In Other Words Page 4

  The translator waited. She was convinced that one of them had taken her sweater and that the one left for her belonged to someone else.

  The owner put down the phone. “I’m sorry. I’ve asked everyone. No one was wearing a black sweater here today. Only you.”

  “But this isn’t mine.”

  She was sure that it wasn’t hers. At the same time she felt a tremendous, consuming uncertainty that canceled out everything, that left her with nothing.

  “Thank you for coming, goodbye,” said the owner. She said nothing more.

  The translator felt disconcerted, empty. She had come to that city looking for another version of herself, a transfiguration. But she understood that her identity was insidious, a root that she would never be able to pull up, a prison in which she would be trapped.

  In the hall she wanted to say goodbye to the woman who worked for the owner, behind the mirror, at a table. But she was no longer there.

  The translator returned home, defeated. She was forced to wear the other sweater, because it was still raining. That night she fell asleep without eating, without dreaming.

  The next day, when she woke, she saw a black sweater on a chair in the corner of the room. It was again familiar to her. She knew that it had always been hers, and that her reaction the day before, the little scene she had made in front of the two other women, had been completely irrational, absurd.

  And yet this sweater was no longer the same, no longer the one she’d been looking for. When she saw it, she no longer felt revulsion. In fact, when she put it on, she preferred it. She didn’t want to find the one she had lost, she didn’t miss it. Now, when she put it on, she, too, was another.

  THE FRAGILE SHELTER

  When I read in Italian, I feel like a guest, a traveler. Nevertheless, what I’m doing seems a legitimate, acceptable task.

  When I write in Italian, I feel like an intruder, an impostor. The work seems counterfeit, unnatural. I realize that I’ve crossed over a boundary, that I feel lost, in flight. I’m a complete foreigner.

  When I give up English, I give up my authority. I’m shaky rather than secure. I’m weak.

  What is the source of the impulse to distance myself from my dominant language, the language that I depend on, that I come from as a writer, to devote myself to Italian?

  Before I became a writer, I lacked a clear, precise identity. It was through writing that I was able to feel fulfilled. But when I write in Italian I don’t feel that.

  What does it mean, for a writer, to write without her own authority? Can I call myself an author, if I don’t feel authoritative?

  How is it possible that when I write in Italian I feel both freer and confined, constricted? Maybe because in Italian I have the freedom to be imperfect.

  Why does this imperfect, spare new voice attract me? Why does poverty satisfy me? What does it mean to give up a palace to live practically on the street, in a shelter so fragile?

  Maybe because from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.

  I wonder what the relationship is between freedom and limits. I wonder how a prison can resemble paradise.

  I’m reminded of a passage in Verga, whom I recently discovered: “To think that this patch of ground, a sliver of sky, a vase of flowers might have been enough for me to enjoy all the happiness in the world if I hadn’t experienced freedom, if I didn’t feel in my heart a gnawing fever for all the joys that are outside these walls!”

  The speaker is the protagonist of La storia di una capinera (Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird), a novice in an enclosed order of nuns who feels trapped in the convent, who longs for the countryside, light, air.

  I, at the moment, prefer the enclosure. When I write in Italian, that sliver of sky is enough.

  I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. I feel tormented, just like Verga’s songbird. Like her, I wish for something else—something that I probably shouldn’t wish for. But I think that the need to write always comes from desperation, along with hope.

  I know that one should have a thorough knowledge of the language one writes in. I know that I lack true mastery. I know that my writing in Italian is something premature, reckless, always approximate. I’d like to apologize. I’d like to explain the source of this impulse of mine.

  Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

  If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words. Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too much.

  What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.

  Given that I try to decipher everything through writing, maybe writing in Italian is simply my way of learning the language in a more profound, more stimulating way.

  Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on the earth.

  What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

  IMPOSSIBILITY

  Reading an interview with the novelist Carlos Fuentes in an issue of Nuovi Argomenti, I find this: “It’s extremely useful to know that there are certain heights one will never be able to reach.”

  Fuentes is referring to literary masterpieces—works of genius like Don Quixote, for example—that remain untouchable. I think that these heights have a dual, and substantial, role for writers: they make us aim at perfection and remind us of our mediocrity.

  As a writer, in whatever language, I have to take account of the presence of the greatest writers. I have to accept the nature of my contribution with respect to theirs. Although I know I’ll never write like Cervantes, like Dante, like Shakespeare, nevertheless I write. I have to manage the anxiety that those heights can stir up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t dare write.

