Because I'm learning Italian while living here, I conduct my education in public. In a bar, I once asked for a grenade (granata) instead of a lemon slush (granita). I have commented on the beauty of a basket of fish (pesce) when admiring gloriously ripe peaches (pesche). Imagine pointing to a black cabbage (cavolo nero) and asking for a black horse (cavallo nero). Tiny but huge differences. The worst was at a funeral when I spoke of the deceased not as a scapolo, bachelor, as I meant, but as a sbaglio, a mistake.
That was early. Now that I have more understanding of Italian, I have greater occasions to make a bigger fool of myself. I know more and am likely to launch into a description of a trip to a balsamic vinegar maker and forget once again that complicated questions will follow, and I'll need to pull out of my head verbs in tenses that I haven't yet faced. Could I pass it all off as a kind of new dialect? Today, I was telling Matteo at the frutta e verdura that overnight something has eaten the young melons and corn in the garden. Perhaps a wild boar or a porcupine—I know both of those—and then, uh oh, I finally see it coming; I want to say “gnawed the stalk to topple the corn.”
Gnawed—“ate” won't do. The word for “stalk”—no, not a glimmer. Topple—forget it. The closest I can come is “cut” and that's not right. All the synonyms I do know will not convey the sense of something gnawing the stalk to topple the corn. I think for a moment of pantomiming the whole scene with a stalk of celery for the corn and me as the porcupine, but a sense of propriety—thank god—saves me.
But this is good, isn't it? Knowing enough that precision is developing? I'm saved because three other people in the shop have joined the conversation, each with an opinion as to the real culprit's identity. Hedgehogs and nutrias are discussed, but the consensus is porcupine, with one man holding out for wild boar because the tomatoes are untouched. If it were a porcupine, obviously the tomatoes would have been mangled, too. I buy my peaches, never having made that mistake again, and leave the shop, realizing I have understood everything, even though I was blocked by my own vocabulary.
At times I am not translating; arancia is arancia and I'm just listening, the image of an orange flashing in my mind, not the word. This is a mystery to me, those moments when the English melts between the Italian and the meaning. I happily make my way around town, having little conversations in the shops. An Italian tourist asks me, me!, for directions and I answer with full confidence. Although I may have sent him to the wrong church, I have faith that he will like it just as well.
Old World–cultured Europeans and the upheaved millions who have migrated in the last half century represent opposite means, but the end is the same—they move among languages—while most of us who were culturally isolated on the great landmass of North America speak English at best. Already, we are a growing minority. Generations hence, our descendants will say to their children, “Once there were people who spoke only one language,” and the children will be amazed. But I have become determined to survive with the fittest.
Having made many blunders and gone home fuming, I've had altogether too much time to analyze my problems. I've come to know why I have made learning Italian more difficult than it had to be, perhaps why all the languages I've studied have been so elusive.
I have the habit of wrenching everything into English. Although we have the same structures—all languages basically have the same parts of speech—there is no way to proceed rationally with the obliteration of the Italian pronoun, the foregrounding of the verb, and the genders of nouns. The idiosyncracies of idioms, just as irrational, are immediate to me because they work with metaphors. I love the graphic figurative image acqua in bocca (water in the mouth), which means “I won't tell anyone.” Something between us two is something for quattr'occhi, four eyes. “I feel oppressed” or “depressed” translates as sotto una cappa di piombo, under a hood of lead. Not only is an image conjured, but piombo, sounds oppressive, like three low notes plucked on the bass. All the connotations of the English “rolling in money” are not at all the same as the Italian “swimming in gold.”
Sound unwittingly often translates meaning where it shouldn't. Stinco, a savory cut of meat, and also a thin loaf of bread, sounds unappetizing even when you know stinco means shin-bone. And how foreign the saying, “Non è uno stinco di santo,” He's not the shin-bone of a saint; he's no saint. Bar conjures solitary figures hunched over mixed drinks, or more sophisticated scenes, not the Italian version, which is centered on coffee and quick bites. Most certainly, an Italian “bar” is not a “pub.”
The common word più, more, is hard for an English-speaking person to say without suspecting a bad smell. So I purse my lips and say we're eating tonight at Amico Più, a trattoria on the edge of the valley, where to the satisfaction of my inner ear, the odor of pigs sometimes wafts from farms across the grassy outdoor dining area from nearby farms.
“Your friend certainly is handsome but he's so cruel to his dog,” my friend Deb said about stop-traffic good-looking Silvano. “He kept telling the poor thing to die.” Silvano was trying to talk to her, and his playful pastore tedesco, German shepherd, pestered him to throw a stick over and over. “Dai, Ugo, dai,” he told the dog as he threw the stick yet again. Dai sounds like “die,” but he simply meant “give”—basta, enough, give it up, Hugo.
I know well from French, that if one is hungry or thirsty, that you have hunger, you have thirst. This is imprinted on my mind from my first trip to France. I went to a restaurant alone and was seated by a door where blasts of cold air blew in my face. I asked the waiter for another table, explaining that I was cold. Back in the hotel, I realized I had not said j'ai froid but instead had said je suis fraise, I am strawberry. The waiter graciously had directed me to a cozy table near the fireplace.
