Me = I write, I edit, I speak Italian, I teach & I do some translation, too. Plus, I love these little sugar-dusted donuts that the Italians call ciambelline. Ciambellina = Chah-Mm-Bayl-LEEna. Welcome & start reading!
My first published obituary for CNN -- and I'm proud to say it is one I pitched, and one I knew we had to have.
Rose Girone survived both German and Japanese persecution, and managed to live eight decades beyond the end of World War II.
Girone was one of about 10 pre-written obits I completed. Thanks to the USC Shoah Foundation, I was able to watch hours of interviews with Girone where she matter-of-factly described the treatment she endured first in Germany, as a young pregnant wife, and later as a refugee in China, under Japanese domination.
Normally for my birthday, I record an entry in my digital journal. A habit whose name in shorthand is, 'Birthday Journal.' Just a diary entry designed to note and provide my mental temperature for future me, who will be re-reading Birthday Journal entries to revisit, to reminisce, to relive.
And I intend to continue with the tradition but I also decided to do something else this year.
I am feeling particular vulnerable this birthday and so I am reaching for my security blanket -- writing. The writing I've managed to produce AND publish. It's a selfish exercise -- safely indulged perhaps only on one's birthday or death bed, and not sure about the former -- but perhaps it could shed a bit of light for those similarly vulnerable this year for any kind of reason.
So here are bits of of my own writing that fill me with pride, and which are not behind a paywall that I can't scale (the links to the pieces for The New York Times are gift articles):
One day, Leo spotted a book in translation on a shelf in our house. Looking at the cover where the translator's name appeared, he said, "When will we see a book that says, 'Translated by Jeanne Bonner'?"
Today, my son. Today! (Because when you were born, I was reborn.)
A box of copies of my translation, This Darkness Will Never End, arrived today. So it's real! I can scarcely imagine the joy you'd feel if you published a book of your own writing. I am elated to bring out the work of another writer through my translating hand but I would guess seeing your own thoughts published in a book would make you (=me) weak in the knees.
Nothing is really like birthing a baby but, wow, birthing a book is also a long, tense, task-filled process!
It's been 7 years since I first read Edith Bruck's short story collection, Andremo in città. Seven years since I felt that lightning bolt: these stories need to be available in English. And now they are.
Thanks to those of you asking about how to buy a copy of my translation.
The book will be officially published on April 22 but you can order it directly from the publisher (Paul Dry Books) and it will be shipped to you immediately:
Give me feedback if you encounter a problem. I am not sure when Amazon or Bookshop will ship the book.
Readings
I'll be reading from the book at various libraries and bookstores in the Northeast, including:
Philadelphia City Institute Library
May 5
5:30 p.m.
Stay tuned for other readings!
I hope to reach a lot of people through events. Are you part of a group that would like to host me? Is your book club looking to read a lost Italian/Jewish classic short story collection? Let me know!
If you're interested in learning more about Edith Bruck or finding other examples of her work in English, keep reading.
I wrote an article for the journal, TheAmerican Scholar, on overlooked women writers who have borne witness to the Holocaust that features Edith:
You can also read her other books in English: Who Loves You Like This and Lost Bread (also published by Paul Dry Books of Philadelphia) or Letter to My Mother (published by MLA Publications).
I had to travel light when a few weeks ago I visited Rizzoli, my favorite bookstore in New York City: so just two books. But the one by Donatella Di Pietrantonio? (Borgo Sud) Pinch me! -- I had actually met her that day as part of the Multipli Forti Italian literature conference organized by the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU, Fordham and Rizzoli, among other organizations.
As for Un bene al mondo, by Andrea Bajani, well, I am still limping after immersing myself in his novel, Se consideri le colpe, (stunning English translation by Elizabeth Harris, "If You Kept a Record of Sins," published by Archipelago). It's about a boy whose jet-setting mother largely abandons him to pursue a career -- and a love life away from her husband -- in Romania. I can only hope this new title by Bajani offers slightly less anguish, otherwise I won't recover.
