The Year in Writing ... and Surviving

Each year, I write a post about what I’ve accomplished in writing (and also literary translation) over the previous 12 months. And even in this apocalyptic year of 2020, I have made some (SOME!) progress in my efforts to be a consistently-published writer and translator.

But I’ve also struggled, and I don't have a long roster of accomplishments to boast about this December. When I post my Year in Writing roundup every year, I ask other people to chime in with their successes. I suspect this year many of us don’t have much to report or don’t feel like celebrating.

We may have accomplished some things in 2020, but chief among them may simply be surviving a blockbuster year in heartache, conflict and troubles.

I have admitted to my students that our current learning model – and our current living model – is falling short. To be sure, we are doing the best we can. We’re all masked up and practicing social distancing and engaging remotely with whatever endeavor we’re involved in.

But what are we missing? What are we silently forgoing, without necessarily acknowledging the void produced by never seeing friends and family? What are we silently forgoing, by never lingering after class to chat? Never impulsively stopping by a friend's house or visiting a museum or catching a movie on a Tuesday afternoon.

What aren’t we admitting?

This isn’t an easy question to answer because Covid-19 in some ways exacerbated existing trends that take us away from pure lived experience. We were already way too much online, and now more so. We were already meeting each other digitally  -- via email and text -- way more than in person. I know that many introverts have welcomed the cancellation of events, the wholesale nixing of keeping-up-with-the Joneses socially. But Covid-19 has given us permission to look at Twitter (or insert your preferred point-of-scrolling here) instead of the world around us. 

There will come a moment perhaps when we reckon with what's been lost. Of course, for those who have lost family and friends to Covid-19, that moment has already come. One more way we are divided, as a nation.

Oddly, what I did manage to accomplish in the world of writing this year is almost completely tied to these Coronavirus Times. Namely, I published three short essays with the Brevity Nonfiction Blog that all sprang from the Covid-19 era’s new routines.

The first, in April, described the sudden move to teaching remotely, and the small silver lining afforded by the shift, inasmuch as I used the moment to inspire my students to take journal writing seriously. My students wrote about their new lives of sweatpants, screens and snacks. As I mentioned in a previous post, the tenderness, loneliness and fear embedded in their posts made them seem less like grad students and more like high school students (and I said it as a compliment because they didn't hold back). 

You can read “My Students are Finally Keeping a Journal” at Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog here: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/my-students-are-finally-keeping-a-journal/

The second – about my ailing father who has multiple myeloma -- speaks to the ways Covid-19 has complicated caring for loved ones, and also how the virus has underscored the fragility of our world. 

"One small pleasure these days? Saying the word ‘apocalypse.’ A-poc-a-lypse. Apocalyptic is even better. Not only because the bread aisle is barren, but also because the father who was intent on not going ‘gently into that dark night,’ to quote his favorite Dylan Thomas poem, may wind up going gently after all, nestled as he is under an avalanche of blankets on the couch in the living room, where he remains day and night.”

You can read the whole essay, “What I’m Not Writing About,” at Brevity here:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/what-i-am-not-writing-about/

And in the third essay, published just last month, I wrote about the dog we finally adopted because heck, we were going to be home all the time anyway, so why not hole up with something furry? It's forced me to discover all kinds of things, but perhaps the best thing is the sky. 

"The sky is always there, isn’t it? There above me now, like every moment that’s come before. But forced to spend hours under its shifting gaze, I feel as though I am only now noticing that it’s a chameleon, a compass, an all-weather friend. You could hang it in a museum, so compelling is its composition."

You can read it here: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/the-dog-journal/

Even the few other publishing world accomplishments I managed to notch that were not tied to Covid-19 restraints seem to nonetheless evoke the apocalypse. For example, I published my translation of four poems by Holocaust survivor and Italian transnational writer, Edith Bruck, in Asymptote Journal, including one that asks if the list of men who count in life can be pared down to one: "The father who is missing." You can read those poems here (you can also hear Signora Bruck read them in Italian):

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/edith-bruck-versi-vissuti/

As always, there is so much I didn’t accomplish. Some of it was out of my control! Like I didn’t have the two-week fellowship I'd won at the New York Public Library because like everything else, the library shut down, and has been re-opening very slowly. And I received dozens of rejections.

Maybe I will just conclude this roundup by saying if you don’t want to share what you’ve accomplished, maybe share what you’ve given up and how much you miss it. I think we owe it to ourselves to admit we’re not living in a normal way.

