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.

-30-

Ocean Vuong interviews that I binge-watch

(Updated) 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!

He's also phenomenally well-read.

Below are four 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.

I recently discovered this one with host David Perell (2026):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn4r4CmWmUw

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!

-30-

"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."

-30-

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)

-30-

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?

For Dantedi & always

🌿📕 #LeparolediDante #CruscaScuola (terza lezione)

Giovanna Frosini, accademica della Crusca
Parlare di Dante agli studenti: l'esempio di Purgatorio XIV https://t.co/5YxIEmxinE

— Accademia della Crusca (@AccademiaCrusca) March 24, 2021

The Accademia della Crusca, the venerable institute based in Florence that studies, promulgates and safeguards the Italian language, is on its "A" game for Dantedi as it prepares for the holiday dedicated to Italy's greatest poet, Dante, on March 25. The institute makes phenomenal use of Twitter, tweeting out for example "parole di Dante" every day (parole = words).

What's even more engrossing is the series of lessons based on specific cantos. One of the institute's learned scholars, Giovanna Frosini, reads and provides comment on a particular canto (above). The text of the canto appears alongside the video, so it's really a teaching moment, but not only for Italians living in Italy but anyone who studies Italian. 

Hear her read the canto, and see the words simultaneously. A pretty perfect foreign language study scenario.

Not surprising given the special edition of Dantedi that's underway this year, what with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death. But still I like to give praise where praise is due, and the institute's general efforts, and notable embrace of modern technology to celebrate an ancient text are inspiring.

We'll never stop studying Dante, and luckily there are a lot of people on-hand, even from this great a distance from Florence, to help us out. Mille grazie agli studiosi dell'Accademia della Crusca!

-30-

Pandemic journal, one year later

March 16, 2020

I have asked my students to keep a Coronavirus Journal, and so I will, too. We are all shell-shocked by the turn our lives are taking. Please tell me they will see writing in the journal as “therapeutic,” to quote something one student said the first night of the course, all the way back in January – when we met in an actual classroom on campus and began something together.

March 18, 2020

This will be a journal of clichés, this Coronavirus Journal. But that won’t mean the words aren’t sincere or the emotions keenly felt. It’s just everything we might have feared about stopping our lives and hiding inside is true. We’ve seen the Zombie Apocalypse and now we’re living it. Since I shrink from anyone whose path I cross while walking or jogging, the people I see might as well be zombies -- I am treating them as such.

Let’s take a visit to the Silver Lining Room. I go there a lot, coronavirus or not. I want to read or re-read classics this year, and something inspired me to take Dante off the shelf for the umpteenth time. So I began re-reading “Inferno” yesterday and hope to finish it in a few days (it can be slow-going when I toggle back and forth between the English and Italian editions).

Appropriate, no? Dante, in this time of plague-like living.

March 20, 2020

I’m calling this the Coronavirus Journal, but it’s also the journal of my father’s illness. I spoke with him yesterday and it was a replay of the conversation from the day before. Small grievances, no desire to read, the TV is “broken” but he knows it’s just some small quirk that if someone were there would be fixed instantly. I pine for the obsessively sharp, needling Daddy. I pine for some rebuke -- enough of this fog.

March 21, 2020

On Saturday, I texted Cristiano, Ilaria, Chiara, Irene and every other Italian friend I hadn’t already contacted. Irene said living under quarantine there was like being “seppellita a casa,” buried inside your house. And they ask, ‘What about in Connecticut?’ 

Today I go to learn about conducting a virtual lesson and setting up a virtual classroom. YIKES!

March 23, 2020

My coronavirus diary exists alongside my Daddy journal.

I spoke with him yesterday and it was not the same person I knew. It was like talking to a hybrid of Mommy and a very tired Daddy. He kept repeating certain key details of his blood transfusion – for instance, it took four hours. He told me there are good days and bad and the bad ones are when he wants to pull the blanket over his head. What was yesterday, I asked? A pull-the-blanket-over-your-head kind of day.

