Caro diario (Day 3): lo 'spartiacque' di Auschwitz

My plan? To write as if I am writing in my journal and to simply do so in Italian. Do you want to join me? In Italian or any language you want to practice. Here we go:

Caro diario,

L'anno scorso quando sono andata a New York per fare ricerca sulle scrittrici italiane che sono sopravvissuti ad Auschwitz o altri campi d'annientamento e hanno raccontato le loro esperienze, ho scoperto tanti libri fantastici.

Sono andata con lo scopo di tradurre dei racconti della scrittrice Edith Bruck ma anche trovare altri libri da scrittrici come lei, testimoni dello Shoah. C'ero perché avevo vinto una borsa dalla biblioteca pubblica a New York (New York Public Library -- NYPL).

Ho sfogliato un sacco di libri, compreso questo libro:

Dopo il fumo: Sono il n. A 5384 di Auschwitz Birkenau

L'ha scritto Liana Millu, autrice pure del libro Il fumo di Birkenau. E sfogliando il libro, ho trovato un brano che mi ha colpito -- il modo in cui lei percepisce la propria vita:

“Venne il funesto 1938 con le leggi razziali; poi la guerra, e con la guerra, uno spartiacque che da solo determina un “prima” e un “poi”: venne Auschwitz.”

Uno spartiacque che da solo determina un “prima” e un “poi”: venne Auschwitz. Una frase da mozzafiato. Significa che mentre gli altri forse usano le date di matrimonio o la nascita di un bambino per determinare i periodi importanti della propria vita, Millu fu costretta a ricordare Auschwitz come  il punto di referimento maggiore sulla mappa dei suoi giorni.

Per modo di dire: non c'è un'uscita. Un club per la vita.

Mi sentivo a volte sopraffatta da quello che scoprivo durante il periodo di ricerca perché si tratta di un male talmente vasto e potente che mi fa paura anche a distanza di anni. Leggo la frase 'venne Auschwitz' e mi fa rabbrividire.

Sopraffatta anche perché ho da imparare tante cose e mi chiedo, come posso essere utile? Basta tradurre, basta studiare le opere di queste donne? Aiuta? Chissà.

C'era una volta che pensavo di aver imparato abbastanza della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Ora so che non mi riesce mai ad imparare abbastanza -- fino all'ultimo, dovrei impegnarmi ad imparare e leggere di più.

Perché non posso mai capire fino in fondo la sensazione di quello spartiacque che divide la vita dei sopravvissuti in due.

-30-

Caro diario (2nd installment): 'Anna' di Ammaniti

My plan? To write as if I am writing in my journal and to simply do so only in Italian. Do you want to join me? In Italian or any language you want to practice. Here we go:

Caro diario,

Non mi serve spesso trovare consigli per libri sull'Airone. Più che altro perché ho già un elenco di libri che voglio leggere ed anche perché lo scopo di Airone è un altro (lo so -- ho l'abbonamento).

Ma qualche mese fa mentre sfogliavo un numero della rivista, ho trovato un consiglio davvero utile -- perché il libro in evidenza era un libro che già possedevo. Il libro era Anna di Niccolo Ammaniti.

Anni sono ormai passati da quando ho comprato Anna. Tanti anni fa, leggevo i libri di Ammaniti spesso -- infatti credo di essermi dedicata a leggere tutti i suoi libri. Quindi ho letto Non ho paura, Fango, Ti prendo e ti porto via, Io e te, Come Dio comanda ed anche qualche altro (compresa una raccolta di racconti, se ricordo bene).

Poi dopo aver letto Come Dio comanda, ho deciso che con i suoi libri, si trattava di letture deprimenti e rattristanti ed ho smesso. (Sono anche letture difficili per me, densi di vocaboli sconosciuti).

Non so nemmeno dove o quando l'ho comprato -- forse quando sono andata al Salone del Libro a Torino.

Spesso quando viaggio in Italia o mi capita una libreria con vari libri in italiano (come Rizzoli a New York), spendo una cifra per i libri, visto che non è facile comprare libri italiani in America se non vuoi pagare un sacco di soldi per la spedizione.

 

Ma comunque sono contenta di leggere un romanzo che mi pare il libro perfetto per questo momento. Il libro parla di una pandemia e noi la stiamo vivendo, anche se finora in modo meno pericoloso.

Come personaggio, la protagonista Anna è impressionante -- forte, tosta, infatti. E la trama ti coinvolge, fin troppo. Ad un certo punto, un personaggio importante si trova in pericolo ed ho dovuto abandonare il libro brevemente perché sono rimasta male! Solamente con grande sforzo, ripresi a leggere. 

Bisogna dire che Ammaniti coglie la tragedia dei nostri tempi: l'amore che proviamo per gli altri è tutto. E quindi quando quell'amore svanisce, restiamo colpiti, come se avessimo subito un colpo davvero. Il momento a cui ho accennato quassu' mi sono sentita cosi -- avendo subito un colpo vero e proprio anche se stavo a letto solamente leggendo.

-30-

Caro diario (Writing in Italian every day for a week)

My plan? To write as if I am writing in my journal and to simply do so only in Italian. Do you want to join me? In Italian or any language you want to practice. Here we go:

Caro diario,

Il corso d'italiano che insegno questo semestre comincia giovedi.

Sono 3 anni che non insegno italiano. Tre anni sono tanti! Non è che siano 3 anni senza parlare italiano o scrivere in italiano -- sarebbe difficile immaginare una situazione del genere. Ma insegnare è tutta un'altra cosa. Dal mio punto di vista, è come giornalismo. Quando scrivo un articolo, devo capire cosi bene la questione/la materia che sto seguendo che posso poi spiegarla ad altri.