After publishing the essay that touched on not wanting to write about my father's illness, I began to force myself to record almost every word my father said. In my diary, I wrote about how he coughed, and it was his cough. The way he has always coughed. He almost never speaks now but the cough? It "sounded like him." Another day, I pointed out the blossoming pink roses outside of the dining room window and Daddy said, “Yes, I’ve been watching them for weeks.” Golden. What else is he contemplating?

Writing my way through this brutal year. Well, look at that -- I am ending this entry on a positive note. I hope that writing is seeing you through -- writing or painting or cooking or running or reading or whatever you can lose yourself in, without losing it all.

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For BREVITY: The Dog Journal that Became a Diary of the Sky

Grateful to the Brevity Nonfiction Blog for publishing another essay of mine, this time about the dog journal that evolved into a meditation on the masterpiece above us every moment of our lives:

"... forced to spend hours under its shifting gaze, I feel as though I am only now noticing that it’s a chameleon, a compass, an all-weather friend. You could hang it in a museum, so compelling is its composition.

"As I age, I’ve come to crave the outdoors. Yet one morning last month, when I looked up at the blue cathedral roof above me, I felt as though I were seeing it for the first time."

Please read the rest of the essay at this link:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/the-dog-journal/

On Judging the Italian Prose in Translation Award

This past year, I was a judge for the Italian Prose in Translation Award, given each year by the industry association known as ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association).

And what that's meant is tons of Italian literature making its way to my house. Or maybe better yet, just more than usual. It has also illustrated to me in a very personal way how difficult it is to nail a good translation. So many variables, so many tricky word combos to get right.

The five finalists were all quite worthy. They included an intriguing murder-mystery by an author I'd never encountered before (Piero Chiara) and a translator (Jill Foulston) whose work was so fluid, I forgot at times I wasn't reading in the original language; and a fictional account of the women charged with pre-tasting Hitler's food to screen out poisons (written by Rosella Postorino and translated by Leah Janeczko).

Ultimately, the award went to Frederika Randall, who translated the wonderfully innovative novel, I Am God by Giacomo Sartori. I am sorry to say the awarding was posthumous as we lost Randall this year (after impressive careers in journalism AND literary translation).

More information and the full list of IPTA finalists here:

https://www.literarytranslators.org/tags/ipta

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What I'm not writing about (for Brevity)

My father, age 84, is ill and for the most part, I am not writing about it.

I don’t want to write about it, beyond forcing myself to record some basic facts in my journal for the future me who may want to reconstruct how everything went so terribly wrong. 

For example, one morning while I was staying with my parents last month, my father woke up and said, “We were robbed last night.”

Aware this hadn’t happened, I said, “Oh really?”

And he replied with great certainty, “They were convicts.”

I jotted down the moment in my journal like you might a bad dream.

Please read the rest at the Brevity Nonfiction Blog:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/what-i-am-not-writing-about/

Italian diary, May 2017 (re-post)

I’m back in the “in-between” world, the space where sentences begin in one language and end in another. 

It’s a world that I inhabited for many years and then withdrew from (in Allentown, when I resigned myself to being stateside).

The in-between world is one I love and I loathe – loving it because Italian quickens my pulse! I become Italian Jeanne -- who has the luxury of walking everywhere, yes everywhere, every day, which only serves to ratchet up my already overflowing reserves of enthusiasm and energy. I might just walk someone to death in Italy, purely out of the joy of movement in my adopted country!

I also loathe the in-between world because it plunges me into saudade. What was, what could have been, what wasn't. America is the land of opportunity -- but it is not, for the most part, a land with an excess of perfectly-planned, grand public spaces linked by achingly beautiful cobblestone streets to other perfectly-planned, grand public spaces, where you can be both with and without people. Where you can see something heart-stoppingly beautiful outside of yourself and something deep inside of you, too.

I walk through the streets of Torino (or insert here whatever Italian city that I happen to be visiting) and I want to consume everything. Not merely a panino or a gelato, the things one normally consumes, but buildings, nooks, mossy courtyards, caffes, signs – especially signs, any vehicle for the Italian language that falls under my sight. Also: cobblestone streets and the tight juxtaposition of shops and restaurants, piazzine, too, which are tiny, often hidden lands frequented only locals. Yes, I want to consumer those piazzine, those cortili (which especially in Torino seem to give access to worlds unseen), I want to mainline the way bikes cross piazzas and how content and confident the riders appear. I want to inhale how toddlers bound across the grand squares of Torino without a car in sight -- how Italian cities are made for children to be children.

I want to gobble up how homey some of the cafés appear – their singular arrangement of product and signage and sumptuously-arranged display window and ancient door, making me want to eat and drink items I don’t even like or simply don’t care for at the moment (no I don't need another caffe or brioche, and yet, well, while I am here...).