Loneliness & loss in the works of Natalia Ginzburg

I love Natalia Ginzburg so I couldn't turn down a chance to write about her for the site Reading in Translation as part of a special online issue completely dedicated to one of the most important Italian writers of the 20th century. 

One of my favorite Italian books -- one of my favorite books, period -- is Lessico Famigliare, and I was even able to review, for the Kenyon Review, the most recent English translation of the book, Family Lexicon, published by NYRB in 2017. The special issue actually features an interview with the translator, Jenny McPhee! I give McPhee the highest praise I can give for her translation of LESSICO: I forgot it was a translation while I read it. That's how smoothly, fluidly it reads.

This time out, I was tasked with writing about two novellas I'd never read before: Family and Borghesia, translated by Beryl Stockman (and with an afterword by Eric Gudas). And what I loved about the assignment was it added to the nuanced portrait of Ginzburg I already carry around in my head. A pioneering woman writer who was nonetheless a traditional wife and mother. Someone who broadcast the interior lives of women at a time when they were completely overlooked and yet someone who made it sound as though she had to scribble lines for a book while stirring the sauce for the pasta.

This paradox, which I wrote about in my essay for Reading in Translation, extends to the depth of loss and loneliness lurking beneath Ginzburg's cheerful veneer. She was able to feed both instincts in lines like this, c/o Stockman's translation: “Pietro said that, in fact, he had come to a halt with his memoirs some while back. He only wanted to remember tranquil, harmless, light-hearted things.”

She gives us the line like it was some throwaway thought in a long conversation about other, more important topics, and the final part of this thought contains these words: light-hearted things. And yet the ache inherent in those lines! I ache just thinking about the ache. He'd given up writing his book about his life, this character, because -- sottointeso -- when he thought back over everything that had happened to him, there were too many painful moments. Too many moments that were the opposite of tranquil -- harmless -- lighthearted. Or at the very least, not tranquil, harmless or light-hearted enough.

Isn't that the way?

And I tip my hat to Ginzburg because without being lugubrious, without shouting from the rooftop the inanity of knowing we're all going to die and what's more, we don't know when or how, she's managed to telegraph just how insanely painful and difficult life on earth can be.

I believe that's reason enough to read Ginzburg. And if you do, too, read the essay here:

https://readingintranslation.com/2021/02/22/putting-a-brave-face-on-loneliness-and-loss-natalia-ginzburgs-family-and-borghesia/

And read every other essay in this special issue because our fearless leader and editor, Stiliana Milkova, recruited some heavy hitters, including McPhee, Minna Zallman Proctor and Lynne Sharon Schwartz (pinch me, my old Bennington MFA prof!).

Which is only fitting since Ginzburg was a heavy hitter. A heavy hitter, even though women writers in Italy continue to be overlooked. Even though when I taught a course called Italian Women Writers at the University of Connecticut, a grad student IN ITALIAN, a young guy (!), told me quite candidly he could not think of enough books by Italian women or women authors to make up a whole syllabus. I think he'll get his PhD sooner or later -- bless his heart! -- and yet he seems unaware of Elsa Morante, Grazia Deledda, Dacia Maraini, Sandra Petrignani, Anna Maria Ortese, Anna Banti, Elena Ferrante and of course close to my heart, Mariateresa Di Lascia, who wrote the masterpiece I have the privilege of translating: Passaggio in ombra (the privilege, I should note, even if there's no publisher as yet sharing/sponsoring/honoring the privilege).

All of this to say, you won't ever regret reading Natalia Ginzburg. While it won't always be tranquil, harmless or light-hearted, it will be engrossing and beautiful. The consolation that life -- and literature -- offers us.

Gomorrah & Angelina Jolie (c/o the archives)

For the final day of my February blog-a-thon, I am a linking to a piece from the archives and one that I wrote in Italian ... tanto per cambiare.