Quindi sono un po' nervosa. Mi innervosisco soprattutto quando penso che fra poco devo insegnare italiano di nuovo ma questa volta in masherina! Finora quando ho insegnato durante la pandemia si trattava di didattica a distanza. Imparare l'italiano è gia' difficile, io direi.

Pero' c'è da dire che i momenti in cui preparo le lezioni mi riempiono con una specie di gioia. Mi rincuoriscono. Perché mi lega di nuovo alla mia passione per la lingua di Dante.

E poi c'è da considerare un mio progetto. È un progetto in cui cerco di aumentare il numero di persone che parlono itaiano. (Ho altri progetti, compresa una spinta di convincere la gente a scrivere un diario -- come questo diario). Esistono gia' tante persone che parlono inglese. E tante persone che vogliono imparare inglese, che stanno studiando inglese. Ma in USA chi studia italiano studia una lingua minore, ben o male.

Ho fatto ora una ricerca sui blog degli insegnanti e ho trovato uno davvero bello che è il blog di una scuola d'italiano a Firenze (L'Accademia del Giglio): adgblog.it

Mi sa che mi potrebbe essere utile, visto che ci sono un sacco di esercizi e consigli.

Comunque penso di fare una proposta ai miei studenti: scrivere un diario in italiano (forse gli faccio guardare qualche scena del film di Nanno Moretti "Caro Diario."). Ci staranno? Ora vediamo. Scrivere fa sempre bene ma quando uno scrive in una lingua straniera, si tratta di un'impresa abbastanza impegnativa. Non siamo tutti in grado di farlo. Io difatti scrivo poco in italiano, ma faccio anche la scrittrice quindi credo sia normale preferire scrivere nella propria lingua quando una ha un rapporto intimo e intenso con essa fin dall'infanzia! Forse invece di dire che non siamo in grado, sarebbe meglio dire che non ci viene naturalmente.

Ora, caro diario, ti saluto! Alla prossima. 

-30-

Translating the Untranslatable at the New York Public Library

The summary of my research project at the NYPL is up on the library's site and it's called "Translating the Unimaginable: Holocaust Imagery in the Works of Italian Women Writers."

And the studies I undertook as part of my short-term fellowship also comprise contemplating the unimaginable, the unbelievable, the almost untranslatable. Which is to say the Holocaust, the Shoah, the systemic slaughter of a particular group.

Imagine this: One of the books I requested to study is basically a directory of all the Jews deported from Italy during the war. It's called Il libro della memoria: Gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia (The Memory Book: Jews Deported from Italy).

It's an incredibly important tool for researchers, and represents enormous work on the behalf of the author, Liliana Picciotto.

But can you imagine? It's basically a phone directory of people carted off for slaughter -- a directory whose entries tell you whether the person was in fact slaughtered and where.

I also learned a lot about the particular plight of women in the camps -- a topic that hasn't at all been exhausted. They were torn away from children at a time when women were the primary caregivers. They weren't always slated for work detail so instead they were slated for death. If they were allowed to live, they were shorn of every physical detail that defined them as women -- at a time when women's appearance could define them. Some even gave birth in the camps.

I am sure I am like every other person who stumbles into Holocaust studies -- I feel like I must delve deeper, I must report on what I have learned, and I must continue to study the topic -- because I will never know enough. And we may never fully understand the genesis of this particular evil but we must try.

You can read the piece at the New York Public Library's website here:

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/12/30/translating-unimaginable-holocaust-imagery-works-italian-women-writers

I highly recommend the short fellowships, particularly as an independent scholar. They will give you a small stipend to study for two to four weeks in one of the world's most dazzling libraries, fetching every book you could possibly want and bringing it to a private study room.

This year's deadline is Jan. 31, 2022. The application can be found here.

-30-

Surviving without Dad: Month One

It was a month yesterday since my father left us. We've survived a month. Maybe you can even say we got "lucky": Christmas and Covid (a.k.a., Covid Christmas #2) distracted us from facing the fact that my father can no longer be reached physically -- my only option is to think about him, to ruminate over his life. I cannot touch him or talk to him the way I once did.

I am writing today largely because of my fellow grievers who have so kindly come forward to offer comfort, some of them suggesting the posts I've written here about my father have resonated with them.

I am writing perhaps especially for those of us experiencing ambiguous grief, to steal Pauline Boss's term (please see Krista Tippett's interview with her from the NPR show, "On Being").

In our case, 'ambiguous' because while my father died a month ago, he ceased to be the person we'd always known at least a year ago -- so I haven't been grieving for simply a month. I've been grieving a kind of nebulous loss for a year -- he was still alive but since words trickled out of him during his final year on Earth and he did almost nothing but rest, the best part of him was dead to me, unreachable (note, I speak only for myself).

Yet I was still absolutely walloped by his passing! Wracked with sobs so deep, they seem to rise up from the Earth's core. Even yesterday!

It's hard to characterize how I'm doing; I am fine in many ways and beleaguered in other ways. Nothing original here. Like I said in my essay for Brevity last year, I am just one more person discovering the non-secret that our parents will die but I still have to say my piece.

Christmas went well (well-ish?), and I was fairly content, perhaps because we entertained my mother, which provided a perfect distraction ("Leo, don't let the dog lick Grandma's face.") Plus, I could surreptitiously write a bit in between chores and snacks. I even ran on the treadmill!

But still, I’m in a club I don’t want to be in. The club for fatherless people.