  Now that I’m writing in Italian, Fuentes’s observation seems even more pertinent. I have to accept the impossibility of reaching the height that inspires me but at the same time pushes me into a corner. Now the height is not the work of a writer more brilliant than I am but, rather, the heart of the language itself. Although I know that I will never be securely inside that heart, I try, through writing, to reach it.

  I wonder if I’m going against the current. I live in an era in which almost anything seems possible, in which no one wants to accept any limits. We can send a message in an instant, we can go from one end of the world to the other in a day. We can plainly see a person who is not with us. Thanks to technology, no waiting, no distance. That’s why we can say with assurance that the world is smaller than it used to be. We are always connected, reachable. Technology refutes distance, today more than ever.

  And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can’t accelerate the process, you can’t abbreviate it. The pace is slow, hesitant, there are no shortcuts. The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is. The closer I get, the farther away. Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It’s taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far.

  In that sense the metaphor of the small lake that I wanted to cross, with which I began this series of
reflections, is wrong. Because in fact a language isn’t a small lake but an ocean. A tremendous, mysterious element, a force of nature that I have to bow before.

  In Italian I lack a complete perspective. I lack the distance that would help me. I have only the distance that hinders me.

  It’s impossible to see the entire landscape. I rely on certain paths, certain ways to get through. Routes I trust and probably depend on too much. I recognize certain words, certain constructions, as if they were familiar trees during a daily walk. But ultimately when I write I’m in a trench.

  I write on the margins, just as I’ve always lived on the margins of countries, of cultures. A peripheral zone where it’s impossible for me to feel rooted, but where I’m comfortable. The only zone where I think that, in some way, I belong.

  I can skirt the boundary of Italian, but the interior of the language escapes me. I don’t see the secret pathways, the concealed layers. The hidden levels. The subterranean part.

  At Hadrian’s Villa, in Tivoli, there is a gigantic network of streets, an impressive and imposing system that is entirely underground. This complex of passages was dug to transport goods, servants, slaves. To separate the emperor from the people. To hide the real and unruly life of the villa, just as the skin hides the unsightly but essential functions of the body.

  At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow. That the true life of the language, the substance, is there.

  To return to Fuentes: I agree, I think that an awareness of impossibility is central to the creative impulse. In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.

  If everything were possible, what would be the meaning, the point of life?

  If it were possible to bridge the distance between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.

  VENICE

  In this disquieting, almost dreamlike city, I discover a new way to understand my relationship with Italian. The fragmented, disorienting topography gives me another key.

  It’s the dialogue between the bridges and the canals. A dialogue between water and land. A dialogue that expresses a state of both separation and connection.

  In Venice I can’t go anywhere without crossing countless pedestrian bridges. At first, having to cross a bridge every few minutes is exhausting. Each journey seems abnormal and somewhat difficult. In a short time, though, I get used to it, and slowly this journey becomes habitual, enticing. I ascend, cross the canal, then descend on the other side. Walking through Venice means repeating this act an incalculable number of times. In the middle of every bridge I find myself suspended, neither here nor there. Writing in another language resembles a journey of this sort.

  My writing in Italian is, just like a bridge, something constructed, fragile. It might collapse at any moment, leaving me in danger. English flows under my feet. I’m aware of it: an undeniable presence, even if I try to avoid it. Like the water in Venice, it remains the stronger, more natural element, the element that forever threatens to swallow me. Paradoxically, I could survive without any trouble in English; I wouldn’t drown. And yet, because I don’t want any contact with the water, I build bridges.

  I notice that in Venice almost all the elements are inverted. It’s hard for me to distinguish between what exists and what seems an illusion, an apparition. Everything appears unstable, changeable. The streets aren’t solid. The houses seem to float. The fog can make the architecture invisible. The high water can flood a square. The canals reflect a version of the city that doesn’t exist.

  The disorientation I feel in Venice is similar to what possesses me when I write in Italian. In spite of the map of the sestieri, I get lost. The Venetian maze transcends its own map the way a language transcends its own grammar. Walking in Venice, like writing in Italian, is an experience that throws me off balance. I have to give in. Writing, I come up against so many dead ends, so many tight corners to get myself out of. I have to abandon certain streets. I continually have to correct myself. There are moments in Italian, just as in Venice, when I feel suffocated, distraught. Then I turn and, when I least expect it, find myself in an isolated, silent, shining place.

  Over the years Venice has had an increasingly unsettling impact on me. Its devastating beauty pierces me, I’m overwhelmed by the fragility of life. I’m enveloped in a passionate dream that always seems about to dissolve. A dream that’s truer than life. Crossing the bridges again and again makes me think of the passage that we all make on the earth, between birth and death. Sometimes, crossing certain bridges, I fear I’ve already reached the beyond.