When I first started blogging, I wrote fairly often in Italian, and I still think about what I might one day want to publish in Italian, beyond the blog. Probably something short.

As for this particular post, I'd looked back to see which posts had generated the most views and this was one of them.

It's a review of sorts of Roberto Saviano's nonfiction book, Gomorrah about the Neapolitan mafia, which many Americans will know from the TV series of the same name based on the book.

This section of the book, which takes place in Naples, oddly enough has a significant Angelina Jolie angle:

https://ciambellina.blogspot.com/2008/06/gomorra-angelina-jolie.html

This one's for Brenda and Eddie (c/o the archives)

For the second to the last day of my-sharing-writing-every-day-in February jag, I've reposted for friends a piece I wrote after we visited Italy in 2018. 

It's been an interesting look-back at some of the topics I've covered here, and I have inspiration for new writing. Maybe you do, too?

Anyway, from the archives, you can find today's piece, which I posted to social media, here:

https://ciambellina.blogspot.com/2020/03/this-ones-for-brenda-and-eddie-or-post.html

His first step was right here

Lost diary entry archive (Atlanta)

I was tidying Leo’s room last night and a vision appeared in my mind, a quick cloud of remember-when ... where I was entering Leo’s room in the middle of the night and comforting him because he was crying. And I realized – or really the point was just crystalized – that if we move (WHEN we move), we will move away from the rooms where those moments happened. 

We will leave behind the love seat where I nursed Leo every night for a year, or at the very least the room where the love seat now sits. And so the love seat -- even in a new house -- will be shorn of its context, its purpose. Shoot, it might even end up neglected in a basement. And oh mercy, mercy mercy me, that is so wrong. I might even be willing to stay here if I begin to be convinced that leaving Atlanta will somehow alter the legacy or my memory of the most important year of my life, the most pivotal, the most blessed.

So many memories – I mean, should I go around and take pictures of the rooms?! Take a picture, say, of the spot on the carpet – it's by his crib, mind you – where he took his first tentative step. 

Maybe.

(Editor's note: We moved. And the moment of where he took his first step lives on only in my mind -- and this blog post. The love seat? It's in the sun room in the new house. Shorn of its context, just like I thought. I guess that's life. But for a memoirist like me, whoa it's a blow to the head. Remembrance of things past, ahhh).

-30-

Texts I sent in 2020

I am a committed diarist (and yes, diarist is a word. Apparently). But the raw deal? What I really think, what I really do -- what *you* really think and do -- it's all in the texts. 

The year 2020 in texts

“Supplies needed for the weekend: please get Mommy wine and cigarettes.”

“Complicated scenario – I’ll explain later.”

“When you say ‘another ambiguous death,’ who do you mean? I’m scanning the news right now.”

“He was vivid one night, vigorous even – but delusional. Where does that vigor go during the day?”

“Biden is being tested for coronavirus, too.”

“The aide says she fell asleep last week while smoking and wound up burning the sofa.”

“One or two packs should be left.”

"Va bene ma West Virginia? Ma come mai?! Va be' me lo racconti dopo."

“Please no weird texts tonight. It wasn’t personal.”

“She tells me watching Sophie attend kindergarten via computer is the saddest thing she’s ever seen.”

“Those items will be provided as is. No protests, please, and no nit-picking.”

"Driving home from NJ now and I just stopped for gas so I have to tell you the radio just played, ‘Train in Vain,’ I promise – you were here with me."

"Sinceramente mi sono emozionata molto."

“Don’t feel obliged to say yes.”

“Where are you hurting?”

“I don’t have $1,000 in cash on me.”

“Leo asked me this question the other day: Mommy, what do you like better, addition or subtraction?”

-30-

(Photo: a favorite magnet. Inscription translation: "I like Heaven for the climate and Hell for the company.")

