Italia: by the book
In 2017, I was fortunate to return to Italy for the first time since I had lived there for a summer in 2011. It's difficult to describe in a succinct way just what Italy means to me—indeed, dozens of people have filled dozens of volumes writing on the very subject. My love of the Italian language and Italy is manifold—I could just as readily fill my own dozen volumes elaborating my views. But one thing which has occurred to me of late is that Italian gave me yet another connection to language, in a way I'd never experienced before.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved language and words. As a child, I was delighted by everything from tongue twisters to whimsical poetry by Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, books of all kinds, writing and receiving letters to and from schoolmates and penpals and cousins, learning long words (humuhumunukunukuapua'a was a longtime [no pun intended] favorite), and on and on. We all grow up exposed to our mother tongue, in my case, English—something we each generally take for granted. The innate ability of babies to mimic phonetic sounds has been fascinating to me ever since we studied the topic in my high school psychology class. But babies lose their reflexive ability through disuse; if not integrated into their learned talking patterns, those underutilized phonetic sounds fade away.
Studying in a world-class language program at BYU, I was immersed (it was not a true 'immersion' program, but due to my fervor I felt immersed nevertheless) into a world where nothing was second nature and everything was new, until I had found my way around and made myself at home there—there being the Italian language and its grammatical rules and lexiconic structure.
My acuity with English, after studying several Romance languages, is no longer something I take for granted. I'm grateful to have grown up speaking this wild, willful language that I've come to know and love. Its irregularities to me are a second-nature delight, but a minefield to the novice speaker. Through my own linguistic studies (Spanish through middle and high school, though I've all but lost my knowledge of the tongue; Italian, to an intermediate-to-advanced level in undergraduate; and beginning French, a delightful whim of my final semester as an undergraduate), my respect for ESL individuals has grown exponentially; to see my own halting progress in my early semesters of Italian and French, then to compare that to the acuity with which I feel most foreign-English-speakers possess in speaking my mother tongue is nothing short of astounding and impressive. I try to reassure speakers I talk with, as I acknowledge English to be utterly bamboozling with its numerous rules and even more irregularities within each section of rules, conflicting pronunciation context clues, and its smattering of origins and etymologies (fascinating, to be sure, but confusing nevertheless to a newly learned speaker) which have led to all of the above.
All that to say, my love of language and my love of Italian culminate in my utter delight in reading Italian books. I could talk for days about the brilliance of Dante Alighieri (indeed, I spent a whole semester poring over his genius that is La divina commedia) and the poignancy of Primo Levi's harrowing but beautifully rendered accounts of his experiences of a concentration camp. My one regret, each time I have left Italy (now thrice—once, post-Siena-summer, twice and thrice during two separate trips in 2017), is the kilo weight limit imposed on my luggage; I try to choose carefully which volumes to bring back with me, but more often than not, I've come away with photos instead to remember the delightful children's books and literary landmarks I've come across during my Italian travels.
In this post, I wrote an explanation of my beloved "You-Are-There Reading"—during my 2017 stint in Rome, I read Jhumpa Lahiri's wonderful book In Other Words. Lahiri shares my love of the Italian language and she penned this book in Italian. The English translation sits alongside, translated into English by Ann Goldstein (who incidentally has translated the works of Elena Ferrante into English). For Lahiri, a writer, her study of Italian was similarly motivated by a love of language and her memoirs of language-learning (and reading her newfound words) was purely a delight. Below—literary locales and discoveries from my two 2017 trips to Italy, which seem a fitting accompaniment.
The English volume of "Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls" sits on my bookshelf (now with volume II!) but when I was in Piacenza in spring of 2017, my friend Danielle and I were just leaving an event at Eataly when my eyes rested upon this! book! I should have suspected from the authors' surname that the original was published in Italian, but it was an even greater delight due to this accidental discovery. This is one book I did bring home with me and the Italian title brings me delight to no end. The stories themselves read as fairy tales in Italian, with the classic "c'era una volta..." (Once upon a time) which feels even more magical due to the distinguishing of verb tenses.
I adore looking through children's books in Italian. This bookstore window had so many amazing offerings on display.
(this post feels a little scattered, as 90% of it was written way back a couple of years ago and I just added a few things now [2020] at the time of publishing to try to polish it off. Anyway, it's mostly a blogpost draft/fossil with those minute additions so please forgive any areas that didn't get quite enough tweaking! I'm ready to move it along to see the light of day rather than die in my drafts!)