I've allowed myself moments of drowning in sorrow, especially on car rides. Actually the car has been my getaway to grief for more than a year. Books have triggered tears, too: especially The Invisible String by Patrice Karst, which before the homily at my father's funeral mass was entirely unknown to me. My cousin sent it to Leo afterwards, and another friend sent a copy, too, but I think it was more cathartic for me than Leo. Spoiler alert: if you're feeling wobbly, beware the page where the boy asks about "Uncle Brian in heaven." I can't make it through it without dissolving into tears. And my God, how true: we are connected to everyone we love, no matter where they are.

A part of me didn’t want to leave 2021 behind for one simple reason: I had an almost indescribable sensation of Daddy belonging now to 2021, since that’s the year he died. 

He won’t be moving into 2022 with the rest of us. 

What I read in 2021 & what I'll read in 2022

When I think about what I am going to read for the year or what I have read, I focus mainly on whole novels, memoirs or books of essays that I have completed, ignoring the little scraps of reading I do, often in the form of reading a poem here or there.

But you can find a whole world in a single poem. And most of us are probably voracious readers who move from a book to a magazine to the cereal box to an article online (about, say, literary controversies).

So it seems fitting to note that after reading a New Yorker article  about Paul Celan and wartime poetry that mentioned Wilfred Owen, I grabbed down from the shelf the old anthology of poetry I spirited away from my father to look up Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est." Then I left the book open to that page for a few weeks. I suppose to commune, for a while, with this idea:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

That's reading, right? The one-off poem. A single verse could save your life, so maybe I can log it here. I'd read the poem 1,000 years ago at school and it's as stunning as ever.

This past year was a particularly fertile year for reading. I read voraciously -- maybe extra voraciously! In my diary, I find notes about days in which I read bits from five or six or even seven different books. I guess that doesn't speak well of my ability to concentrate but I wanted to wallow in reading at times, I wanted to bathe in books. You, too?

I also read vastly contrasting books -- so one day in March, while I was reading Le Carre's Legacy of Spies I was also listening to the audiobook of Blue Highways (for that course on travel literature that got canceled), before dipping into Il Pane Perduto (an Italian memoir), La Stanza del Vescovo (I re-read it after the ALTA judging; it was a finalist in our contest) and a compilation of "Mafalda" comics (in Spanish -- some of the panels escape me because I don't have a big vocabulary (!) but when I understand what the little Spanish-speaking cherub is saying, it is deeply satisfying!)

Some of my reading resulted in reviews that I published here and there. For example, I reviewed the Italian memoir Distant Fathers written by Marina Jarre and translated by Ann Goldstein (a.k.a. Elena Ferrante's translator).

Indeed, there were lots of memoirs in the early part of the year! Including a book by New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples: Parallel Time. I teach an essay by Staples called "Black Men and Public Space" and have long wanted to read his memoir, which did not disappoint.

I also finally "discovered" Rebecca Solnit. In Wanderlust, she writes, “Walking ideally is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” And, “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” The Gospel according to Rebecca!

And then around the time I went to the New York Public Library for the translation and research fellowship, I switched back to heavy Italian reading.

In all, I read 40 of books from start to finish, and 15 I perused without finishing. That's not great; my Uncle Larry reads something like 80 books a year.

Some of the books I actually read:

A Stranger's Pose, by Emanuel Iduma (travelogue)
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon (travelogue)

Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever (memoir)

Parallel Time, Brent Staples (memoir)
The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster (memoir)
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir/writing guide)
Distant Fathers, Marina Jarre (memoir)

Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin (essays)
Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (essays)

Bourdain: The Official Oral Biography of Anthony Bourdain
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century by Frederik Logevall (biography)

Northern Spy, Flynn Berry (novel)

Voices within the Ark: Modern Jewish Poetry (anthology)

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong (poetry)

Some books in Italian (outside of NYPL fellowship)

Anna by Niccolo' Ammaniti (novel -- er -- romanzo!)

Non ti muovere by Margaret Mazzantini (novel)

Tre volte all'alba by Alessandro Baricco (novel)

Il Pane Perduto by Edith Bruck (memoir)

Notable non-book reading

*Cards and letters from the New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler to my uncle (they were friends)

*The photo albums my mother painstakingly compiled when we were children

What I read at the New York Public Library for my fellowship (at least in part):

*Smoke Over Birkenau by Liana Millu (translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, my old Bennington prof!)

*Voci della Shoah: Testimonianze per non dimenticare

*Giorgio Agamben’s Quel che resta di Auschwitz (In English: The Remnants of Auschwitz)

*Auschwitz by Frediano Sessi

The Year in Writing ... and Contemplation

Here we are at the end of another year -- at the end of another can-you-believe-it year. A year where you could be forgiven for asking, Did that really happen? Except you would be asking it almost every day.

And those of us who write ... tried to write. (Some of us even tried to translate, though not nearly as much as desired).

It seems odd to tally up what's been gained when I am so mindful of what's been lost. Dare I say I was hoping to be a catcher in the rye, not of wayward children but of sick parents?

Last year when I wrote this annual roundup, I talked about not achieving much. But I think that when I wrote it, I admitted as much with the naive idea that 2021 would be different. We'd go back to normal and we'd be logging all kinds of achievements and wins.

Not so much, right? I was shocked a few months back when my doctor said she doesn't think the pandemic will be going away but rather we'll learn to live with it. Maybe this was 100 percent clear to you, and everyone else. But I hadn't gotten that memo. I was thinking at some point I wouldn't have one hand tied behind my back all the time.

I suppose of it's of a piece in a year in which my parents seemed to grow old overnight, and I had the belated realization that they have been the superheroes of my life -- at the exact moment their super powers have begun to wane.