Postcard from Torino

Torino was a city that appeared at the margins of my Italian brain. I knew it as the city that had birthed some of my favorite writers (Primo Levi, etc) and I knew it as a city that hosted the Olympics. Me? I was fiorentina all the way. Except for the Eternal City, because it's, ahem, Eternal. (All roads really DO lead to Rome.)

But then I arrived in Torino and the rest of what I will say is just pure cliche, except that really and truly you must visit Torino. Really and truly you need to experience the grand piazzas and the porticos and the coffee culture and the pastries.

Turin, as I wrote in an essay for CNN Travel, is surrounded by mountains and criss-crossed by trams and cyclists. Being outdoors is what people do there, instinctively. Oh and the city is covered with porticos, or covered walkways, so strolling is a year-round hobby (not every city in Italy has these porticos; Florence, for example, has very few.)

The city also has the distinction of having been right in the middle of the Risorgimento, when Italy became an independent country.

One of the things the visit telegraphed to me was how little I've really traveled in Italy.

Sure, I've lived in Siena, Florence, Pisa and Rome. I've vacationed in Bologna, Milan, the Italian Riviera, Venice, the Benevento area in Campania and Puglia. Been to Rome countless times. I've even visited Sicily, which required a hectic overnight ferry.

But it's a big country, Italy. Torino has a different history -- and a different vibe (one laser-focused on coffee culture and public conviviality) -- from all these other places I've mentioned.

(As problems go, it is most certainly a FIRSTWORLDPROBLEM. But as an Italianist, I aim to know everything I can about my adopted culture).

For more about Torino, you can read an article I wrote for CNN Travel:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/return-trip-italy/index.html

-30-

My Italian soundtrack

You love Italian coffee, Italian wine and Italian pasta. (You and Stanley Tucci!)

But what do you know about Italian pop music?

Probably the first time you’ve ever seen those words strung together in a sentence!

But bear with me, because if the only thing you know about Italian music is opera or Il Divo, then there’s room for a little more info in your mental music library. Plus singing along to Italian music is a much better way of boning up on your Italian than cracking open a phrase book.

So here are four Italian pop songs worth your time:

“Hai un momento, Dio?” by Ligabue ('You gotta minute, God?') -- click title to see/hear

In which Ligabue imagines coming face to face with God and asking him which soccer team tops Inter in the finals (as you might if you met God and were an Italian male), if it’s sunny in the Great Beyond and also why? Just why? Ligabue fancies himself the Italian answer to Bruce Springsteen if the Boss were from Bonjovi’s part of Jersey.

Another favorite is his song “Certe Notti,” in which he croons:

Certe notti la macchina è calda e dove ti porta lo decide lei.

Certe notti la strada non conta e quello che conta è sentire che vai.

Certe notti la radio che passa Neil Young sembra avere capito chi sei.

Certe notti somigliano a un vizio che non voglio smettere, smettere mai

 

(TRANS: Some nights, the car is warm and the one who decides where you’re going

Some nights, the road doesn’t matter, what matters is going somewhere

Some nights the radio that’s playing Neil Young seems to know who you are

Some nights are like a vice that I don’t ever ever want to quit

(2)

“America” by Gianna Nannini -- Video above

The title of the song is likely to grab your attention. But if not, how about this: it’s about self-pleasure. It’s also one of the “hardest” songs in the Italian pop repertoire – a repertoire not known for grungy, realistic rock.

Would you like to know more? The song, by one of the only bad girls in Italian rock, is an anthem about independence and the difficulty of ever knowing anyone really well. But even if you don't know the words, the beat tells you everything you need to know about rebelling, Italian-style.

(3)

“Le Ragazze” by Luca Carboni (“Girls”) -- click here to hear/see

The song is about women getting tans and flying around like butterflies but also stinging men, including the singer, like bees. No, really -- that's what it's about.

Le ragazze si abbronzano

Ma le ragazze, a cosa pensano?

(Girls get tans/But what do girls think about?)