I must admit -- having just reviewed a new Patrick Modiano novel for the Boston Globe -- that I fleetingly eyed the French section. As the Rizzoli shopping bags proudly proclaim, the bookstore carries books in Italian, English AND French!
I'm sure some visit the store because it is stunningly elegant.
Others may visit the store because it is a short block from Eataly, or because it's on a wonderfully tranquil block of Broadway that more or less deadends into Madison Square Park.
And, of course, the shop has dozens of book-adjacent gift items -- the most incredible journals, for example. (And sometimes La Settimana Enigmistica).
But I go for the foreign books, and one day, I am going to give into my urge to buy French books, too!
Thrilled to say my translation of a speech by Edith Bruck entitled, "My Alma Mater is Auschwitz," has been published!
Edith gave this speech in 2018 when she received an honorary doctorate from a university in Rome. It gave her occasion to ponder her own education, which was interrupted when at age 12, she was seized from her loving home and sent to Auschwitz, so unsurprisingly, she approached the topic from an unusual angle that demands our full attention.
The piece begins:
As
the poorest among the poor, with or without anti-Semitism and the race laws, I
wouldn’t have been able to attend university. My alma mater is Auschwitz, a
place that’s become the symbol of absolute evil among the 1,635 concentration
camps that belonged to the ultra-civilized Germany and other countries allied
with or occupied by Hitler.
Auschwitz:
the university where you learn everything. Above all, to know yourself. There, you
learn anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology, faith and religion. The
value of life, the value of bread. But it also teaches the sorrow you feel when
a blonde child spits on you.
There’s
much to learn for the man who in slavery is defenseless and incapable of
looking after himself. There’s much to learn for the woman who’s stronger and
more resistant to the pain, shrewder and more capable of coming up with tricks
to evade selection for the crematorium. The woman who learns to make herself
invisible in order to gain another day of life.
You
also learn the lingo of swear words. The range of behavior among the different
social classes. Shame and pity for the guards, though the cold, the hunger and
the terror cloud your reason and don’t permit much feeling.
You
learn to understand everything. You understand the dehumanizing of the deported
who become Kapos. You understand and pity the companions willing to take on a
miserable job in exchange for the chance to steal a piece of turnip from the
bottom of the soup pot.
But
you also discover light in the darkness. When for example a soldier gives you a
warm potato, a tattered glove, when he leaves a bit of jelly in the mess tin
he’s tossed you to wash, and when he asks you, “What’s your name?” It sounds
like the voice of heaven. You’re no longer prisoner #11152. You exist!
And
so, you begin to hope you’ll come out of that hell, and come out a better
person because you won’t ever forget three things: that you’ll never be a
racist, a fascist; you’ll never discriminate against anyone; and you’ll never
be like your persecutors.
On January 27, a crowd will gather outside the Italian Consulate in New
York, no matter the temperature.
It always does for International Holocaust Remembrance Day when the
Italian consul, staff from Centro Primo Levi and others take turns reading the names of thousands of Italian
Jews who were deported from Italy by the Nazis and killed in
concentration camps across Europe. It will be one of many events connected with
the day, which will mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.
But Italy
has a special – and damning – connection to the Holocaust. It collaborated with
Germany on pushing Jews to the margins of society through the 1938 Racial Laws, among other measures, and then exterminating as
many as possible.
This event is arguably sui generis because while Italy played a
critical role in persecuting the Jews, the country had a relatively small
Jewish population and so the number of names read is a little less than 10,000 -- a number that allows for reading all of the victims' names in the space of a day. It is a
one-of-a-kind commemoration for those who somberly read the names and even for
the strangers walking by on their way to work or school, hearing even just for
a moment an echo of all that was lost.
And I will be there to pay my respects. What's commemorated on Jan. 27 is on my mind night and day, as I await final publication of This Darkness Will Never End, my translation of Edith Bruck's 1962 short story collection (Italian title: Andremo in città).