  When I write in Italian, I feel the same disquiet, in spite of my love for the language. The step that I’m taking seems like a leap into the void, an inversion of myself. Like the reflections of the buildings that tremble on the surface of the Grand Canal, my writing in Italian is something impalpable. Nebulous, like the fog. I’m afraid that the bridge between me and Italian doesn’t, ultimately, exist. That it will remain, at best, a chimera.

  Yet both in Venice and on the page, bridges are the only way to move into a new dimension, to get past English, to arrive somewhere else. Every sentence I write in Italian is a small bridge that has to be constructed, then crossed. I do it with hesitation mixed with a persistent, inexplicable impulse. Every sentence, like every bridge, carries me from one place to another. It’s an atypical, enticing path. A new rhythm. Now I’m almost used to it.

  THE IMPERFECT

  There are so many things that continue to confuse me in Italian. Prepositions, for example: alla parete, per terra, dal calzolaio, in edicola (on the wall, on the ground, at the shoemaker, at the newsstand). To review them, I could take notes nel quaderno or sul taccuino (in the exercise book or in the notebook). I have a grammar containing a series of exercises of this sort, to help foreign students: “Mettiti miei panni e prova vedere la situazione i miei occhi” (Put yourself my clothes and try see the situation my eyes). They are tedious, but I do them anyway; if I want to master the language, there’s no way out. And yet I never manage to fill in those blank spaces perfectly. Maybe this stupendous sentence from a story by Alberto Moravia would be sufficient to teach me the prepositions once and for all: “Sbucammo finalmente su una piazza al sole, in un venticello frizzante da neve, davanti un parapetto oltre il quale non c’era che la luce di un grande panorama che non si vedeva” (“We finally emerged onto a square in the sun, in a crisp breeze hinting at snow, in front of a parapet beyond which there was only the light of a grand panorama that couldn’t be seen”).

  Another thorn in my side is the use of the article—it’s not clear to me when you use it and when it’s dropped. Why does one say c’è vento (it’s windy), but c’è il sole (it’s sunny)? I struggle to understand the difference between uno stato d’animo (a state of mind) and una busta della spesa (a shopping bag), giorni di scirocco (days of sirocco) and la linea dell’orizzonte (the line of the horizon). I tend to make mistakes, putting the article when there’s no need (as in “Parliamo del cinema,” instead of di cinema, or “Sono venuta in Italia per cambiare la strada,” instead of cambiare strada; “We’re talking about the movies” instead of “about movies”; “I came to Italy to change the course” instead of “to change course”), but reading Elio Vittorini I learn that you say queste sono fandonie (those are lies). Thanks to an advertising poster on the street, I learn that il piacere non ha limiti (pleasure has no limits).

  By the way: I’m still not very sure about the difference between limite and limitazione, funzione and funzionamento, modifica and modificazione (limit, function, change). Certain words that resemble each other torment me: schiacciare (crush) and scacciare (expel), spiccare (stand out) and spicciare (get something done quickly), fioco (weak) and fiocco (bow), cro
cchio (small group) and crocicchio (crossroads). I still mix up già (already) and appena (just).

  Sometimes I hesitate when I compare two things, and so my notebook is full of sentences like Di questo romanzo mi piace più la prima parte della seconda. Parlo l’inglese meglio dell’italiano. Preferisco Roma a New York. Piove più a Londra che a Palermo (I like the first part of this novel more than the second part. I speak English better than Italian. I prefer Rome to New York. It rains more in London than in Palermo).

  I realize that it’s impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For good reason, what confuses me most in Italian is when to use the imperfect and when the simple past. It should be fairly straightforward, but somehow, for me, it isn’t. When I have to choose between them, I don’t know which is right. I see the fork in the road and I slow down, feeling that I am about to come to a halt. I am filled with doubt; I panic. I don’t understand the difference instinctively. It’s as if I had a kind of temporal myopia.

  Only in Rome, when I start speaking Italian every day, do I become aware of this problem. Listening to my friends, telling my Italian teacher something, I notice it. I say c’è stato scritto (there has been written) when one should say c’era scritto (there was written). I say, era difficile (it was difficult) when one should say è stato difficile (it has been difficult). I am confused above all by era (it was) and è stato (it has been)—two faces of the verb essere (to be), a verb that is fundamental. In Rome, for almost a year, my confusion torments me.

  To help, my teacher provides some images: the background with respect to the main action. The frame with respect to the picture. A curving line rather than a straight one. A situation rather than a fact.

  One says, la chiave era sul tavolo, the key was on the table. In this case a curving line, a situation. And yet to me it also seems a fact, the fact that the key was on the table.