I hope it won't appear unseemly to continue on with this tradition, in light of recent events, and I will be counting on you to join me so we can count our blessings together. I'll start with the year's highlight, then step back to consider the broader picture.

I didn't publish much in the way of translations this year but I did have a wonderful experience that was very much tied to translation: my short fellowship at the New York Public Library. I finally took it, aimed at working on translations and doing research on Italian women authors who have written works about surviving the Holocaust. Clearly the people who built the library's main branch on Fifth Avenue knew that readers and scholars needed a sanctuary -- a church or temple or mosque of books -- and they made it so. Every moment studying in that gorgeous monument to learning sparkled, and besides, simply returning to New York was a gift. I blogged about it, of course, homing in how I now experience Manhattan through my father's eyes, and you can read those posts here and here.

The Rose Main Reading Room dazzles; with a painted and gold-ornamented ceiling, it's as beautiful as some of the churches people visit in Florence (and for the topic I am researching, the library has EVERY book imaginable). If you visit, make a detour to the periodical room on the first floor -- it might just be the most beautiful room in the entire library. The kind of wood-paneled reading nook all of us books-obsessed folks dream about.

Having begun with the pinnacle, I will pause to ask:

What are your writing goals (or creative goals or for my sister, Denise, exercise goals)? I often update my goals -- mid-year adjustments, I call them! -- but really, I have a few permanent ones: 

*Write regularly, and 

*Land work in a new publication. 

I also have what appears to be a pie-in-the-sky goal: land a regular writing gig at a publication (like a column; I always think if I had stayed at the Morning Call, I would have hoped to become one of the newspaper's columnists). Oh and I also would like to meet Bono! But I suppose that is neither here nor there.

Putting the pie-in-the-sky aside, I managed to keep writing regularly and also land work in a new publication. In fact two, though you may think the first doesn't count: CNN. 

Yes, I work there as a contract news editor but getting an essay published by CNN Opinion is totally separate! And now that I've done it once, I see it's not so easy. Here it is:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/opinions/family-history-research-pandemic-year-bonner/index.html

I also did a tiny bit of reporting this year for CNN in connection with three stories I pitched -- something I hadn't been doing. Shall I inch my way back to reporting? I do miss it -- it's hard as hell but the contact with people and the process of gathering information is exhilarating. Ex-journos, how do you handle this? I don't mean to wax poetic about the business of journalism -- it's brutal. But there's something about reporting that is elemental. And I think I need to do a little reporting each year, if I can swing it. If you agree, let's chat. Here's one feature story I wrote about libraries doing some rather heroic work during the pandemic:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/13/us/coronavirus-libraries-pandemic/index.html

As for the other new publication/venue, an essay of mine was published in the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas section -- which was a thrill. Possibly a new home for future work, and I got the whole back page the week it ran! If you haven't already read it, it's about pocketing small items from my parents' house that will let me hold onto their spirits.

Notes from a funeral

The appearance of bagpipers for Daddy’s funeral was apt and moving but also like a movie cue from the Celtic DVD catalog: This is grief! You have suffered a terrible loss and you need this soundtrack.

We ran down to the beach this morning and stripped down to our bare feet so we could wade into the chilly water. Maybe if my feet are freezing, I won't know my heart is breaking.

The two-day wake-funeral doubleheader is like a long distance race of grief. You have multiple opportunities to grieve (i.e., lose it): when I arrived at the funeral home, I kneeled by Daddy and left a note; then there was a brief service; then I said my goodbyes at evening’s end; when we returned this morning – along with a large party of family members – we had another occasion to say final goodbyes. And throughout the wake, people appear like guests on "This Is Your Life," triggering additional bouts of grief. 

(That's no complaint -- I now know the funeral ritual performs a purpose as old as our race with precision; when my beloved relatives and friends arrived, I abandoned myself to their embrace. I no longer needed to stand on my own. That's the power of the funeral rite).

I said goodbye for Leo, too; he sat apart from the rest of us, as if to physically distance himself from the corpse across the room. He appears confused and angry but most likely also -- or simply -- sad.

I’m allowed to spread the “pall” over the casket. I don't know what the funeral director means when he makes this offer, but I know it will be clear when the moment comes, and it is. Somehow it feels right and proper to spread the little shroud over the coffin.

So many occasions to realize my father's life is over, no chance at rebuttals or re-dos. I try to tell Leo that in some ways being so engulfed in grief is a good thing – I am not ready for our shared time together to come to an end. My father was called to play the role of Daddy and now I see he gave a star turn. No one else could have been my father.

My father and Steve Winwood

There's a song on Steve Winwood's last studio album called, "Take It to the Final Hour."

But in my mind, the song has another title: "What My Father Says," because that's the song's refrain.

I have listened to the album a lot in the past year. And as often happens with music, new associations emerge, or maybe just deeper ones.

The song reminds me that while I sometimes may see reckonings coming -- even those a few years off -- that doesn't change the outcome. 

And in the past year while my father languished due to complications from blood cancer, the song has become transformed in my mind -- it's part of an internal playlist that's been on as I've dwelled on his illness, on what will never be, on what I left undone. 

Also: what will now go unsaid. 

Because my father says almost nothing. After a lifetime of robust argument and debate, of recounting funny stories, of using his voice almost like an instrument to emphasize, to chastise, to entertain. Now more or less gone. Silent.

This is what I think about while Steve Winwood is singing. The mind does that, right? The mind immersed in music.

Indeed, at times when I need to cede to the emotions emerging from the new normal, I've cued up the song in the car. 

I do it especially after taking Leo to school. I am alone, I am momentarily free of obligations, I do not need to put on a mask (or at least not the kind that hides our emotions).

