NYC Translation event -- Wish I were there!

An amazing translation event is planned for tomorrow in New York.

A conversation with the translators of Elena Ferrante and Roberto Bolano (Ann Goldstein and Natasha Wimmer, respectively).

Hosted by Asymptote Journal, a journal of literary translation, which recently quite generously published an essay of mine on its blog (read it here). The event is in honor of its 5th anniversary.

Oh I wish I could go!

If you can, lucky you. Click here for the details.

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Why blog? Here's why

I often wonder why I keep this blog when I could just continue to practice my religion of Italian studies fetishism privately.

I could continue to write in my journals (plural -- the one in my car, the one for fiction, for nonfiction, et al).

I could post curiosities to Facebook and Twitter, and leave it at that.

But as Anna Clark so eloquently puts it on her blog, it's to "practice the public art of writing and reflection."

When someone expresses it that way, it sounds so lovely, so noble.

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Two reasons I love Italian newspapers

They always have an interesting take on American politics. To wit, the political cartoon about Hillary Clinton showing the Statue of Liberty blow-drying her hair.

In the case of La Repubblica, the newspapers are so colorful! And often covering intellectual topics that betray a deep interest in other cultures. Here they're writing about Spain under Franco, with some harrowing pictures to boot.

Bassani on his characters (Nuovi Argomenti)

"Basically, in my novel, every character worth considering is a manifestation of my own personal feelings."

“Nel mio romanzo, insomma, ogni personaggio degno di questo nome e’ una forma del mio sentimento.”

This statement comes from an interview Italian author Giorgio Bassani (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) gave to the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, and which was published last year by Nuovi Argomenti.

Bassani is talking in the interview about what portion of the indelible characters he created in the novel, Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, are real. But if there is an easy answer, he eschews it.

"What's true?" He asks. "Did these characters actually exist?"

He continues, "I could talk on and on until tomorrow morning about how the shorts Micol is wearing really belong to a young woman I saw one day who made a big impression on me when I was a boy. Or the sweaty face of Malnate, which really belongs to a friend of mine who isn't called Malnate but rather Vincenzo Cicognani, who lives in Lugo. His face sweats when he argues, and he's also very tall."

At the risk of being repetitive, Bassani summarizes his thoughts in this way: "Basically, in my novel, every character worth considering is a manifestation of my own personal feelings." (Original Italian above)

To wit, he says, "The main characters are manifestations of feelings of the person who wrote the novel, which is to say, more or less Micol is me, Professor Ermanno is me, Rovigatti is me, the father, it's me."

In the Italian, Bassani has a novel way of putting it -- he actually uses French to express himself: "Sono tutte forme del sentimento di chi ha scritto questo romanzo, cioe’ effettivamente Micol c’est moi, il professor Ermanno c’est moi il ciabattino Rovigatti c’est moi, mio padre sono io."

***
Here's the original Italian which I transcribed from Nuovi Argomenti:

"Cosa c’e’ di vero? Questi personaggi sono effettivamente esistiti?"

(BREAK)

“Potrei trattenermi fino a domani mattina a dire che gli shorts di Micol appartengono a quella tale signorina che io ho visto un giorno e mi ha colpito quando ero ragazzo, oppure che la faccia sudata di Malnate appartiene veramente ad un mio amico che non si chiama Malnate, ma che si chiama Vincenzo Cicognani, il quale sta a Lugo, ha la faccia sudata quando discute ed e’ anche molto alto.”

(BREAK)

"Quindi da un lato, ognuno di questi personaggi ha un rapporto col vero oggettivo – e molti si sono offesi per questo – pero' da un altro lato sono tutte forme del sentimento di chi ha scritto questo romanzo, cioe’ effettivamente Micol c’est moi, il professor Ermanno c’est moi il ciabattino Rovigatti c’est moi, mio padre sono io."

(BREAK)

“Nel mio romanzo, insomma, ogni personaggio degno di questo nome e’ una forma del mio sentimento.”

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Louise Attaque - Du Nord Au Sud

Lost entry from my car journal -- Here and there

Oct 12, 2015

From the journal I keep in my car 

The babysitter calls me at work today and I hear his voice down the phone line, tiny, bewildered, “Mommy.” Then again, “Mommy.”

As if that were a whole sentence (and it is, I suppose).

Nothing's wrong.

It's just that I'm here and he's there.

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What I'm reading (literary schizophrenia)

I want to record life exactly as it happens. But that's not easy.

I mean, these days, you would need, in any given moment, to write down what you're thinking, what you're doing, the texts you're writing, the emails you're sending, the stories you're scrolling through online.

In fact, your reading life is probably like your real life. Mine is. I'm reading some books start to finish. Others I'm re-reading. Still others I'm skimming, almost like a few pages or a chapter packs the punch of a quick pick-me-up. 'Oh! I needed that dose of Hemingway.'

