The Bilingual Brain - Choose Your Language

In most of the interviews I've done, sooner or later the interviewer will sort of squint and smile and ask me this question: "Why did you choose to write Il Traduttore in Italian?"

Of course that question is asked to me in Italian... Perchè hai scelto di scrivere Il Traduttore in Italiano?... because, yes, all the interviews about Il Traduttore have been done in Italian. The book doesn't exist in English. Not yet, anyway. It's all a little bit weird and convoluted when I start thinking about it. I've lived less than half my life in Italy, and then somewhere along the line, I decided to write a book in my second language - Italian. And yet, no, I never actually decided that, it was not part of any master plan, like Jhumpa Lahiri and her longterm plan to write in Italian, which she acheived with "In Other Words." Well done Jhumpa. But my path was not a path, it was more like a hunter-and-gatherer who emerges from the forest and realizes he must adapt to this newfangled thing called civilization. It just happened.





On the other hand, the answer I end up giving my interviewers is more straightforward: "I wrote it in Italian because the main character, Patrick Bird, lives in Italy (like me) and is surrounded by Italian friends and colleagues (like me) and his participation in the plot is that of an "adopted" Italian (yep). The narrative point of view would have been totally skewed and ersatz if Patrick had explained everything in English (bizarre that I am doing exactly that right now) because he participates in the story as an INSIDER. He's not some kind of anthropologist describing the crazy locals for the folks back home. He has "gone native."

That's the key right there. You speak the local language and you are an insider. You are inevitably part of the local community. If you don't speak the local language, you automatically set yourself apart as an outsider. The foreigner who speaks the local language is of course still an outsider (he or she will never totally master the local accent and will always make frustrating little mistakes that the locals perceive as cute) but now he or she is "our" outsider. The ex-foreigner who has now been accepted into the tribe. It's speaking the local language which allows for this passage-slash-transformation, nothing else will do the trick.

Being bilingual, speaking a foreign language... it never gets old. It's something I find endlessly fascinating. Besides getting accepted by the locals, speaking a foreign language allows you to break through the iron bars of your mother tongue, allows you to see what's been beyond saying for much of your life and imagine totally new expressions. What could be more intellectually stimulating than that?

Sure, if you want to say "The cat is on the table" it's the same in Italian "Il gatto sta sul tavolo." But things start to swerve off into unexpected directions pretty quick. Let's think about food, about eating. In English if you enjoyed eating in a restaurant, you'll probably say, "The food was great." But in Italian it would sound weird to say "Il cibo era buono," it would almost come across like saying "The food wasn't rotten or expired." In Italian in that circumstance you'd say "Si mangia bene" which translates as "You eat well there." What is being expressed is the experience of eating, the overall quality of the act itself, which includes, yes, the quality of the food but goes well beyond. In English we don't perceive the experience in the same way, we focus on the food. Only by learning a foreign language would such an expression make itself "sayable" because without learning that foreign language, that particular way of describing the experience will never have occurred to you.

I could go on about this for days. And sometimes I do, when talking to other bilingual friends.

But in interviews I keep it short and sweet. I keep to my straightfoward answer, which is, after all, totally authentic and, I hope, a little insightful as well.