More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For twenty years I studied Italian as if I were swimming along the edge of that lake. Always next to my dominant language, English. Always hugging that shore. It was good exercise. Beneficial for the muscles, for the brain, but not very exciting. If you study a foreign language that way, you won’t drown. The other language is always there to support you, to save you. But you can’t float without the possibility of drowning, of sinking. To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. Without a life vest. Without depending on solid ground.
I renounce expertise to challenge myself. I trade certainty for uncertainty.
When I read in Italian, I’m a more active reader, more involved, even if less skilled. I like the effort. I prefer the limitations. I know that in some way my ignorance is useful to me.
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
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.
The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
But when I go into a shop like the one in Salerno I find myself abruptly hurled back to shore. People who don’t know me assume, looking at me, that I don’t know Italian. When I speak to them in Italian, when I ask for something (a head of garlic, a stamp, the time), they say, puzzled, “I don’t understand.” It’s always the same response, the same scowl. As if my Italian were another language.
A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.”
Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts.