Strange that a cat purrs differently in Italian; a cat “makes the purrs.” Ha sonno?, You have sleepy?, now comes naturally. Some things may never. If I forget and take to the literal, I'm often left with “Now I must to go myself of it,” for “Now I must leave.” Or “I myself was forgotten of this,” for “I had forgotten this.” Translation is approximation; the original doesn't say that at all.
Mark Twain, who obviously had an ear for language, had fun with a literal translation of his own speech, given to the Press Club in Vienna:
I am indeed the truest friend of the German language—and not only now, but from long since—yes, before twenty years already. . . . I would only some changes effect. I would only the language method—the luxurious, elaborate construction compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover can. With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One her yonder-up understands. . . .
I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit reform. I might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history of the Thirty Years' War between the two members of a separate verb in-pushed. That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller the permission refused the History of the Hundred Years' War to compose—God be it thanked! After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be.
I've had the late realization that English is a spoken language, whereas Italian is sung. An opera teacher at Spoleto told me she has her American students listen in class to someone speaking ordinary Italian while following the tones with their own voices la, la, la-ing. Then she has them perform the same exercise with someone speaking English. The English voice-graph modulates gently and regularly up and down while the Italian zips dramatically around. I knew this instinctively. When people are walking toward me, long before I can hear words, I can tell if they are speaking English, German, or Italian. I know it, too, from my own very plain buon giorno and the exuberant response from the Italians, with several lifts and slides of sound. Italian spoken by a native English
speaker is much easier for me to understand—the pacing is still in English even when the words in Italian are grammatically perfect. Catching the rhythm—that's the hardest part. The lucky few who have a natural grasp of ritmo are understood by Italians even if their grammar isn't so hot.
Too bad you can't take a language in a series of injections labeled “indirect pronouns,” “the pronunciation of glielo,” and “tile installation terminology.” But I tell myself, Roma non fu fatta in un giorno. Dante, the five-year-old son of an American mother and Italian father, moves easily, thoughtlessly, back and forth between English and Italian. I can't fool him on the phone into thinking that I'm Italian. I say “Posso parlare con la tua mamma,” May I speak with your mother, and he says, “Sure, she's right here.”
I recently read in the paper that those who acquire multiple languages when they're young learn them in the same thimble-sized spot in the brain. Those of us who try to learn later must locate the new language in an entirely different territory. The new area must be something like frozen tundra. As I study Italian, I can feel that journey. The new words buzz to the real language spot—top center—for translation, then slide back to the new one, which is being chopped out somewhere in the obdurate back right corner. On the way, many new words fall off into lost canals and abysses. Some do make it all the way back to the new quarry. They become natural. Gioia is no longer joy, it's the buoyant feeling of gioia. Hundreds of other words are now themselves. Still, I pick up a novel by Pavese and I'm sunk by the third paragraph. Piano, slowly, piano, I tell myself, there's no exam coming. As if there will be a final, I compulsively concentrate on what I don't understand. I make lists of all the cases when the imperfect is used, spending hours writing examples for each of the cases I don't understand and neglecting to reinforce examples of what I do.
Besides the luxury—and necessity—of being able to converse easily, I am desirous of another literature. My long habit of browsing in bookstores and leaving with a nice sack of books has been stymied in Italy. I have become a great appreciator of cover designs.
Travelling or living here as a foreigner, I experience the life force of Italians acted out every day on the streets, in the cafés, and on the roads. As I walk by open windows, I'm transfixed by the aroma of ragù and the cascades of concurrent voices. So often I'm bearing witness to the rich outer life of Italians, knowing that the direct route to the inner life always is literature. Novels, essays, books of place, the philosophical treatises, poetry—here's the big news of the place, the territory most hidden from me in my friendships and brief sojourns in this bel paese.
Gradually, my summer reading has shifted to native Italian writers: Eugenio Montale, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi—all the heavy-hitters whose work appears in English. Sometimes I've bought a difficult book in Italian, as one might buy a skirt a size too tight, hoping to lose the ten pounds by summer.
First, their guidebooks. All the Slow Food Arcigola Editore books, especially the yearly guide Vini d'Italia, quickly convinced Ed that the Italians' own perspective on food and wine was the one we wanted. The Gambero Rosso guides to restaurants and hotels led us to uncrowded places of intrinsic character. They're easy to follow because of clear ranking symbols.
Then we began to pick up poetry, simply for the pleasure of reading it aloud, even if we mispronounced the author's name, as we did with Quasimodo for too long. Cesare Pavese revealed all the dark and melancholy layers of the countryside that I missed in my own elation over the landscapes straight out of Piero della Francesca and Perugino. Leonardo Sciascia's stories gave me the heart of Sicily, which I otherwise would have encountered with a raft of fears and assumptions. “Once there was a special room in old Sicilian houses that was called ‘the scirocco room.' It had no windows, or any other communication with the outside other than a narrow door opening onto an inside corridor, and this is where the family would take refuge against the wind.” That is the way I want into Sicily—an island where weather rules and the isolation of geography is reflected in the microcosm of the family. Thank you, Leonardo; I did not focus overly on the Mafia when I was there but on the wind in the thousands and thousands of palms.
