If I understand what your need is, this approrach should work for you: this script encodes and decodes back an array of values similar to yours:

use strict ;
use warnings ;

my @data = qw(la marianna
              la va
              in campagna
              quando il
              sole tramontera`) ;

my @results ;

while (my @couple = splice @data,0,2) {
  push @results,pack("A8A*",@couple) ;
}

print "$_\n" foreach @results ;

my @decoded ;
push @decoded,unpack("A8A*",$_) foreach @results ;


print "[$_]\n" foreach @decoded ;
[download]

This prints

la      marianna
la      va
in      campagna
quando  il
sole    tramontera`
[la]
[marianna]
[la]
[va]
[in]
[campagna]
[quando]
[il]
[sole]
[tramontera`]
[download]

Ciao!
--bronto

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->made($love) ;
}