Seeing these homespun creations, I want to order 3 cappuccini, 4 ciambelline (like donuts but not), and also some other pastry that looks yummy and appena sfornata, a glass of acqua gassata, un bicchiere di vino rosso and maybe something else (I actually had breakfast twice every day I was in Italy this trip -- che golosa!).

It’s almost tender, how beautiful Italian cities are (and how welcoming their public and consumer spaces are). Made to be lived in, made for life outdoors, in the streets, in public. As if the Italians’ need for picturesque boulevards and quaint eateries is something they can’t help wear on their sleeves, as if it’s a remnant of the warm, coddled world of their childhood. That need to be welcomed and wanted by the world around us, by the barista, the giornalaio. That need for human contact.

At the risk of repeating myself, it will never be anything else but thrilling that Italy is a place I’ve called home, a place that’s still home to a very significant part of my mind. Somehow I am lucky enough to know this foreign country in the most intimate way. I didn’t simply live in Italy – it lives in me. Every time I’m here, I’m thoroughly inhabited by this bewildering, beloved, bedazzling country. 

Inhabited in a way that makes me spring to life, as if in Atlanta or America in general, I’m merely treading water, moving ahead instead of bursting onto the street and through piazzas as I do in Italy.

You may grow tired of reading this, and other posts that are similar, but I, at least, never seem to lose that thrill of contact with the culture. Even in moments of difficulty – where Italians insist on something absurd – this is still my Italy.

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Italy on my mind (more than usual)

I keep thinking about Italy, about being in Italy, about walking the streets of Italy. 

It's the thing I want to do most right now, not simply when the quarantine is lifted. But right now. It's visceral. And also not possible, and not practical. 

So instead, as I mentioned in a previous post, I am listening to programs like Prima Pagina and watching videos on Facebook (especially The Jackal) to gain even just a glimpse of il Bel paese.

I am also thinking back to the last time I was preparing to return to Italy, and re-reading old posts ... like this one:

https://ciambellina.blogspot.com/2018/07/an-italophile-prepares-for-trip-to-italy.html

Un abbraccio -- ci vediamo presto!

*&*&*&*&*& --30-- *&*&*&*

Do good work (c/o Melanie Vugich's Facebook feed)

My students are still keeping a journal

As I mentioned in a previous post, I asked my students to keep what I called a Coronavirus Journal when our course went from live lessons to remote learning, and they continued to post in our journal up until the last class.

They wrote about so many things -- anxiety, boredom, hope, love, and the big things that seem small and the small things that seem big, to paraphrase the memoirist Beth Kephart. One student wrote about being the product of a divorce, which meant during her childhood she didn't know her half siblings very well. Now they are sharing a house under quarantine and catching up on the lost years. Heart breaking -- mine is.

Some treated the diary -- which we posted to an online forum that's part of the course's cyberhome -- as a private account where they could say anything. Indeed, one student remarked that he would probably never see any of us again and so he divulged his most intimate preoccupations, his failures, his worries. Then he would write that he hoped no one was reading his posts. Still, they were there -- and I read them.

These students are graduate students, not undergrads. But the tenderness, the loneliness, the fear inherent in their posts rendered them more like high school students, and I say that as a compliment. They didn't hold back. Didn't posture.

Here's the post I contributed to Brevity magazine's Nonfiction Blog about it:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/my-students-are-finally-keeping-a-journal/

Poetry translations published by Asymptote Journal

Asymptote Journal has published four poems by Edith Bruck that I translated from Italian. It provides me with a much-needed respite since last week I should have been studying her works (and the Italian works of other women writers who survived the Holocaust) at the New York Public Library as part of a fellowship I won last year.

Instead, we are all home (the NYPL postponed my fellowship, and understandably so) ... but we can read poetry. And that is no small comfort.

You'll find on the journal's site not only my translations but also the original text of the poems in Italian, a Translator's Note in which I attempt to characterize Bruck's poetry, and recordings of Signora Bruck reciting the poems in Italian.

You can find the poems at this link or read the shortest one below:

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/edith-bruck-versi-vissuti/

Maybe

Of the men who count
In life
There’s only one:
The father who is missing

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"Prima Pagina" -- an ode to my favorite Italian radio show

When I launched this blog, I wrote to reflect my own joy in knowing Italian, studying Italian and speaking Italian and also to inspire that joy in others.

Now I write here about everything that sparks joy (to steal a line from Marie Kondo, my letter to her over on the right side of this blog, notwithstanding).

Yet Italian pleasures remain paramount, especially now that my beloved adopted country is suffering so much on account of COVID-19.

