Cinematic Taxi

Corrado Paina

ISBN 978-1-77126-065-7
$17.00 CDN/USA
64 pages

In Cinematic Taxi, Corrado Paina revisits the poems of Hoarse Legend, first published in 2000. Those poems were an incisive critique of language and race that explored the themes of multicultural city life and personal and social identity. Now in Cinematic Taxi, Paina has returned with a simultaneous translation of the English poems, but not into any language you will recognize. Instead he has created his own language out of the creative confusion of the modern multicultural wanderer. The language might be called an ‘idiolect’ or a ‘grammelot,’ which is a kind of gibberish used in satirical theatre as far back as the 16th century Commedia dell’arte. Paina’s grammelot is made up of Italian, Spanish, Italian dialects, some French derivatives, and of course, English, the language of power. It is an experimental suite of poems that could only have come from someone within earshot of the creative babel of Toronto, ground zero of the great Canadian experiment in multicultural life.