In “Four Quartets,” T.S. Eliot lamented the “general mess of imprecision of feeling.” If our feelings were precise and disciplined, he implies, we would express ourselves with exactitude. I doubt it. We usually do know what we feel with considerable precision. The mess occurs when we try to fit words, those blunt instruments, to our finer sentiments. Eliot knew a lot about messes, emotional as well as linguistic. But he was something of a novice next to the true maestro of the mess, the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda.

Gadda (1893–1973) was an electrical engineer by training. He brought a cool scientific intellect, abetted by a Rabelaisian sense of humor, to the study of muddle. In his amazing novel “That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana” (NYRB Classics, 409 pages, $16.95), he played with chaos as though it were some outlandish calliope on which all sounds, from grunts to arias, could be reproduced. The translation by William Weaver, first published in 1965, is itself a masterpiece of ingenuity. Mr. Weaver also supplies a brilliant foreword. In his introduction, Italo Calvino pays tribute to Gadda’s “appetite for reality,” which was monstrous and led him, again and again, to subvert his own best intentions, usually to wonderful effect.

In the original, “mess” is “pasticciaccio,” an untranslatable dialect word akin to “pasticcio” or “pastry,” as well as to “pastiche.” The literal mess involves a savage murder, but the title encapsulates Gadda’s inimitable style. This is a novel of voices, from the most eloquent to the inarticulate — a choral pandemonium — and so it isn’t just about some “awful mess,” but is itself a “nasty pastiche,” which Gadda’s genius lifts to the level of polyphony.

Like Joyce or Céline, Gadda creates a language all his own. He fuses Roman dialect with provincial expressions, French and Latin phrases, gutter slang, puns and neologisms, scraps of song and incantations, jingles and rallying cries, and yet the result has a classical burnish. The sentences are always shapely, even when they stammer. Gadda’s purpose isn’t so much to conquer “imprecision of feeling” as to exploit it to the full — he is a cognoscente of chaos.

Gadda drew on the conventions of the detective novel for “That Awful Mess.” His detective is Officer Francesco Ingravallo, known to everyone as “Don Ciccio,” an improbable cop “with black hair, thick and curly, which sprang forth from his forehead at the halfway point, as if to shelter his two metaphysical knobs from the fine Italian sun.” Don Ciccio is ponderous, his eyelids are always drooping, and his lapels are spattered with olive oil.

For all his slovenliness, Don Ciccio stands in the great tradition of the philosopher-detective. He dominates the narrative with the dogged momentum of his quest. But the other characters are equally vivid, from the hysterical maiden aunts of the shambling apartment house where the murder occurs to the furtive bureaucrats and dog-eared aristocrats, the busty maids and shady scroungers, whom Don Ciccio encounters while lumbering through the maze of his investigations. (The novel is set in the early fascist years; Mussolini and his goons, scathingly invoked, often in terms unprintable here, loom over the confusion.)

I won’t give the plot away. Suffice it to say that one mess leads inescapably to another. Clues become tangles, tangles turn to morasses. This leaves Don Ciccio unfazed. He believes that “unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect … but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world.”

To thicken the mess, Gadda alludes slyly to ancient Rome. Each of his characters extends an epic shadow. Even the rats, stalking stray cheese, have Palatine pedigrees. And every fetid nook shelters forgotten gods: “The gods that see and remain silent, breathing in the dead odor of naphthalene in cupboards.”

Most mysterious in this regard is Gadda’s evocation of the “Oriental Wizardess,” one Zamira Pàcori, a seamstress and bawd, who “unkierkegaarded little crooks of the province.” At the heart of Don Ciccio’s quest, she seems the embodiment of fascist Rome, squalid and massive, a Sybil on the skids. The book swarms with such pungent figures, each one caught in “roots in which the soul of a Lucan, of an Ovid, is entangled.” Unlike Joyce, who cast the tale of Ulysses as a template over a reluctant Dublin, Gadda coaxes his Rome out of its own grimy and ancient stones. The voices he conjures are messy, but he catches every accent with the precision of affection.

eormsby@nysun.com