I go to the song and I allow it to work its magic, or in this case, wreak its controlled havoc within the confines of my mind and my car. In other words, I am just one more wacky mom, crying as she returns from school drop-off.

One morning last Fall, after taking Leo to school, I listened to the song again, losing myself to sadness on a short rainy ride home, with the wet leaves that cluttered the ground acting as an appropriate shroud around me. I wanted to be shrouded, to be hidden, to privately pick at my wounds. Chief among them, what I’ve lost in not being able to talk to my father. 

Letter of Recommendation: Non ti muovere

I'm finally reading Margaret Mazzantini's novel Non ti muovere and I am thrilled to say I am doing so courtesy of my local library!

(There are not a lot of Italian books in the original language there, but I see any books in Italian as a positive thing).

I've seen the movie and I must confess that I see Sergio Castellitto at almost every turn in the novel since he played the narrator in the 2004 film dramatization.

That may contribute to my assessment -- who knows? -- but I feel like Mazzantini's prose very deftly creates a convincing male narrator and main character.

The voice is so strong that I can overlook what this character does, which is allow himself to serially rape a woman he meets at a coffee shop one day who invites him to use her phone. And not just serially rape but convince himself that he loves her and that these first encounters are the start of a relationship. Well, in fact they are, perhaps because the woman is an Albanian immigrant who lives in a hovel and works as a prostitute.

What's more, the relationship unfolds while his own fledgling family needs him.

So he's quite the flawed protagonist but Mazzantini's intimate gaze into his character is mesmerizing. What else has she written? I have no idea -- but plan to find out.

-30-

Visit the dead, bury the sick

March 22, 2019

Visit the dead, bury the sick. I produced this tangled axiom the other day without thinking.

Bret said: 'Write about the things you’d write about if no one would read it' … Where to begin? 

That's obvious: The legs splayed out casually, of course, the night we came back from the hospital, the rocking chair pushed closer to the TV, the studied lightness of his demeanor. 

'Maybe everything is OK,' I thought. 'He’s here, watching TV with us, as if nothing is wrong.'

***
Lost diary entry

The Power of Small Journeys (for Brevity)

I'm shameless when it comes to writing about my travels and will hide travel writing inside of just about any piece. In this case, one about the power of trips -- even small ones, even within your town or city! -- to awake the writing amuse.

"We were staying in a residential neighborhood called Rosemount-La Petite Patrie which is full of delightful duplexes with second floor balconies facing the street that overflowed with flowers, bikes and the odd pair of running shoes. On a whim one evening, I took a walk at sunset. As the sky turned purple, I craned my neck to get a better view. 

"On a sliver of park land I glimpsed between duplexes I could see soccer players practicing, while bike commuters ambled by me. And notebook in hand, I began taking an inventory of the neighborhood’s businesses: a grocer, an off-license, a hair salon, a book shop, a toy emporium, a real estate office, the plumber, a driving school (automatique and manuelle) and so on."

 

You can read the rest at the Brevity Nonfiction Blog (my blog away from blog, as it were):

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2021/11/03/small-journeys/

-30-

What I bought at Rizzoli

While I was holed up in the scholars room at the New York Public Library, I did break out for strategic jaunts, either to walk block after block or to buy some items that I cannot easily purchase in Connecticut (or which would otherwise have to come via the mailman).

Chief among these shopping destinations was, of course, Rizzoli, the famed Italian book store that my father introduced me to years ago (not because he reads Italian but simply because he reads).

I wasn't judicious in my spending but (luckily) they didn't have everything I wanted. Indeed I saw little down side in throwing some money at a place like Rizzoli, especially since buying Italian books is good for my health, and maybe one day will be good for my wealth (though probably not, given the difficulty inherent in literary translation! Or the scant dough tied to teaching Italian).

I mainly bought books but oh the journals they have! Oh the notecards! 

So without further ado, I bought two books by Primo Levi that I'd needed to replace for a while:

Se questo è un uomo

Sistema periodico

The first one was apt since I was in New York to study Holocaust-era works at the New York Public Library.

I also bought:

Harry Potter e la camera dei segreti

I couldn't resist! Or rather, I had been resisting and decided to throw in the towel. Someday Leo and I will read it together, as we've read the English-language original.

I also bought a children's book about the Romans for Leo.

And, last but not least:

La settimana enigmistica

It's a weekly book of crosswords, puzzles, word games and cartoons. And it's by no means the only puzzle book you'll find on Italian newsstands.

If they'd had books by Natalia Ginzburg, I would have bought them since they were on my list. If they'd had Borgo Sud by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, I would have bought it. They didn't but still, to walk into a bookstore in America that sells Italian books is always a treat.

You'll find Rizzoli not far from Eataly NY so why not visit?

1133 Broadway

New York, NY

-30-

That's me in the NYPL Researcher Spotlight!

I continue to float on the energy afforded me by completing my short fellowship at the New York Public Library last month. And it helps that part of my research is already surfacing in ways I can share (if we have to wait until my translations are published, we could be in it for the long haul).

The staff at the New York Public Library interview  researchers to learn about how the library's extensive holdings are helping them do research. In my case, I was able to gush about the myriad (and massive) Italian dictionaries and etymological works in the Rose Main Reading Room that helped me while I worked on translations. One of my favorite dictionaries, the multi-volume Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, edited by the legendary Salvatore Battaglia, has multiple pages dedicated just to the history of literary usage of one of the key phrases I was trying to decipher (more about this later in a research essay I am writing for the Library).