One small joy in these dark days has been listening to *Prima Pagina*, a RAI radio program where – I kid you not – a journalist reads and discusses the front pages (= prima pagina) of all of the major Italian newspapers.

Each week, a different journalist is asked to read through the Italian papers aloud, commenting on each article he or she finds on the front page. Commenting, but not commentating. The journalist is presenting the news, at times pointing out relevant facts or dates, but not giving an opinion on anything beyond noting, say, that a particular subject is covered by each paper or covered in different ways by the various pubs.

I imagine Italian housewives listen to it, but it would appeal to anyone who wanted to follow the news without sitting down to read the newspaper -- or really, every major paper in the country! 

I suppose for a news junkie/news industry professional like me, it's an obvious draw. But I think it would benefit students of Italian because the program deals heavily with the headlines, which are short combinations of words that, if you wanted, you could even find online. Meaning, you could read along as the journalist of the week reads, reinforcing comprehension.

Coronavirus Journal ... for the Brevity Nonfiction Blog

I've asked my students at Wesleyan to keep a coronavirus journal -- a diary of their days as they navigate what are truly unprecedented times. (I asked the "student" in the photo here, too, but so far, no go).

I see it as a tiny, silver lining to the crisis and the quarantine because while it will be a new assignment, it's likely to be one that taps into writing (or at least thinking) they are already doing. I say "tiny" because I hesitate to wax poetic about the "good" that will come out of the pandemic since it almost seems anathema, but there's no question these extraordinary times will inspire us to do things we normally don't do.

Indeed, at the start of the term, I asked them to keep journals but had the sense few were writing in them outside of class (it's a course on memoir). Now I suspect they are galvanized. This hot-house atmosphere of illness and fear has them living in new ways, with inspiration a-plenty, and a desperate need to vent their frustrations somewhere. And their entries are LONG!

I was so inspired by their writing that I pitched a column to the Brevity Nonfiction Blog about it and the editors, I'm thrilled to say, decided to run it. You can read it here:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/my-students-are-finally-keeping-a-journal/

As I say in the piece for Brevity, "An unusual moment in our world has created an opening for me as a teacher to reinforce the very principles I've been trying to convey (write whenever you can, track details, take your mental temperature). But ... how to replicate next time?"

In any event, my students so far are capturing exactly what I imagined, as I mentioned in my piece for Brevity; "the small changes, the absence of one activity or obligation creating space for something else, the repercussions of our new routines (one student fears the increased screen time from working virtually is interfering with her sleep and I would agree!)."

I don't plan on sharing their entries but here are two of mine:

*March 26, 2020*

File under, Thank God/silver lining/finally: I am in love with James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.”

In an introduction to the older edition I am reading, borrowed from Olin, Baldwin writes, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

*March 25, 2020*

Leo yesterday had a Zoom meeting with his teacher. The same Zoom software I am using to teach my class at Wesleyan, except it’s not AT Wesleyan anymore.

He’s above average in reading and likes Math a lot, so perhaps we are lucky in some ways because I don’t think he will miss out as much as one might fear.

Nonetheless, a part of me grieves that he’s been robbed of the fundamental social nature of school, particularly as an only child.

Yet I am always of two minds – literally always, before coronavirus and probably always, and I think of it as an occupational hazard as a journalist.

He should be in school but in MY HOME SCHOOL he can rock in his chair or even slump (for a while at least), he can stand up to do math problems, he can walk around the computer room on the third floor while he explains fables to me. Oh, and we have gym every day, multiple times a day.

And yet – the other mind weighing in again – he has not played with a friend in a week.

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Review: A GIRL RETURNED by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Finally, my review of one of the best Italian novels of 2019 has run! You can find my whole review of A GIRL RETURNED here on the Kenyon Review's site, and a short excerpt of the piece here below:

"In the gripping new Italian novel in translation A Girl Returned, a young girl’s adoptive parents suddenly bring her back to her birth mother, thirteen years later, as if she were an expired item. Adoptions are typically permanent, no? Not in this novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, who deftly grapples here with the holy trifecta of human emotions (and thus, fiction): love, longing and loss.

"The stunning turn of events propels the girl into a new world. The first person she meets in the other home is Adriana, a sister whose existence she has heretofore known nothing about. The move to the new house forces her to exchange life as an only child for a home where she shares a bedroom with four siblings, including three teenage boys. Her sense of alarm (and the reader’s) is underscored when she tries to escape by pretending she has left something in her adoptive father’s car. Once inside the car, she activates the locks, begging him to take her back. As he forcibly removes her, the narrator comments, “In his grip I no longer recognized the hand of the taciturn father I’d lived with until that morning.” It seems an act of unmitigated cruelty by the father—and in one way, it surely is—but maverick plot twists revealed later in this startlingly suspenseful book will somewhat attenuate that verdict."

