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Joseph A. Buttigieg died on January 27, 2019 in South Bend Indiana, home to Notre Dame University, where he had been a professor for over 35 years. He lived with his spouse, the linguist and professor, Anne Montgomery, where they had a son, Peter Paul Buttigieg. I met “Joe” Buttigieg in the early 1970s when we were taking our PhDs in English at the State University of New York.
Joe was born in Malta where he took his BA and MA degrees before taking another degree at Oxford University, Heythrop College. I met him in a crisis. He had been in a car accident and gravely injured when another car crossed the highway to crash into his vehicle. The English Department, presciently, asked me to lend him a hand while he was recovering, sensing we had common interests. We became good friends. He taught me be a very great deal about how to study, how to think clearly, and how to measure the victories and defeats in intellectual life. Since his death, I have missed him profoundly.
Joe was a very distinguished and much honored academic. He was famous for his study of modern literature but gained international renown for translating the complex writings of Antonio Gramsci into English, a task that required careful, patient, and elegant work to establish the Italian text for translation. Joe showed the world the value of philology, the careful historical study of word and text.
At no time was Joe Buttigieg a dry as dust scholar. He knew, as all key members of the great tradition of modern literary study know, that care for language, rigorous study, and precise historical reconstruction were essential elements of a politically just, economically fair, and humanely organized society. His work rested on an ideal vision of what a just society should be. He also knew the realistic obstacles to achieving it. More important he understood and worked relentlessly at the contributions intellectuals must and can make to reach that envisioned future.
If it seems I am describing a heroic figure, please understand that I am doing just that—and with little if any exaggeration. Joe’s devotion to the life of the intellectual and to the university as the place that should shelter and advance that life—his devotion was unlimited, except and until he knew that institutions had abandoned or turned against their own high purpose. When that occurred, he accepted defeat on one front but worked hard and steadily on others.
For anyone who has not read him, I recommend a slow and careful study of the Introduction to his multi-volume—and, alas, now incomplete—translation of Gramsci. There readers will see the humane love that motivated a lifetime of devoted work on behalf of students, of the past, and always for the future of society and culture. His life was too short. His contributions almost too many to have come from that life. Gratefully, we can dwell with his work, even though his voice is no longer at the end of a phone call.
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