Okay, so here's 30 days in the life of Jeanne reading (books only).

Books read for Bennington:

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Denis Johnson, Incognito Lounge (poetry)

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Antonya Nelson, Female Trouble

Other books read:

David Gates, Jernigan

Alice McDermott, Charming Bill (re-read parts)
Antonio Tabucchi, Viaggi e altri viaggi (re-reading parts)

Also reading (for book reviews):

Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

Reading excerpts of:

Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

Started reading, then stopped:

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Books I've started to read and plan to finish:
Jane Austen, Emma

Anche tu, Jhumpa? (Jhumpa Lahiri loves Italy)

Jhumpa Lahiri has somehow read my thoughts – and my diary. Yikes! 

She doesn’t just love Italy. She lurves it. Like me. The Pulitzer Prize winning author has taken the almost unprecedented step of ceasing to write in English, the language of the works that catapulted her to success, and instead has begun a new literary career in Italian. She does so because, as she’s admitted in many interviews, she’s become obsessed with Italian, and feels almost ill whenever she must be away from Italy.

O, guarda, Jhumpa, anch’io. Me, too. I’ve already confessed as much in an essay published last year on Catapult. I think crying over Italy after you drop your son off at daycare qualifies as some kind of illness. Who knew I had such august company?

Today’s the official launch day for her new memoir, In Other Words, written in English and Italian (or rather I should say, written in Italian, her Italian, and then translated into English). I don’t have my copy yet but I’m reading an excerpt of it in the Italian literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti, and that’s just fine with me. I’m not sure I really need to read the English version, right?

Nonetheless, certain words from Ann Goldstein’s translation stand out. In The New Yorker excerpt of the work, Lahiri says she “felt a sense of rapture” in Rome. Yep, rapture, check.

Here’s what she’s in for the rest of her life:

When I returned briefly to Rome last year, I quickly realized I had paid for the Nostalgia Tour. 

I spent five days retracing my steps. I stumbled into a tiny piazza and stumbled back nearly 20 years to a weekend getaway to the Eternal City – my first with my partner. I looked up at the street sign – Piazza San Pantaleo – and my mind, photographic for things like street names and addresses and the dates important moments happened – recalled instantly that we had stayed maybe two nights at a small pensione on the piazza. Two nights or a lifetime.

I revisited old stomping grounds like Campo dei Fiori and the Pantheon, taking the temperature of the city. Eavesdropping on conversations, watching the interactions between the barista and the regulars at the coffee bar. Listening along with the taxi driver to the Juventus game on the radio, and returning his smile in the rear view mirror as he pumped his fist over the key goal. Looking in the shop windows, including the pharmacy, hoping to find the house shoes I used to wear when I lived in Italy. 

Observing with a loving glance Italian children, shouting out commands and observations to their mothers while they lick gelato and haul their heavy backpacks home from school (“Oh! Mamma! Vieni qui!”)

Then returning from Italy and your mind is already bifurcated, split down the middle between Italian and English. Forever translating. Get used to it (she probably already has).

She’ll forever be tethered to Italy. Wishing she was “there” while failing to make the most of her time “here.” A creative tension, to be sure, but one full of heartache.

Rapture, indeed, Jhumpa. We’re in for it.

Fall arrives 'via FedEx' (Lost diary entry)

From my diary:

Sept. 24, 2014 

Nothing comes gradually anymore. I say this as fall appears to have arrived in Atlanta via FedEx, rather than snail mail.

From my Bennington journal

Nostalgia is a kind of fictionalization. We're often nostalgic for things that never happened.

(Mark Wunderlich lecture)

                                                            ****

If you've ever cried while reading a book, it was probably because of a period.

All creative writing is about silence.

(Mark Slouka on the use of silence in writing)

I miss you, Bennington

The cozy little perch I fashioned for myself at Bennington, during the Winter residency.

Talky Time

Try hard (very hard!) to remain firm when your toddler tells you that instead of quiet time, he'd prefer "talky time."

And he happens to pronounce the words "talky time" in a way that instantly supersedes every funny thing you've ever heard.

Bennington by night

Conveys some of the magic of being at Bennington College.

What I'm reading (for the next five months)

Here's my reading list for my final term in Bennington's MFA program for giggles... 

(Note, it's half the length of a normal term's reading list because we're writing our theses and preparing a public lecture in the final term)

1…Dante Alighieri, Inferno

2…Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility or Emma

3…James Baldwin, Notes of A Native Son or Nobody Knows My Name

4…Roberto Bolano, By Night In Chile (novella)

5…J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

6…Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

7…Junot Diaz, Drown

8…Flaubert, Madame Bovary

9…Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories

10..Marie Howe, In the Kingdom of Ordinary Time (poetry)

11..Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

12..Denis Johnson, Incognito Lounge (poetry)

13..Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John

14..Antonya Nelson (still need to decide which one...suggestions?)