So thrilled to write about Patrick Modiano in the Sunday Boston Globe. His newest novel, Ballerina, which will be published this week by Yale University Press, reminded me of a saying attributed to Henry Moore about the necessity of having a task that consumes you every day -- one that you'll never be able to complete, however. Presumably Moore was thinking about sculpture but what about writing fiction in a bid to exhume the personal and political ghosts of wartime Paris?
Modiano has published dozens of books -- yes, dozens (and I've read and re-read many of them); and nearly all of them circle a particular time period -- the Occupation and the 30-year-period that followed in France -- and a particular obsession: what Daddy did during the war.
As I mention in the review, Modiano's father was Jewish and on the run from the Nazis. A terrible story and regrettably very common in that period but Alberto Modiano took a different approach: if the Nazis essentially outlawed his Jewish identity, then an outlaw he would be, trading goods on the Black Market, possibly collaborating in odd ways.
In Ballerina, which was translated by Mark Polizzotti, Modiano only touches on such things obliquely but the mystery of his father's existence -- and also the neglect shown both by Albert and Albert's wife to their two children, including young Patrick -- continues to haunt France's most famous living author.
Today I sent back corrections on the typeset proofs of my translation, This Darkness Will Never End.
Hundreds of little steps, seemingly, are behind the publishing of a book, in this case a translation of a short story collection by Edith Bruck. Conferring with the editor at Paul Dry Books, my publisher. Conferring with the marketing executive. Contacting bookstores about the possibility of holding a reading.
All of this after spending a year translating the book!
So, lots of work but what a hum there is in my little heart! What a labor of love it has been. I am grateful for:
*And translating a writer whose experiences of the Holocaust have forced me to conclude I don't know enough about this critical period of history -- and I never will. So I will simply study it for the rest of my life.
As I noted in an article for the American Scholar about the work of women survivors, the experiences of women often offer a different perspective on the Holocaust but it's one that's sometimes been marginalized or forgotten so I still have so much to discover.
Oh and the book has its own page on the publisher's site. Here it is:
Yes, yes Lavazza is Italian coffee, and I drink it. But brands like Guglielmo and Caffe Kimbo offer a very intense coffee experience! You are left in no doubt that you've had -- and almost certainly savored -- a cup of Joe (or Giuseppe, as the case may be).
The brand also has a very cool motto: Il caffe che fa centro. The coffee that hits the spot!
Every year, I tally up what I've accomplished professionally -- mainly my year in writing, but also translation. Basically, what I've managed to publish.
I started blogging about this because I noticed a wildly successful writer (Alexander Chee) did so. (He's a hard act to follow!)
Looking back on this year, I find there's not much published writing to consider! Not much writing, period -- but a lot of translation.
This was the year I completed my first book-length translation manuscript. (See cover mockup at left).
And like all of the short stories and poetry that I've translated and published, the book is by a woman author. Thanks to Paul Dry Books for continuing to invest in Edith Bruck, an important transnational Italian writer!
But mainly, I plugged away at the monumental task of revising, polishing, proofing and publishing a translated book. And I'm thrilled it's a translation of a book by a woman.
Translate women.
It's all I've done in the seven years that I've been translating Italian literature.
It’s not surprising that I would come to think of this as my mantra, my purpose. Women's achievements inspire me. They make me feel as though I have vicariously achieved something, so I've enjoyed discovering emerging Italian women writers and also overlooked authors.
(It’s also easier for me to confine my translation projects to women authors: I don’t work full-time as a literary translator.)
I stumbled into the field after earning an MFA and seeing the literary world as a potential home not only for my original writing but also for translated works of literature. Specifically works written by Italian women writers that I could smuggle into English.
Women and men, of course, share many of the same concerns, emotions and hardships, all of which can fuel the best writing.