Later he sings:

Poi di notte si accendono

(Then come nighttime, they light up)

There are so many more songs that I love and I think it’s largely because of the way I trace my journey into Italian music. It begins with “La canzone del sole,” by Lucio Battisti. 

Nando is strumming his acoustic guitar in piazza; behind us is the fountain and nowhere to be seen are the horses that will take center stage here in Piazza del Campo, come summer. The way he sings the song, the way we’re sitting in a piazza in Siena, Italy, like we have a reason to be there (like a girl from Hicksville has a reason to be there), well I couldn’t turn my back on Italian music. It made me feel just a little Italian when I was anything but.

-30-

I kept your postcard

Did you send me a postcard once? If you chose it with some care, wrote a pithy message, or a long message, or sent it from a place dear to me (or us), most likely I still have it.

Open any drawer in my house and you will likely find a postcard. One I received or perhaps one I meant to send. (Or they may belong to Mike's "postcard collection," mainly culled from museum gift shops). I still buy postcards when I travel, and yes I even mail them.

Postcards are meant to capture a moment in time -- duh!

But sometimes I am stunned by how well they fulfill that mission.

One of my favorites is from my British friend Alex, whom I met in Siena when we were two aimless Study Abroaders, looking more for trouble than anything else (she was actually on her Gap Year).

Later after we'd left Siena (run out of town?!), she found the perfect postcard -- the one above -- and then added the perfect caption: "In memory of the casino we created therein." How could I not save it all these years? (casino = trouble)

It's part of a correspondence whose postmarks include not only Italy but also Luxembourg City, London, of course, Atlanta, Iguazu Falls (she's a world traveler) and many other far-flung destinations.

In fact, I've found a way to have the best of both worlds in postcard land -- a see-through lucite block picture frame where I can show off the front image as well as the inscription that has worked its way into my heart.

As I mentioned in my silly letter to Marie Kondo post (see here on right), I also have a postcard from my Florentine friend Floriano (say that 5 times fast). He'd gone to Ireland (years ago) and sending me a postcard from his trip, he wrote, "The land of your ancestors is amazing!"

One line that simultaneously pays homage to the country my family tree hails from and telegraphs this dear friend had been listening while I went on and on about being Irish-American.

Postcards, like I said, can do some very heavy lifting.

-30-

Leo's Greatest Hits (questions and comments division)

As you know, I jot down as many pithy observations from my budding philosopher as I can manage.

Like when he said, “Your tongue is like a slide for your food,” I scrambled to record it in the Leo Journal. You can't make this stuff up!

Or: “When you plant seeds, it’s like a baby being born.” How true! He's probably saying something like that in this old photo I've included. We began our days in Atlanta hunting for photos of Pres. Obama in The New York Times over breakfast.

Then there are the questions. They don't stop. And they are extremely detailed! He's ready with hard-hitting probing queries (future journalist? Nah probably an engineer. As you may know, engineers can be quite detail-oriented, ahem!). Here's one:

"What's your least favorite 3-D shape?"

Do you have an answer for that one? I did not, so he followed up with this: "What's your least favorite 2-D shape?" Much easier, right?

I am vaguely flattered by all of the questions, though I don't know what it means. He often doesn't have an answer for a particular question he's posed. I like to think he's so outwardly focused -- more interested in others than himself. But who knows? And would that even make sense at his age?

Here's a short conversation I jotted down in my diary years ago:

Leo: "Does the owner of Amazon do everything out of his house?"

Me: "He has a big factory."

Leo: "Does he have helpers?"

It’s almost like he thinks of Jeff Bezos as a kind of Santa Claus.

Anyway, I will keep writing down what he says because his words are a daily gift. Sounds like such a tired Hallmark card inscription but really true. I mean, children are almost always more entertaining than adults, and when the child in question is YOUR child? Christ, it feels like you're talking to the most interesting person in the world.

Last night, we read from a book about Albert Einstein in which he said the world is divided into people who believe nothing is a miracle and the people who believe everything is a miracle. Einstein preferred to be in the latter camp. Where do you think my little soul mate cast his lot?

