Storie Orali: Racconto, Immaginazione, Dialogo (Oral [Hi]stories: Narrative, Imagination, Dialogue) (review)

No contemporary oral historian (at either the praxis or the theory ends of the spectrum, which this author has never divorced) can have ignored Alessandro Portelli's contributions to the field: for example, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, 1990; The Text and the Voice, 1994; Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, 1997; and The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, 2007 (as well as his, as yet, untranslated: Biografia di una città: storia e racconto: Terni, 1830-1985 in 1985, Città di parole. Storia orale di una periferia romana [Centocelle], with Bruno Bonomo, Alice Sotgia, Ulrike Viccaro, 2006; Acciai Speciali: Terni, la Thyssen Krupp, la globalizzazione, 2008). This collection (divided into five sections: Language or Linguistic Codes; War; Terni, Italy; Harlan, Kentucky; Century's End), gathers globally scattered essays (in Finnish, Catalan, Italian, Spanish) from 1979 to 2006, more or less known to the English-reading world, and all belonging both to the past and the present: "they are the history of thirty years of work with oral sources, but also the summary of the point at which I find myself today, the foundation of other work not represented here" (3, citing The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, New York: Palgrave, 2003; Alessandro Portelli, et al., Città di parole: Storia orale di una periferia romana, Rome: Donzelli, 2007; "I'm Going to Say it Now: Interviewing the Movement," in Reflection on the Fieldwork Process, eds., Bruce Jackson and Edward D. Ives, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). More importantly: "They are all works in progress, always open and never finished" (3). This collection therefore provides something of the pre- and intra-history of Portelli's writings, while exemplifying the historical process itself. That is, they provide reiterations of the past in the never-ending process of reinterpreting it (Portelli intensely—somewhat obsessively—rewrites, updates, translates, thinking, rethinking thoughts and words under the influence of new experiences, new sociopolitical circumstances). These may therefore be considered essay variants, each with rich oral and written histories of their own: spoken, written, and translated, many times, tangibly illustrating a central tenet that oral history—mimicking variation in oral tradition itself (cf. folksong variants) can only provide variant tellings of history reflecting individual and collective perspectives shaped by the present.¹ Variation is inherent in oral research, embracing songs, stories, and histories. And, after all, Portelli is as much a scholar of "story making" (as a literary critic and folklorist) as of "history telling" (as an oral historian).

This collection is also an intra-history, providing a glimpse of Portelli meditating on Portelli as his own scholarship and activity evolves. He is a three-dimensional scholar/activist/political thinker and doer, an academic and public intellectual (e.g., he writes and blogs for Italian newspapers of the Left, il Manifesto, Liberazione, l'Unità). He is a consummate practitioner of the art of the oral interview, with a long history in the field, while he simultaneously engages all other parts of the oral historical process, from interview and transcription, to interpretation, always seeking to "share authority" with those interviewed (an "experiment in equality").² He is a multifaceted oral historian ever reflecting critically on all parts of the process. But most of all, Portelli is a first-rate listener, always hearing the many, nuanced voices, layered simultaneously within the speaking (and silent) voice: the individual and the collectivity, the conscious and the subconscious, the generational, the mythic, the literary: all relevant and mutually illuminating. Reinforcing all, there are plenty of substantial, not token, transcriptions—so readers can hear for themselves.

Ronald Grele places Portelli's oeuvre within the context of oral history scholarship in an excellent, almost lyrical introduction, noting how his colleague was one of the first to radically focus...