If you want to read the Q&A at the Library's website, it's here:

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/11/02/nypl-researcher-spotlight-jeanne-bonner

If you want to read poems by the author I'm translating (Edith Bruck), go here:

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

-30-

Lost diary entry: Up at night with 'Country Girl' by Edna O'Brien

July 28, 2019

Woke up late, on account of being up during the night (delightfully so, though, since I am reading Country Girl by Edna O'Brien), and was not too ambitious today. Coffee on the back deck with the Gullon digestives that arrived last week, notes for a Natalia Ginzburg review. 

Then a barefoot tour of the flowers in the front yard, so gorgeous and generous: day lilies and morning glories and hibiscus blooming in the two pots on the front steps. 

Notes of an unexpected summer soundtrack fill my head: "I know that you're in love with him because I saw you dancing in the gym."

From the Lost Diary archive

-30-

Letter of Recommendation: Il Caffe by Gramellini (Il Corriere della Sera)

When I want to read Italian news, I turn to Il Corriere della Sera. I don't know how that wound up being "my" newspaper (since I didn't study or live in Milan) but it might have something to do with Indro Montanelli (who presided over the letters in the newspaper when I moved to Italy after college and answered one letter each day in the paper).

And when I want to wade into some bit of Italian news or controversy, I turn to Massimo Gramellini's column, which is called Il Caffe.

There are lots of ways to learn Italian or deepen your knowledge of the language. And reading Gramellini's vignettes in the Corriere della Sera newspaper is just one way.

The newspaper labels his short column "una tazzina di parole ogni giorno": a cupful of words every day. And they are sometimes fightin' words, but almost always worth reading.

BTW, another way to deepen your knowledge is listening to Italian radio. I've written about this before; listening to the news or to cultural programming in Italian is a way to keep Italy on the brain, to practice my Italian and also simply to hear about global news from an Italian perspective (I love "Il Libro del Giorno," for example, a daily show about new books coming out in Italy). 

And hearing the language in this way, versus reading a static website or newspaper, can help you move vocabulary from words you know passively to words you can imagine using in conversation.

What's interesting is, you can listen to Gramellini's column, too!

Click on this sentence to read (or ascoltare!) his latest.

-30-

New York journal, part II

Oct. 18

It's 5 p.m. and I'm at the corner of 42nd and Sixth Avenue, the edge of Bryant Park. More specifically: at the Belgian waffle stand. 

In the glass building to my right, I see a wavy, slightly distorted reflection of the Empire State Building behind me. The ping pong players are back in the park. The Christmas market kiosks are going back up. The city is throbbing.

Oct. 20

On the 190 bus

I stayed late at the library tonight with a plan to eat a belgian "waffel" from the stand in Bryant Park. And as I walked through the park to the kiosk at the far corner, every patio table was full. Groups were meeting, lessons appeared to be underway. A rock duo made their way through the Zeppelin catalog outside the Whole Foods, and every building was lit up.

I took the (slightly) less-trafficked 41st Street to Port Authority and slipped through the back of Times Square, mesmerized by the glowing, flashing screens. I never do that! I am never mesmerized! But this week, well, yes, quite mesmerized (thanks, Pandemic).

It is truly a thrill to be in NY! How starved I am for movement and engagement. There's not enough time for all the books I am requesting at the New York Public Library for my fellowship but I am thrilled to scan their contents even briefly, making note of anything I should investigate further.

New York journal: 440 W. 34th Street

How many times have I prowled the precincts around 34th Street, home of course to the train station I used all throughout childhood? Similarly, how many times have I told the story my mother tells of buying her meat at Macy's when she and my father lived in their newlywed apartment?

And yet only today did I try to find their apartment, after securing the address from my 83-year-old mother (when I said, 'You probably don't remember your old address in New York,' she replied in Prime Pat mode, 'Of course I do!' And she did).

I think I found the building -- a red-brick affair that doesn't appear to be a building that went up anytime soon so surely it was standing in 1966, the year they married.

Around the building some rather tall skyscrapers have sprouted up, making it possibly, in my mother's words "a high-rent district." (A phrase that unfortunately may disappear after her generation of New Yorkers leave us).

She'd mentioned their church (St. Michael's), which is on the same block, so I stopped in to say a prayer -- not only for her, mind you, but for myself. Lucky as I am to have a mother like her, I asked for strength that I can help her during the last stage of her life.

I took pictures of the building, I took pictures of the streetscape, I noted an overpass she'd mentioned. If you step out of the building and into the street, you have a straight-shot view of the Empire State Building. Wow!

Then crossing back over 9th Avenue, I stopped for a ciambellina (it is the name of the blog, after all) at an Italian bakery, then sat by the origami sculptures south of Times Square to enjoy it. And to savor the world whirling around me, and within me.

A walk through New York is an exercise in saturation. If I could attach a notepad and pen to my hands and write while simultaneously craning my neck to take it all in -- well, that would be perfect (maybe also add a camera on my head, kind of like the one perched on top of the Google Earth car).

And a walk through my parents' New York overwhelms me with such curiosity and tenderness. To love what they loved is so rich as to be intoxicating.

So, of course, I enjoyed every minute of my journey to New York by train. I took the new Hartford Line to New Haven where I caught a Metro North train to NYC. ("If you can make it there..." I thought as I jotted down notes).

No one can ever convince me that train travel is anything less than spectacular! As I mentioned in my last post on visiting New York, you eavesdrop on people's lives as the train winds its way past backyards. The laundry you put out on the line to dry? I saw it!

Indeed, from the train, I saw my newly (re-) adopted state in a new way, as I gazed out of the windows. For example, at one point the tracks bisected a small lake in the middle of Connecticut.