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From the Leo Journal: ROAR!

Feb. 22, 2017

2:17 p.m.

While he plays by himself, I overhear him as he says again and again one word: “Roar!” He loves to pretend he’s a baby puma. Whence the obsession? Also, who cares?

Hearing a child yell "roar" must be one of life’s tender mercies. Oh wait, there's more. It’s my child, the one I think hangs the moon.

***
Dept. of Lost Diary Entries

This one's for Brenda and Eddie (or post-Italy blues)

Driving home in a trance from JFK, some 20 hours after leaving our hotel in Rome, Mike prowled the radio dial for anything that would keep him awake while behind the wheel. Before long, the unmistakable bars of Billy Joel’s "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" came across, serenading us through our disorientation and regret as only the Piano Man can. Oh it felt right to this former Long Islander. Just as Brenda and Eddie went back to the green (even though “you can never go back there again”), we, too, had returned. To our green. Italy. 

Billy got it wrong – you can go back, but you probably can’t stay. That’s the catch. And fate will have you driving across the Whitestone Bridge, commiserating with Brenda and Eddie – who started to fight when the money got tight and just didn’t count on the tears – but it will be another grievance that you’re nursing. 

A grievance that torments inasmuch as it pulls you in two different directions at once. 

Forget time travel. I want to be here – and there. Qui ma anche lì. At the same time. And 20 years is a long time to be pulverized by this particular type of Italian torque. 

So what will it be, a bottle of red or a bottle of white?

***
Lost diary entry

Octopus arms

Dec. 31, 2017 -- From the Leo journal:

“It would be great if people could live on Earth forever --”

*Pause*

“-- and have octopus arms.”

***

Lost diary entry

Jhumpa Lahiri and the Rapture of Italian

I am not a full-time literary critic, which has one particular advantage: I get to choose which books I review. And I jumped at the chance to review a new anthology of Italian short stories in translation, curated by none other than Jhumpa Lahiri, someone who's so far had two distinct literary lives -- one fabulously successful one in English, and one, unexpectedly and joyously, in Italian. I reviewed the anthology for the Three Percent Blog, run by the University of Rochester's one-of-a-kind literary translation program. And in reviewing it, I gleefully found I have a kindred spirit in Lahiri as she, too, is drawn to overlooked Italian women writers whose work should reach wider audiences. In particular, the anthology includes the five authors writer Dacia Maraini calls her "literary mothers": Lalla Romano, Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg and Fausta Cialente.

Here is a short excerpt -- read the whole review at Three Percent's site, and prepare to become intrigued by authors you may have never heard of before!

Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri
Translated from the Italian by Various
528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00
Penguin Random House
Review by Jeanne Bonner

Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine the editor of a large, door-stopper compilation of, say, short stories, calling the arduous task of sorting and selecting the entries a labor of love? And what if the short stories are in a foreign language and the editing also involved commissioning new translations and tracking down old ones?

Author Jhumpa Lahiri, who edited the new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, doesn’t use those exact words in the anthology’s introduction, but she comes pretty close as she describes what inspired her to want to curate such a collection. It’s of a piece with what inspired her in 2012 (a dozen years after winning the Pulitzer Prize) to move her family to Rome so she could surround herself with the Italian language: “I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself and to acquire a second literary formation.” That second literary formation she mentions (it makes me think of “formazione,” which in Italian means training or education) has been fruitful. In addition to publishing two books in Italian, including In Other Words, based on the Italian diary she kept in Rome, Lahiri has translated Domenico Starnone’s novels Ties and Trick, and now the short stories of underappreciated or overlooked authors such as Corrado Alvaro, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Fabrizia Raimondo—all of which appear in the anthology.

It’s not unprecedented for an author to go abroad and lose her head over a language and a country (James Joyce also decamped to Italy, and would converse with his children in Italian; James Baldwin lived for decades in France, as did Mavis Gallant). But how often does such an author—especially one gifted enough to receive this country’s highest literary honor—master the new language enough to write in it or translate important works, as she has done? Indeed, Lahiri’s role as not only a booster of Italian lit, but also a practitioner arguably transformed the process of editing and curating the Penguin anthology (just as, in her diary, she wrote how Rome had transformed her). The result is a primer on short fiction from Italy that, given its thorough and nuanced selections, will likely be used as a college text. Indeed, Lahiri’s inclusion of a side-by-side chronology of Italian literary and historical events—a copy of which may go up on my wall—is peerless in a general interest book of this kind.

Click here for the full review