1