But because the circumstances of their lives have often been different – a focus on caregiving for women, fewer work opportunities historically, mortality related to bearing children -- the experiences they've drawn from are often fundamentally different. In the case of the Holocaust narrative I’m now consumed by, women who were deported to Nazi concentration camps had to contend with the same inhumane conditions as the men -- meager rations, freezing temperatures, disease, evil guards -- but also fear of sexual predation, clandestine pregnancies and decisions regarding separation from their children that frequently hinged on the mother or the child headed for certain death.
There are many others focused on promoting translated works by women, including the Women In Translation initiative, which sponsors Women in Translation month every August.
But we still have a long way to go.
The first book I began translating seriously was Passaggio in ombra by Mariateresa Di Lascia. I learned about it while writing an article for Lit Hubabout overlooked works by Italian women writers. The book won the highest literary award Italy confers -- the Strega -- but has somehow not been published in English.
(My translation manuscript, "Into the Shadows," isn’t finished but I plan to return to the project in 2025, after shepherding This Darkness Will Never End into print; I won a PEN grant for the manuscript-in-progress and I remain grateful for it!).
That project gave me my mission: paying special attention to works by women overlooked by the literary world.
So now I translate women, I review literature by women writers and I look for any opportunity to spotlight books written by women. And I will continue to champion the work of women!
Here’s some of the work I’ve done so far to advance this mission:
*An article for the journal, American Scholar, on overlooked women writers who survived the Holocaust:
How do I feel when I speak Italian, you ask? Te lo dico! ... And thanks to Pensierini magazine for publishing my short piece on their website. Sometimes I also feel the need to write in Italian!
“Come ti senti quando parli in italiano?”
Quando arrivai a Siena nel 1993, sono rimasta totalmente
spaesata. Avevo studiato l’italiano all’università in USA ma nessuno mi aveva
detto che a Siena (come in tutta la Toscana) la gente aspira la ‘C’. Sono
arrivata come studentessa per un soggiorno di sei mesi e girando per Siena, non
capivo e non mi facevo capire.
Di preciso, non avevo capito che si trattava non solamente
di un paese dove la gente parlava in altra lingua; si trattava di un paese dove
la gente pensava in un modo totalmente diverso dalla mentalità americana. Per
esempio, quando entravo in un negozio e la commessa mi diceva, “Dimmi.” In
America, nessuno dice “dimmi” quando entri in un negozio! Non bastava
sostituire le parole – bisognava fare molto di più.
Per leggere il resto del testo//to read the rest, visit:
I took part in a blog project called Italian Lit Month that's coincided with the big, annual book fair in Frankfurt, where Italy is the guest of honor this year.
Other translators wrote about the works they've translated and translation book prizes and translating dialects and Italian poetry and amazing Italian novels you may have missed.
If you've ever wanted to know about Italian literature or Italian-English translation, this month of blogposts is a crash course.
We're nearing the end of it but the month of posts will be available for anyone who wants to catch up. You can also follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #ItalianLitMonth or #ItLit.