The lavish Italian sense of design extends to books as easily as it does to shoes and cars. I found the art books irresistible, the crisp, fresh colors in both the cheap booklets on individual artists and in the grand tomes of the Uffizi Gallery and the Vatican collections. Paperback novels attracted me most. I took them down one by one, staring at the cobalt covers, each with a small reproduction of a painting tipped onto the cover. These books lead me farther into the language. To sit in a café with a cappuccino, a book, and a dictionary is not a bad way to spend an hour or two in the morning. Of course, I bought Dante. How can you not buy Dante in Italy? I had a dark secret—I'd never read Dante, except in snatches. Translating a few stanzas provides an instant cure from the textbook tedium of: The tide was ebbing. She dreaded snakes and spiders. The servicemen are on furlough. The fair was rained out. Their behavior will improve. She was looking very coy. I was a fool from the beginning. Precisely so!
Since I have been coming to Italy for so many summers, my friends assume that my Italian is completely fluent. “Oh, you pick up Italian,” they say flippantly. “It's so close to Spanish.” Well, I never picked up Spanish that easily. From a summer of studying in San Miguel de Allende, most of what I remember is going off-road in a taxi with my instructor whose passionate interest was Chichimeca pottery. He responded to my interest in the culture more than to my need to translate the story of the little mouse. We searched through middens for bits of black-painted pottery and I came home with more shards than words.
But my friends are right; you travel to Italy, you pick up a few phrases. Italians are so courteous and responsive that you're lulled into thinking, This is a cinch. I have long since spoken restaurant-Italian, travel-Italian, shopping-Italian, and a lot of house-restoration Italian. But I never have “picked up” the imperfect subjunctive or the past remote. I have not learned to understand the various dialects spoken around Tuscany, not to mention the rest of Italy. I read in Italian Cultural Studies that dialects are used by sixty percent of Italians, and are spoken exclusively by fourteen percent. Since we've learned on the fly, our vocabularies are unholy mixes of dialect words and the Italian we've learned in classes. The local dialect often changes the “ah” sound to “eh,” producing a harsher sound. We don't always hear the difference. Our store of curses is rather vast, since hauling out stone and digging trenches and wells elicits those from workers. Madonna cane, Madonna diavola, Madonna-dog, Madonna-devil, are two drastic curses. The use of some expressions we've picked up still escapes us. Non mi importa una sega, Don't bring me a saw, accompanied by a sawing motion, has something to do with masturbation.
Some aspects of this amazing language confound me. I admitted to myself recently that I am going to give up on the idiomatic and incomprehensible use of the invariable pronoun “ne”; whatever Italian I speak will have to be without this protean word. I have not admitted this to Amalia.
American friends say with modesty, “I did quite well in Spain,” or “It's amazing how it all comes back.” Comes back from where? I've travelled with some of those same friends, have seen them point at the menu, have seen them meekly hold out their hands for the clerk to take the cost of a purchase from their palms because they get dizzy when duemilaquattrocentosettantalire (2470 lire) spirals out of the clerk's mouth. One friend belongs to the speak-loud-and-clear-and-they'll-understand-English school. Another, who visited me in Italy, was annoyed that local shopkeepers had made “no attempt to learn basic English phrases that would help them in business,” not noticing that we are in their country, and in a rural area at that.
Even though I “took” years of French in high school and college, it never really took to me. I never met anyone from France, and my high school teacher believed in the method of a verb workbook, with tiny spaces to write all the conj
ugations. Even if we had no idea what those conjugations meant, we still had to write the passé composé for hundreds of verbs. For the last half-hour of class she turned on scratchy records of Paris street sounds and stood clasping her hands and looking out the window. We filed out to “Under the Bridges of Paris,” Carl Twiggs slapping Mary Keith Duffy's girdled bottom and shouting “Monobuttock,” by far the most inventive linguistic moment of the hour.
In college, the class focused on “lab”—tapes about mon moulin, letters in a crabbed French, which I had to listen to in a cubicle in the gym at seven in the morning. News from a faraway French mill was accompanied by a basketball pounding the gym floor and a wafting odor of pine oil–scented disinfectant. When I was called on to read in class from Les Misérables, our endless text, the professor would say with a smirk, “Miss Mayes speaks French with a Southern accent.” I slammed the book shut and sat down. His Midwestern accent wasn't magnifique either.
Later, I took classes in Spanish and German. They all seemed somehow so fake. Surely these people went home at night and spoke English. A friend who has had similar experiences says she would like “I studied languages” carved on her tombstone. I endured German even through a bout of explosive flatulence from the instructor. “Pflaumenkuchen,” plumcake, he explained and continued with Es war einmal ein junger Bauer, There was once a young farmer. The day I dropped out of German was when I came across the word for nipple: Brustwarze. A glance, and even I translated “breast wart.”
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