15..Muriel Spark, Public Image

We get to illuminate the human condition

Novelist Charles Bock came to speak at Bennington during the Winter residency.

And he leveled with us about hard it is to produce a novel, to find time to write along with all of the other responsibilities life has assigned us.

And then he said, but you know what? It's not really that hard. It's not that bad of a trade.

Because we get to illuminate the human condition.

Well, sure, when you put it that way, yeah, it's okay. It's more than okay.

Lost entry from the Leo Journal

From a diary entry, last October, uncovered here at Bennington, while I have some time to review and revise:

“I have a story to tell you.” 

Isn’t that one of the most joyful statements one can hear? Oh fantastic, I think, a story.

But it's gets better. Because in this case, it’s Leo who has made this announcement.

I'd told him I needed to go fetch something from the bedroom, and that was when he said it.

"When you come back, I have a story to tell you."

And when I came back, he said, "Once upon a time, there were five tigers..."

He's now going to tell *us* stories. 

It does not matter that he then said the five tigers were going to eat other tigers and then thought better of the idea (he's already learning to revise). 

He’s beginning to tell stories, hovering as he is between three and four years of age. 

Oh the places he will go with those stories! (Cliché, cliché...but nonetheless a true sentiment).

At Bennington

Went swimming. Has nothing to do with writing. Nothing and everything.

Because it's a way of seeing new things, especially when you swim somewhere you've never been.

And it's intense. Plunge your head under water for 30 minutes.

Intense isolation in the purest, most gorgeous form. Sounds like writing, no?

Plus I went swimming with Daryln from Western Pennsylvania, something I only do at Bennington.

So many things I only do at Bennington, where I'm enrolled in the Bennington Writing Seminars' MFA program.

Like consuming the writing equivalent of a Thanksgiving feast -- every day.

Wake up and write. That's my routine wherever I go now.

But here at Bennington, I wake up to the silence of rural Vermont, so thick it feels eternal. I look out the window at campus, marvel at the opportunity I've been given, the opportunity I've seized, and I get to work.

Then breakfast, and I'm off. We're all off -- to a day of student lectures, and a master class, and later workshops, followed by a craft session, maybe and then student readings, and eventually faculty readings and more student readings. Each segment soldered to the next by conversations you have along the way.

Conversations and writing swapped and tips shared and books recommended, all around.

Went swimming this morning.

I lose myself in the strokes, and then I leave the pool, and since I'm at Bennington, I return to my room to lose myself in the writing.

My Year in Review?

I recently discovered a piece by the writer Alexander Chee from 2014 in which he summed up his year in writing.

And oh what a year it was. You can read about it here. He was an Amtrak writer in residence (because HE was the guy who thought up the idea), he finished a novel and started another.

Most recently he penned a story about Cambodia for Afar, which is pretty much my favorite travel magazine (next semester, he'll be a Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Bennington College where I'm enrolled).

It's a tad bit embarrassing for him to be my inspiration because when I jot down what I've accomplished this year in the World of Writing, it really pales.

But that isn't the point, is it?

I've checked off some pretty cool milestones on my own personal list of goals.

For example, I had a short piece on Afar's Web site about how to approach traveling to Italy (inspired by my own trip back to Italy in May). It's essentially my first paid bit of travel writing. You can read that here.

I also had my first poem published! You can read that here.

A nonfiction story I wrote called "I Come Bearing Gifts" was awarded Honorable Mention by Writer's Digest as part of its annual writing contest this year. A different version of this piece was later published on Catapult's site. B

I also had my first book review published for a short story collection that I personally think would make for a wicked holiday read. You can read the review here.

And already looking ahead to next year, an essay I wrote about work-life balance (after becoming a mother) will appear in an anthology published by the HerStories Project.

(Anthology=book=Jeanne swooning)

A lot of things didn't go my way. For example, I didn't win a grant I'd applied for (again). But the judges did provide feedback -- a first.

My year in review is largely about milestones in the field of Creative Writing. But I've also started freelancing for HLN, a division of CNN. You can also occasionally find my writing in Atlanta magazine, including this story.

It's no Alexander Chee year. But it's something I'm proud of.

Do other people write a Year in Review? I'd love to read other examples.

Found -- in an Italian journal circa 1995

A quote from the great Italian poet and writer Eugenio Montale.

English first, then Italian:

I don't understand why we are born and why we survive but I must admit there are beautiful moments and everyone experiences some. I'm very happy to be here but I feel great sorrow and disgust.

-Eugenio Montale (in an interview with journalist Enzo Biagi)

“Non capisco bene per quali ragioni siamo nati e sopravviviamo pero devo ammettere che ci sono momenti molto belli e ognuno ha i suoi. Sono contentissimo di essere qui, ma con molto dolore e molto disgusto.”

Who's decking the halls?

ME!

Spode Christmas tree coffee cups just for the holiday season?

Check.