Swooning at the New York Public Library

Back before the pandemic made us shelve all kinds of plans, I won a short-term fellowship at the New York Public Library that had to be postponed. And last week, I was finally able to do a part of the fellowship.

In my diary at one point, I wrote, "I can't believe I am in New York!"

It wasn't the only thing I couldn't believe; I couldn't really believe how beautiful the New York Public Library's main branch is.

It hardly seems possible that there's a place as opulent as this that anyone from anywhere can enter and tour for free.

I'd visited the library before on multiple occasions but was never doing research so I didn't access some of the internal rooms that are nothing short of breathtaking.

People flock to the Rose Main Reading Room because the ceiling is gold-encrusted (like you might see in a French chateau) and the walls wood-paneled. Even the hallway outside of the reading room is grand.

And I flocked there, too, except when I got there, I found it was also home to the largest Italian dictionaries I'd ever seen. Six or seven-volume sets, several of which not only flooded the reader with possible meanings but also gave the history of use for a particular word. Like, this particular word appeared in a line from Boccaccio in the 1300s! A golden ceiling above me and the heaviest Italian dictionaries around!

I spent my days not only poring over Italian dictionaries but also immersing myself in works of literature I've begun to translate or plan to translate. Indeed, the fellowship gave me access to works by Italian women writers who survived the Holocaust that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to assemble in one place easily (in some cases, the books are out of print). I feel like I chipped away a bit at my project, which I've called, "Translating the Untranslatable: Holocaust Imagery in the Works of Italian Women Writers."

I will be writing a post about my project at some point for an NYPL blog for short-term fellows but I'll just mention here that I, for one, will never be able to learn everything I need to know about the Holocaust. In fact, I need to be reminded of it regularly, I need new details, I need fresh ways to understand how this atrocity happened not long ago but rather so recently that my parents were already alive (albeit toddlers). 

In Dopo il fumo: Sono il n. A 5384 di Auschwitz Birkenau, Italian author Liana Millu quotes a verse of poetry that sums up the feeling I am left with when I consider what people of my same species did to other people of our same species: 

"Andate, o umani. Più niente

voglio a che fare

con voi.”

(A rough translation: "Go now humans, I want nothing more to do with you.") 

All of this, and Manhattan awaiting me outside the walls of the library!

For information on the short-term fellowship program, visit this link.

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