How do you sum up a life? Normally with my mother, I think of a funny story. And maybe that’s not fair, though she was a character, wasn’t she? It’s not a fabrication on my part that when I told her I was going to have a baby, she said, “What? What? What? What? What?” (Yes, five whats. As I’ve said before, people born in Flatbush in 1938 are naturally enthusiastic). But this morning, a year since she’s left us, I’m thinking of the little gifts she came up with for Leo. Maybe all grandmothers do this but that first Christmas ornament she bought for him? It will live forever in the museum of my mind, if only there. A stately, white porcelain figure of Santa and his sack of toys, with Leo’s name etched in gold on the side. Her thinking? He needed a Christmas ornament right from the get-go, and she was right, of course. A nice one, too. Grandchild no. 8 but she’d lost none of her enthusiasm. I also think – veering off in a completely different direction, which she was known to do – of what she was like when she ritually watched the New York City marathon on TV, as I mentioned in a previous post. I remember when the first Kenyan won in the late 80s. That year, as she sat in her rocking chair smoking and watching while the runner began to overtake the lead pack, she edged forward as she shouted, “He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it!” I’ll never be able to completely ignore sports because of moments like that. The thrill of human achievement. The euphoria we can feel for someone we don’t even know. She wasn’t ever going to run a marathon, Pat, but she was going to enjoy that man’s victory, his perseverance, his dedication. Yet maybe it would be a better tribute to think of the ideas she endorsed because she knew how deep our longing could be. Specifically, my longing to go to liberal, activist, avant-garde Wesleyan, which would never have been her choice for a college, but she was happy for me, even though the atmosphere was a bit too bohemian for her tastes (“It’s very far-out”). This post hardly does her justice because I am leaving out the time she schooled me for suggesting we give a very old piece of clothing to a Goodwill donation, saying: “People who are poor like nice things, too.” The sting of regret faded, the lesson remained. I’m leaving out words like “discombobulated” and her instructions for a quick bath: “Get in, get out, get washed.” (Maybe not in that order). But nothing I can write can conjure up her spirit fully because she was truly alive – especially alive in raising four children in pre-modern times (which is to say, all the cooking, all the cleaning, nearly all the ferrying to activities, the Girl Scout leadering, the backyard shepherding, etc). Christmas? How she arranged it, with a thousand heartfelt, hand-selected gifts, it’s hard to imagine Heaven is as special as Christmas morning was at 236 Ohio Street. Her hobbies? Besides smoking, the New York Times crossword. Because she could fit that in between all of her other tasks. No matter how much I do for Leo, it will never approach what Pat did for us. Because she gave her whole self. I haven’t even touched on her conversational skills – she made chit-chatting seem like the reward you get for all of your hard work at day’s end (and good thing the kitchen phone’s cord could snake its way to the rocking chair in the living room). “Oh, he was a character,” she might say about someone we were discussing (take the compliment, buddy! You got Pat’s attention, and her good will). I scarcely know how to end this message because there are so many things I’m ignoring, except maybe I could ask a favor? If you're thinking of your mother right now, spend some time talking to her today – for me. Entertain her theories, put up with her smoking, probe her memories. I’ll live vicariously through you! But if that's not possible, maybe just read Marie Howe's poetry -- especially this line, "I am living. I remember you."
Vado pazza per le parole, sia in inglese che in italiano. E una volta un mio amico fiorentino mi mandò una cartolina dall'Irlanda, e ci scrisse:
"Il paese dei tuo antenati è la fine del mondo."
Mi è rimasto impresso questo suo commento perché mi sembrava cosi gentile -- certamente mi aveva ascoltato con grande pazienza mentre gli parlavo, come americana, del paese di mio bisnonno -- ed anche perché Irlanda è davvero spettacolare.
Quando ci sono tornata a giugno, spesso mi dicevo, "Il paese dei tuo antenati è la fine del mondo."
Le parole. A volte possono avere un peso sacro anche quando si tratta di frasi che non hanno niente a che fare con Dio o senza dimensione religiosa.
I began compiling this list because whenever I teach, I'm always scouting out works I can include on the syllabus and I'm slated to teach a course this Fall. But I decided to complete it after the fanfare that resulted fromThe New York Times' list. Note, I don't make temporal distinctions. These are the works from all time that move me, which I suppose might be off-topic since the newspaper was specifically aiming to capture the best books of this century. I am not convinced -- or maybe I'm simply unsure -- the best books I've read were published during the current century. I also approach my reading life in a way that's quite separate from the publishing industry's calendar. I have recommendations from friends, I have genres I follow (memoir, literature by Italian women authors), I have gaps to fill (Shakespeare! Toni Morrison!), and none of that necessarily coincides with the particular books that come out each year (the most notable often go on the TBRL file, no?).
To be sure, many of these works I've read and/or re-read this century. But does that matter? Let's put the issue aside and move onto the actual list, which isn't exhaustive, more like 'some ideas' for what to read. A list like this could really go on and on but I'm going to call time right now. And I've probably missed all kinds of books that I loved. Oh well!