I believe if we truly want to know our surroundings, we need to see things from a vantage point other than our cars. Each station gave me a glimpse into a new town, especially on Metro North. In Meriden, the town green looked welcoming. In Westport, I spied coffee shops I'd like to visit. In South Norwalk, I wouldn't mind stopping to look at furniture at Safavieh, which even has an outdoor patio.

I won't dress up the time spent: I arrived the train station in Hartford at 7:45a and didn't make it to New York until 11:45a. But oh what I did between those two times!

I am in New York this week for part two of a short fellowship at the New York Public Library focused on translation, and to prepare, I read my newest copy of Airone. I had packed the monthly mag as a treat for the train ride and it didn't disappoint. Even with the features that don't reflect Italian life, per se, I learn something about what interests the average Italian. Or I simply learn about a topic that's new to me, like the profile of French photographer Robert Doisneau, whom many Americans know as the artist behind the seminal black and white photo of a couple kissing on a Parisian street. Doisneau, according to Airone, considered photography "un bisogno privato" (literally "a private need") and "un insopprimabile desiderio di registrare" (translation: an indomitable desire to record what he saw).

The train horn for me was a symphony, a lullaby, a voice beckoning me home.

And just as we were crossing over into New York, I saw the Circle Line making its rounds!

As you may know, it's a helluva town -- the Bronx is up, but the Battery's down.

-30-

Leonardo Sciascia on what's worse than death

I have taught Leonardo Sciascia's novels because I believe they telegraph something essential -- and dangerous -- about Sicily and Italy.

I especially enjoyed including Il Giorno della Civetta on a syllabus when I was teaching a course called The Literature of Travel. It's a whodunit only in the narrowest sense -- there's a death (in fact more than one), and it wasn't by natural causes. (In English, the book is called "Day of the Owl.")

What it actually is: a novel about the mafia -- and about Sicily and the mafia. And hence apt for a course in which we attempted to analyze books that distilled the essence of a place.

When I teach it, I zero in on one scene, and in particular on one sentence. It's a scene in which a manual laborer finds himself at the local police station for questioning because his brother has been shot. The man has nothing to do with his brother's demise -- and hence nothing to fear -- but he is as uncomfortable as one can get, sitting in his local precinct at the mercy of the law and other forces.

And Sciascia slips in a line that is indelible -- even unfathomable -- to describe the brother's state of mind:

"Niente è la morte in confronto alla vergogna."

You can translate it like this: Death is nothing compared to shame.

And just like that, the Sicilian author challenges everything I know about life!

Because until I read that line, I thought nothing is worse than death.

Nothing tops death as far as unfortunate events that happen to you during your sojourn on Earth.

But Sciascia knows something I don't. He knows about a certain kind of man living in a particular society for whom pride trumps every other concern.

I mention this because 2021 marks the 60th anniversary of the book's publication in Italian, and also the centenary of Sciascia's birth (his life: 1921-1989).

For more information, you can read about Sciascia on the site of the Italian agency charged with promoting Italian literature:

https://www.newitalianbooks.it/leonardo-sciascia-in-other-languages/

-30-

No one told me Phil Schaap died

No one told me about Phil Schaap's death in September, or perhaps better yet, I somehow missed his obit in The Times. 

No one told me I suppose because my father is the only person who would think to tell me and now he’s not fit to tell me much, given all of his health problems.

The funny thing – wrong phrase but we use it this way all the time – I wrote about Phil Schaap for the first time earlier this year, which has had me thinking so much about him this year, and especially this summer.

Not only thinking about him but also seeking out his one-of-a-kind voice on his radio show on WKCR. Indeed, just over the weekend I indulged my typical driving-through-New York-on-my-way-to-Jersey habit of losing myself in my favorite old NY radio stations, WKCR and WFUV.

And there he was on “Bird Flight,” of course (the radio station re-broadcasts his shows).

I wrote about him as part of an essay for CNN about my father, and how much I don’t know about him even as he heads toward his human twilight. I also talked about what I did know: that he’s always loved Jazz and he passed on that reverence and passion to me, partly through marathon Jazz shows broadcast on Columbia's WKCR. 

What I loved about Phil Schaap is his full embrace of the subject. As Franz Kafka once said, "Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." Which means Schaap can be an inspiration to us.

You can read Schaap’s obituary at this link below. I would have loved to read it in the newspaper itself – an odd journalistic treat since placement and space indicate so much about the person’s importance when you’re dealing with an obit in The Times.

And Phil Schaap was important because he told us Jazz was important. And it is, it so very is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/arts/music/phil-schaap-dead.html

Avon Journal, I

Over the summer I visit my parents on the Jersey Shore and it's the normal chaos -- or maybe the new chaos of my parents, now elderly and ailing, being shadows of their former selves. 

Daddy, for example, doesn't seem to understand almost anything I say, and he doesn't make long or appropriate responses to anything I say that he may understand. 

I ask him: Do you want some water? Are you OK? Are you tired? 

He's noncommittal -- either because he cannot hear me or because he cannot comprehend these questions.

But then Mommy says something absurd.

It happens when we're at the breakfast table shortly before my Uncle Larry is due to visit from his home near San Francisco.

She says to my father, "Does Larry need to clear customs when he comes from California or is that just for international flights?"

He pauses for the briefest of moments, and then replies, "That's just for international flights." 

It's not a basic question. In fact, the basic questions I ask him he does not understand (or hear). 

But this crazy question from Mommy that requires some thought and knowledge, he understands and responds in a totally normal way.

I don't want to lapse too much into sentimentality but I find it telling -- maybe even compelling -- that the voice he's heard every day for more than 50 years cuts through the confusion of old age, end-stage blood cancer and hearing problems.

