Edith Bruck: "La lingua è la mia patria"

Edith Bruck has published a new memoir called Il pane perduto, and the 88-year-old survivor of Auschwitz is promoting the book through a series of talks. I was able to "attend" one at Biblioteca Villino Corsini and I took some notes on what she said. So much wisdom in the words of a woman who for over 70 years has had to not only live without her parents and her beloved brother but also live with the knowledge that they perished in the  Holocaust in the cruelest way. Our dead loved ones, she told the virtual audience, "vivono dentro di noi," they live inside of us, and "sono sempre con noi," they are always with us.

Of her experience entering Auschwitz at age 12, she says, “Ho vissuto qualcosa assolutamente inimmaginabile,” meaning, "I lived through something that is absolutely unimaginable." 

And forget forgetting it, obviously: "Non riesci mai a dimenticare," You never manage to forget it. (But the rest of us? We do manage to forget this horrific era of humanity again and again. This era, which is not even so far away from today).

So how to survive? How to survive more than 70 years?

“Ci rifiugiamo nella scrittura.”

We take refuge in writing, she says. Indeed, Italian is a "rifiugio" for her. Or put a different way, "Language is my country."

Bruck began writing in Italian in the 1950s, and her entire body of work is in Italian -- the language she chose to describe what she couldn't bring herself to describe in her native Hungarian (language is her country, she says).

It's no surprise, then, that she says we need "una lingua nuova" (a new language) and "nuove parole" (and new words) to describe Auschwitz.

Even now.

I have had the honor of translating some of Bruck's poetry and she has also given me permission to translate some of her short stories. And it is one small way that I never forget the Shoah. That I pay respect, and that I seek to learn and re-learn the lessons of that era. It's become a small personal project to learn as much as I can about the Holocaust and World War II.

I'll never be able to learn enough. Luckily. I have her new memoir -- which has made this grand old lady once again a finalist for the Premio Strega. Auguri, Edith!

Italian language lab: "Negazionista"

I am still learning Italian, after all of these years, because modern life continues to unfold and words are coined or emerge more prominently. 

And hence I am still marveling over tiny flourishes that make Italian distinctive and which seem -- maybe only to me -- to render the particular character of the Italian people manifest. In this case, "negazionista," the word Italians have been using to describe the people who deny or play down the pandemic (it's also used for those who deny other verifiable facts). If you click on this hyperlink, you'll find a piece about an Italian man who'd been propagating falsehoods about Covid-19 until he fell ill with it; the headline, which for me is golden, and which you can see here in the picture, begins: Il Negazionista Pentito ("the remorseful denier," is one way to translate it; the whole headline reads, "The remorseful denier: I'm sick, I have Covid. Now I understand").

I may get a little carried away because I've known myself to practically weep over the word 'babbo' (which means Daddy). The rational side of me says the word 'negazionista' is a logical linguistic locution. Negare, after all, can be translated as the English verb 'to deny,' and 'ista' is a common suffix to denote an individual engaged habitually in a particular action -- often a profession (A journalist, for example, is a giornalista; a corporate shareholder is an azionista; you'll recognize it maybe from the term 'fashionista,' which is used in America, and of course English retains this usage -- journalist, dentist, pharmacist, etc).

So perhaps 'negazionista' isn't all that tricky a word combination.

But it sounds oh so tricky to me. (And what's wonderful is that it's a true Italian coinage. None of this 'Il Jobs Act' or 'Lo spread' or 'Il personal branding' where Italians act as though their native tongue is too impoverished to create new words and/or concepts invented abroad are so superior they need to retain their original English-language nomenclature).

It reminds me a bit of some of the swooning I do over Natalia Ginzburg's books. 

Maybe because it's the simplest little Italian linguistic tics that seem cozy. When I gave my graduate lecture at Bennington (for my MFA), I waxed poetically about the way Italians will sometimes add "la" to women's names when referring to them in the third person. In Ginzburg's masterpiece, Lessico Famigliare ("Family Lexicon"), she refers to her sister as 'la Paola.'  I am, for example, 'la Jeanne,' and yes, I've heard Italian friends refer to me that way.

It's a tiny thing, and something that actually cannot easily be translated and so it's not. In Jenny McPhee's masterful translation of Ginzburg's book (which I reviewed for the Kenyon Review), she dispenses with the "la" and just says "Paola."

But getting back to negazionista: we, too, in America have people who aren't taking the pandemic seriously or don't even think there IS a pandemic. And they're referred to as "pandemic deniers." But, see, there's nothing tricky about a denier. 

To be the equivalent of a negazionista, we'd need to call the deniers, I don't know, something like deny-men or deny-ists.   

And so I'm pretty happy to conclude this trip to the Italian language lab with the thought that Italian is an incredibly rich language that I have the privilege of knowing and exploring.

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Binge-listening to Ocean Vuong interviews

I've been interested in the work of Ocean Vuong since I moved near his childhood hometown of Hartford, Conn., a few years ago. But I've only just begun listening to interviews he's given (mainly about his novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous), and I find the way he speaks is mesmerizing. 

Both the substance of what he is saying and the way he says it summons my full attention.

He's one of those people about whom it could be said, "He's old beyond his years."

What incredible fortitude -- his childhood after leaving Vietnam and coming to America wasn't easy -- and also incredible grace. Not to mention a certain acumen for dispensing with silly literary distinctions; when asked about how he blends poetry with prose, he says something like, "I am an apprentice of the sentence." As if to say, in the end, words and sentences, which convey human thought and emotion, are key, regardless of the configuration. 

I love that!