Fiction
The Dubliners, James Joyce
Drown, Junot Diaz (which I preferred to 'Oscar Wao,' which made the Times' list)
The Divine Comedy, Dante (definitely not this century, ha ha!)
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Il Giorno della Civetta, Leonardo Sciascia
To Each His Own (A Ciascuno Il Suo), Leonardo Sciascia
Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini)
Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones (His book, "The Known World," is on the NYT list but I haven't read it yet!)(almost this century!)
Country Girls, Edna O'Brien (May she rest in peace!)
A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr
A Meal in Winter, Hubert Mingarelli
Gli Indifferenti, Alberto Moravia
The Bishop's Bedroom, Piero Chiara (in a stellar translation by Jill Foulston)
Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill
So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, Patrick Modiano (actually this century)
Suspended Sentences (ibid)
A Scrap of Time, Ida Fink (see below)
Charming Billy, Alice McDermott
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (this century)
If You Kept A Record of Sins, Andrea Bajani (ditto) (and translated gloriously by Elizabeth Harris)
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (thanks to my friend, Jenny, for reminding me of this incredible book! So this entry is an addition to the original list, judges)
Essays/Memoir "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin
Italian literature is never far from my mind, even the last few months when I immersed myself in Irish literature as I prepared for my first trip to Ireland in more than a decade.
It's perhaps because when I read Italian literature, I attempt to fill in the vast gaps in my education, seeing as I attended school in America, and not Italy. So many Italian classics I didn't encounter in high school!
As such, I've avoided reading American or British classics in Italian. Why bother?
But a year or so ago, I stumbled over the opening lines of The Great Gatsby in Italian. By which, I mean, the first lines of IL GRANDE GATSBY. (I wrote about it here).
It happens to be my favorite novel of all time. And I realized how tickled I would be to see how the Italians render it (tickled and maybe also edified, since I do some literary translation, myself).
And why stop there?
So when Il Nostro Inviato went to Italy a few months ago for work, rather than ask for the latest releases from my favorite Italian women writers (my standard order), I asked for Gente di Dublino.
Or what I've been calling "Dubliners" since I read it for the first time at St. Anthony's High School on Long Island.
I made a beeline for the masterpiece of James Joyce's collection, "The Dead," or in Italian, "I morti."
Here are the indelible final lines from that seminal story (slightly condensed):
(From "I morti" -- "The Dead")
"Cadeva la neve in ogni parte della scura pianura centrale ... E cadeva anche su ogni punto del solitario cimitero sulla collina in cui giaceva il corpo di Michael Furey.
"...pian piano l'anima gli svaní lenta mentre udiva la neva cadere stancamente su tutto l'universo e stancamente cadere, come la discesa della loro fine ultima, su tutti i vivi e tutti i morti."
I can remember my teacher, Brother Jeffrey, pointing out the repetition in the lines: "falling faintly through the universe andfaintly falling," and they delight in Italian, too.
I've been binge-reading Irish literature for months -- ever since booking our trip to Ireland shortly before St. Patrick's Day.
And I've spent my reading hours re-visiting Synge and other works by Joyce, as well as tackling several Brendan Behan works and a short play by Samuel Beckett.
But there's really nothing like those final lines of "The Dead" or "I morti." It's the same, really, in the end. Be it "The descent of their last end" or "La discesa della loro fine ultima," I am equally enthralled.
These are poems from Versi Vissuti, which combines three of Edith's poetry collections. I read them for the translation reading series, Translators Aloud, which is a YouTube channel that bills itself The Voice of Translated Literature.
