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After a crossing, the known shore becomes the opposite side: here becomes there. Charged with energy, I cross the lake again. I’m elated. For twenty years I studied Italian as if I were swimming along the edge of that lake.
The first Italian book I buy is a pocket dictionary, with the definitions in English.
It becomes both a map and a compass, and without it I know I’d be lost. It becomes a kind of authoritative parent, without whom I can’t go out. I consider it a sacred text, full of secrets, of revelations.
One day, for example, I discover the word claustrale (cloistered). I can guess at the meaning, but I would like to be certain. I’m on a train. I check the pocket dictionary. The word isn’t there. Suddenly I’m enthralled, bewitched by this word. I want to know it immediately. Until I understand it I’ll feel vaguely restless.
However irrational the idea, I’m convinced that finding out what this word means could change my life.
When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me.
The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the basket is memory, and memory betrays me, memory doesn’t hold up.
My knowledge of English is both an advantage and a hindrance. I rewrite everything like a lunatic until it satisfies me, while in Italian, like a soldier in the desert, I have to simply keep going.
She had enough money, and good health. She had, in other words, a fortunate life, for which she was grateful. The only thing that troubled her was what distinguished her from others.
When I read in Italian, I feel like a guest, a traveler.
When I write in Italian, I feel like an intruder, an impostor.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
I’ve been writing since I was a child in order to forget my imperfections, in order to hide in the background of life. In a certain sense writing is an extended homage to imperfection. A book, like a person, remains imperfect, incomplete, during its entire creation. At the end of the gestation the person is born, then grows, but I consider a book alive only during the writing. Afterward, at least for me, it dies.
Compared with Italian, my English is like a hairy, smelly teenager.
Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.
There is pain in every joy. In every violent passion a dark side.
No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are a part of me.
After lunch, something catches my eye in the window of a shop selling shoes and purses on Via del Corso. I go into the shop. This time I say nothing. I’m silent. But the saleswoman, seeing me, says immediately, in English, “May I help you?”—four polite words that every so often in Italy break my heart.
was ashamed of speaking Bengali and at the same time I was ashamed of feeling ashamed.
hated the attitude of these salespeople toward my parents. I wanted to defend them. I would have liked to protest: “They understand everything you say, while you can’t understand even a word of Bengali or any other language in the world.” And yet it annoyed me as well when my parents mispronounced an English word. I corrected them, impertinently.
From the phonetic point of view, I find Bengali much closer to Italian than to English. I
What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren’t aware of before. We want to transform