-30-

Today in Reading, or Too Many Books?

I am joking of course when I even suggest there are too many books in the world, or too many books on my bed or too many books I haven't read.

I mean, could there really be too many?

And yet, ahem, the number of books I'd like to read appears to be exponential.

I've set a goal of reading a new memoir for every month of 2021 because I so enjoy teaching that genre of writing. And to that end, I've already read Parallel Time by Brent Staples, a memoir of Act One of Staples' life, long before he joined the editorial board of The New York Times. I've also read Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever’s memoir about her father.

And of course, I want to keep up with the latest in Italian fiction -- or at the very least, the latest in the slice of Italian literature that concerns me most (emerging women authors and older women writers overlooked by Anglophone publishers). Yet I got distracted and began reading Tre volte all'alba by Alessandro Baricco, who is not a woman but is writing in Italian. My sister, Liz, had bought me the book and it sat along with quite a few other unread books on a small bookshelf in my room, waiting for me to notice it.

It's not even about being too busy. I work for myself, in many ways.

But, given the sheer number of books I would like to read, will there ever be an end to all of this?

There are books on the floor, books in an Amish wooden bread basket I got from an antiques store that was meant to contain all of my reading-in-progress. Instead, it's permanently full -- overflowing, in fact -- and cannot accommodate any new bit of reading.

So the new bits of reading go on the floor, the old settee in the bedroom, the top of the bureau... 

I may be trying to read too much at once.

Take yesterday, for example. I had woken up early and then dormicchiavo for a bit so my mind was kind of pensive, restless, whatever, and it wound up being the most marvelous reading day because I re-read a book, and wound up finding something I had missed the first time. Namely a wonderful poet – Jolanda Insana – whose work is similar to poetry I am translating. So three cheers for Contemporary Italian Women Poets, an anthology that I've had for years, and which apparently I have not read in full.

I am also reading: 

Inventing the Future: the Art of Memoir

Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin (which contains another version of the "Brownsville Kitchen" essay that I teach).

I have begun to *re-read*:

A Perfect Spy (in honor of the great one's death)

Bella Mia, by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (amazing Italian author who wrote A GIRL RETURNED)

I've taken out of the library, and have on deck:

Dear Mr. You

The Last Interview -- Anthony Bourdain edition

Basically, it's like I am rolling in books. 

I know this is a fairly prosaic statement for any booklover. We are all surrounded by books. But sometimes a feeling overcomes us, right? It's like we are consuming the books, not merely reading them. It's like wrapping ourselves up in a cuddly sweater. We are wrapping ourselves in words, in beloved books.

But when is it too much?

Tomorrow's tomorrow (from the archives)

One of my favorite entries in the Leo Lexicon is "tomorrow's tomorrow." He doesn't say it anymore, of course, since he's now 8 and knows the days of the week.

But back before he went to school, he would reference 'tomorrow's tomorrow' whenever he wanted to talk about the day after tomorrow. I loved the phrase so much I wrote about it here. 

He would even say tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow if he was talking about something we might do three days from now. Like Christmas is coming tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow.

(Or as I like to say, if tomorrow had a baby, it would be called tomorrow's tomorrow.)

I sometimes will meet someone in Italy who reminds me of a person I know from my American life. Or vice versa -- an American who is talking to me in English while I am picturing someone in Italy talking and gesturing just like my interlocutor but in Italian.

Similarly, I find my fascination with tomorrow's tomorrow akin to my interest in little Italian linguistic curiosities -- such as domani l'altro. Italians will use that phrase when talking about the day after tomorrow. But it literally means "the other tomorrow." The day after tomorrow is straight forward. Like 2 + 2. The "other" tomorrow? That's got a whole different dimension to it.

I am posting new writing or re-posting existing pieces of writing every day in February. Read more about these little grammatical oddities here.