But once
upon a time, an Oscar nod was reason enough for me to go to the
movies. Ten days before leaving for college at Wesleyan University, I saw
what is now considered a modern Italian classic: “Cinema Paradiso.” It won the
1989 Oscar for best foreign film. And it changed my life.
The main
character is a famous movie director named Totò who, in the years after World
War II, returns to the tiny Sicilian town where he grew up. The film begins in the present day, in an apartment in Rome,
but an unexpected phone call sends the director back to Sicily – and the movie
back in time.
In the
director’s boyhood village, life revolves around the parish church and the
lone movie theater. That’s where the whole town convenes in the years before
television. Alfredo, the projectionist, is seen repeatedly shooing away Totò –
back when he’s an adorable but incorrigible boy who is infatuated with movies
and always grabbing strips of film that fall on the floor. Alfredo eventually
relents and agrees to teach him his profession. In the course of the film, Totò
transforms from a tiny tot who uses a stepstool to reach the projector into a
teen using his first movie camera to capture frames of a pretty girl he likes.
Before I
saw the film, I knew no Italian, and had no plans to study it. But when I
arrived at college a short while later, I enrolled in Italian 101 and signed up
for a hybrid literature-study abroad program – all because I fell in love with
the sounds I’d heard in the film. Eighteen months later, I left to study in
Italy, and after college, I went back to live in Tuscany as an ex-pat. Since
returning to the States, I’ve written this blog as an ode to small Italian pleasures. The film is one of many reasons a part of me will forever
remain in Italy.
The
movie does what all good fiction does: it makes you wish you lived in the world
evoked by the story, in this case, Italian small-town life. I felt as though I
had gone on vacation, to another country and another time.
It also
reminds me of the necessity of pursuing something that’s not inherently useful
or handy. Knowing Italian won’t really get you out of a jam. Even traveling the
world, you’ll find Italian will help you in only a handful of place outside of
one solitary country (Italy). But studying Italian has been the great passion of my life; it’s allowed me to step inside the mind of another culture and
revel in small moments, such as eavesdropping on a conversation between a
barista and a regular at café in Rome or dining in a remote countryside
restaurant where not a single other person speaks your native language.
Fluency, after all, is a form of immersion not unlike diving into a pool or
hiking the Appalachian Trail.
I saw
the film at a now-defunct arthouse cinema in Manhattan. Last year, I watched it
with my students at a small college in Hartford where I was teaching Italian. I
sat in the back of our darkened classroom, and took notes, my eyes
brimming with tears of nostalgia. In one scene, Totò is at home in his kitchen
pretending to be a cowboy, mimicking shoot-outs from westerns he’s watched at
the theater. A lighthearted moment balanced with the knowledge that his father
has gone off to war and never returns. In the space created by that absence,
Totò’s friendship with Alfredo, who is childless, looms far larger than the
token love story in the movie.
The film
is about more than a boy who grows up to be a director; it’s about how longing
and loss shape our lives, as well as the power of community. Totò leaves his
provincial hometown on Alfredo’s advice, without ever looking back, and becomes
successful in the big city. But the cost to both men is considerable. On his
return, he sees what’s happened to the village – and his one-time mentor,
Alfredo – since then. As the director revisits landmarks of his youth, he
realizes he’s abandoned the people who loved him the most.
Watching the film at 18, I absorbed a culture completely foreign to my
suburban New York upbringing. It drove me to master Italian so I could
understand bits of dialogue that escaped me on the first viewing and it
introduced me to what would become my adopted country. Since then, its language
and customs have infiltrated every corner of my life. That 11-year-old son I
mentioned? His name is Leonardo, and one afternoon in Italy not too long ago, a
Florentine friend of mine insisted on teaching him to curse in Italian. I am
raising him in a house where Italian words cover every surface, from book
covers to the posters on the living room wall, and boxes of pasta in the
pantry.
So go to
the movies. See a film you know nothing about. It might change your life. And
one day, when he’s a little older, I’ll watch “Cinema Paradiso” with Leonardo –
in the hopes that he, too, falls in love. With the movie or movie-making or
Italian. As long as he knows the beauty of falling in love with something
powerful enough to change your life.
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