Below are three interviews I could consume over and over again. The one from the NPR program "On Being" also comes in an extended version (~90 minutes). Here's the link:

https://onbeing.org/programs/ocean-vuong-a-life-worthy-of-our-breath/

He talks at length in this interview about the struggles of immigrants in America, saying that immigrant parents give their children these instructions:  "Work, fade away, get your meals and live a quiet life."

He adds, "That's the great crisis of the first and second generation."

The "conundrum," he says, for the second generation is this: "They want to be seen -- they want to make something. And what a better way to make something ... than to be an artist."

Then he makes this devastating observation, "So many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents' dreams."

I don't know if I am hearing right, but it sounds as though his voice breaks as he says this (his voice conveys emotion a lot and it's hard to know sometimes if he's on the verge of tears or just simply that's his voice, and for me, that's part of why it mesmerizes me). Either way, what a bold, heartbreaking and profound statement about one particular iteration of the parent-child saga.

And here's one Connecticut Public Radio's Colin McEnroe conducted:

https://www.wnpr.org/post/conversation-ocean-vuong-1

Lastly, from Christiane Amanpour's show on PBS:

"Cosa succede se ami i libri più di ogni cosa al mondo?"

I don't do this very often -- and by this, I mean write in Italian on this blog (I used to). I also mean: blog about other blogs on my blog.

But now's the time to do both ... but before I lose my Anglophone readers, I'll tell you it's the blog that an itinerant librarian keeps (the title translates into "The Happy Librarian" and the quote above, brace yourself, means: 'What happens if you love books more than anything else on Earth?').

Amici italiani, sono lieta di segnalarvi un bellissimo blog scritto da una signora che come avrete capito ama i libri! Addirittura porta i libri usati a vari mercatini di Roma. Viene descritta come "una infaticabile libraia di strada." Vuole "metter in contatto" chi "deve eliminare libri" con "chi li vuole e non puo' averli per svariati motivi."

Come dice lei, l'obiettivo non ha niente a che fare col commercio. Invece secondo lei, "È un progetto per vivere e far vivere i libri."

Ed ha iniziato ad unire i libri con chi ne ha bisogno perché è stata costretta a re-inventarsi. Fino a poco tempo fa, insegnava giornalismo alla scuola media, fra altre attività. E poi all'improvviso è rimasta senza lavoro.

Per seguire le sue attività e approssimarvi ad una persona che mi pare deliziosa, andate qui:

https://iosonounalibraia.wordpress.com/

La potete anche seguire su Twitter, cliccando qui.

Ci sono tanti aspetti belli di questa sua iniziativa. Chi ama i libri è quasi sempre una persona che io vorrei conoscere. Ma una persona che si dedica a portare i libri agli altri, come se fosse la medicina? Secondo me si tratta di una persona davvero eccezionale. E poi, pur essendo una signora di una certa età (io pure!), ha adoperato i nuovi mezzi di comunicazione, eccome! Aggiungo per ultimo che non si lamenta ... mai. 

Fatevi il piacere di conoscere questa signora tramite il suo blog!

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"Love, Leo and Caramel"

I’ve asked Leo to write birthday cards this year to my mother and to Liz, and I noticed that he signs them now, “Love, Leo and Caramel.” (Editor's note: Caramel is a dog!)

I find it heartbreaking, in so many ways. I mean, heartbreakingly beautiful, of course, and tender and joyful, but somehow also just plain heartbreaking.

Last night, Leo and I were reading aloud from the book Who was Albert Einstein? when we came to a line that reads more or less like this: "Albert as a boy believed there were two ways to live life: as if nothing were a miracle or as if everything were a miracle."

And unprompted Leo said, "I want to live my life as if everything were a miracle."

I don't know if he said it, thinking that’s what I would want to hear, 

I can only hope he is really sincere.

And I said, "Me, too."

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Question about the radio in your brain

March 24, 2021

Do you cue up the song on your computer or stereo and threaten to permanently dislodge it from your head?

Or do you lean into the loop your mind keeps replaying, even though it’s only your mind’s version of the song, and only the snippet your mind insists on replaying? 

(In this case, “The Street Only Knows Your Name,” by Van Morrison)

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The Great Gatsby -- in Italian!

I tell myself I should read English and American classics in Italian just for fun, yet I rarely do. I tend to want to read the works written in English in English and the Italian works in Italian. But I stumbled upon the opening line of The Great Gatsby in Italian on Twitter and I must admit I was enchanted!

''Negli anni più vulnerabili della giovinezza, mio padre mi diede un consiglio che non mi è mai più uscito di mente. 'Quando ti viene voglia di criticare qualcuno,' mi disse, 'ricordati che non tutti a questo mondo hanno avuto i vantaggi che hai avuto tu.'"

ORIGINAL:

"In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'"

(It's interesting to see how other American classics get translated across the pond. For example, Gone With The Wind? In Italian, it's "Via col vento.")

In this case, I am especially mesmerized because I often think of The Great Gatsby as my favorite novel, and it's a book that I sometimes re-read around my birthday as a gift to myself. What's more, it may be the translator's prerogative to consider what's lost in translation (more is gained typically, just to be clear). Here it catches my eye that the phrase 'turning over in my mind' becomes something in Italian more like 'has never left my mind.' I love the frission of this idea continually circulating, re-emerging, in Nick's mind.

One classic I did read in Italian was The Diary of Anne Frank (called simply "Il diario.") That may be a perfect book to read in any language because it's less about prose style than pure feeling.

I am always looking for ways to continue my study of Italian, and also to deepen my study of other languages. It seems quite obvious that I would want to know the opening lines of my favorite novel in any language I come across, much less my beloved second language. 

But life has a way of distracting us, doesn't it?