-30-

Love this: How a Barber and Journaling Expert Spends His Sundays

I'm a sucker for a journalistic profile of any kind, even a mini-profile in the form of the Sunday Routine column in The New York Times. And this guy writes in his journal! My kind of guy!

He's also spreading the word about keeping a journal to others -- a calling we both share.

"Basically, I’m sharing ways to keep journaling simple and to not overthink it while at the same time talking about the value of doing it every day so that it can become a habit. I feel like some people use social media to document their lives, but creating posts isn’t great for record-keeping and doesn’t provide the space for reflection that writing a journal entry does."

(He's also a barber.)

Read about his Sunday Routine by clicking on this sentence.

-30-

The chaos of reading and writing

Earlier this year, I decided to surround myself with all of the books I wanted to read. 

No more sensibly putting off book orders or borrowing more books from the library. To immerse myself in the genre I've been writing and teaching -- memoir -- I would begin amassing all the books from that genre I wanted to read. It's the genre I often write in, and it's also a genre I've been teaching of late, and so quite logically, I need to be more purposeful in loading my bedside table with the personal stories of authors I know and love (and ones I don't know and don't love yet).

I also decided I would tackle the long-deferred TBR list, which included a number of essay collections.

Maybe you're already doing this.

In any event, it meant continuously bothering the librarians at my local library with hold requests, and also ordering books online, even though I was still working my way through my Christmas literary stash. (And then whenever we visited local bookstores, I would buy something to support them).

It quickly became an avalanche of books. Everything I read seemed to point me to new works I need to read, in a never-ending loop. So I read an essay by Rebecca Solnit about a Virginia Woolf piece on walking called "Street Haunting" and in the course of reading it, I realized I have to right now read Solnit’s book on walking AND the essay by Woolf about the same, because if nothing else I know I love walking and I know I love other writers who live walking.

Along with the Solnit books, I made a list of memoirs I wanted to read, with help from the index of Beth Kephart's "Handling the Truth and Philip Lopate's To Show and To Tell, and began buying and borrowing. Home came Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White by Brent Staples, a memoir I’d wanted to read ever since reading Staples’ seminal essay "Black Men and Public Space," which I teach (I also follow Brent on Twitter; he's on the Times' editorial board but posts a lot of garden photos). Home came a book by Paul Auster that mesmerized me – my first Auster book! Plus Pedigree by Patrick Modiano, which I’ve wanted to read for a while, and also Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever’s memoir about her father. I also finally read more of Alfred Kazin's work through A Walker in the City.

Unrelated to memoirs, Liz sent me Dora Bruder by Modiano (in Italian!) so that went on the pile, as well.

I also wanted to read books about writing memoir. So I read Inventing the Truth: the Art of Memoir (Zinsser) and The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts whom I met at Bennington.

Plus a book I hope to teach as part of a travel literature course I've taught, A Stranger's Pose, by Emmanuel Iduma about his travels throughout his native Africa.

But hold on a moment. I’m polyamorous when it comes to literature so I always have a few Italian books going as well, to feed my literary translation side-business. I learned that an author I’ve translated had published a new book in Italy – a memoir, no less – and I had to buy it. It seemed like the right moment also to buy another Italian book I’d been eying by an author I discovered last year. So two more books – well, three, because I added another one to the carrello (I was shopping on the Italian Amazon website) – were on their way to me. When the books I arrived, I promptly began reading all three, and was inexplicably thrilled to discover in the copious notes accompanying one novel that the concept of borders figures prominently in the work of the author, Piero Chiara, who grew up near the Italian-Swiss border. My mind raced! I don’t even know why but I felt that intellectual shiver that drives me to amass ever more books on the floor, bed, desk and kitchen counter. 

I don't want to suggest it's a real emergency. But I do wonder if I am doing more harm than good. Were we meant to cram so many books into our heads at one time?

(Or should I just say words? To make matters simple, I've left out of this account the New Yorker articles Liz has recommended and anything from The New York Times, my daily gift, as well as any other periodical I subscribe to, including the Kenyon Review and Airone, which Mike calls "Gente" but it's not that gossipy).

And my God where will it end?

In some ways, it sounds noble if my aim is lifelong education and professional development. But I am not immune to the mental fragmentation so rife in lives that are increasingly digitized. Lives where we pay attention to so many different things, real and imagined.

I've just finished the Auster book, The Invention of Solitude, which is itself quite fragmented, or at the very least the second part of it is.

At the same time, I am working on many different pieces of writing, and also working on a mammoth translation project that I am constantly being distracted from.

Is this just another manifestation of the fragmentation rife in modern life? Or perhaps the fragmentation reflects the pandemic -- where non-work life spills into work spaces -- and also perhaps the eternally distracted life of the working mother. Or should I just say this working mother? 

Ever since getting serious about creative writing eight years ago, I’ve been indulging what I call the Life of the Mind. I am, in many ways, living not only the life I dreamed about, but the life I didn’t dare allow myself to dream about. I write, teach, translate and edit, and although I don’t make much money or draw a pension, I am basically paid to revel in literature. To pay attention to literature. That’s one job description that fits me to a tee.

But is what I am doing productive? Am I able to retain what I read? 

I guess I subscribe to the messy desk theory of the world. The more books strewn across your desk (and your bed and your nightstand), the better.

As one writer who's dubbed herself Rust Belt Girl puts it on her blog of the same name, "Relationship status: reading."

Yet I ask as a personal favor, can someone tell me if there is a limit to the number of books one can productively read simultaneously?

Also, does it matter if you only read the first half of a book? Asking for a friend, inasmuch as we should be friends with ourselves.

And of course, happy reading!

-30-