Yet the impulse to track down the right word remains irrepressible, so even in Italian I try. I check the thesaurus, I leaf through my notebook. I put in a new word, just read that morning in the newspaper. But my first readers often shake their heads, saying simply, “It doesn’t sound right.” They say that the word I’d like to use is now considered dated, that it belongs to a register too low or too refined, that it sounds either precious or too colloquial (thus I learned the adjective aulico, lofty). They say that the word order isn’t natural, that the punctuation doesn’t work. Correctness doesn’t necessarily enter into it. They say that an Italian would not express himself like that.
I have to listen to those readers, I have to follow their advice. I have to remove the incorrect or wrong word and look for another. I can’t defend my choice: one can’t contradict a native speaker. I have to accept that in Italian I am partly deaf and blind, and so I’m afraid of being a spurious writer.
I now have quite an extensive vocabulary, but it’s an eccentric one. I feel as if I were dressed in an outlandish manner, wearing a long, elegant skirt of another era, a T-shirt, a straw hat, and slippers. That graceless effect, those muddled tones might be the consequence of the distance, from the beginning, between me and Italian: of my having absorbed the language for years from afar, from a variety of sources, before I lived in Italy. For two years I’ve been learning the language in a comfortable, daily way. But now that I read in Italian my vocabulary is also molded by an amalgam of writers, of various historical epochs, who write in diverse styles. In my notebooks I list words of Manganelli, Verga, Elena Ferrante, Leopardi, without making any distinction. Beckett said that writing in French allowed him to write without style. On the one hand I agree: one could say that my writing in Italian is a type of unsalted bread. It works, but the usual flavor is missing.
On the other hand, I think that it does have a style, or at least a character. The language seems like a waterfall. I don’t need every drop, and yet I’m still thirsty. I suspect, therefore, that the problem isn’t the absence of style but perhaps an excess, by which I feel overwhelmed. What I lack in Italian is a sharp vision, and so I can’t hone a specific style. Furthermore I can’t grasp it. If I happen to formulate a good sentence in Italian, I can’t understand exactly why it’s good.
I remain, in Italian, an ignorant writer, aware only that I’m in disguise. In fact I feel like a child who sneaks into her mother’s closet to try on the high-heeled shoes, an evening dress, some jewelry, a fur coat.
I’m afraid of being caught in the act, of being rebuked, sent to my room. “You have to wait,” my mother would say. “These things are too big for you.” She’s right. I can’t walk in the shoes. The necklace feels heavy, I stumble on the hem of the dress. Although the fur coat is stylish, I’m sweating inside it.
Like the tide, my vocabulary rises and falls, comes and goes. The words added every day in the notebook are transient. I spend an hour choosing the right one, but then, often, I forget it. Now when I encounter an unfamiliar word in Italian I already know several terms, also in Italian, to express the same thing. For example I recently learned accantonare (set aside), already knowing rinviare and sospendere. I discovered travalicare (cross over), already knowing oltrepassare and superare. I underlined tracotante (arrogant), already knowing arrogante and prepotente. A little while ago I acquired azzeccato (well aimed, exact) and ficcante (incisive); before, I would have used adatto, appropriato.
I do my best to hit the target, but when I take aim I never know where the arrow will land. At least a hundred times while I was writing the chapters of this book I felt so demoralized, so disheartened, that I would have liked to stop. In those dark moments my Italian writing seemed to me a mad undertaking, a slope too steep. Yet if I want to go on writing in Italian I have to withstand those stormy moments when the sky darkens, when I despair, when I fear I’m at the end of my rope.
I envy Pavese, and his capacity to plumb Italian to the depths. But I think that I, too, have taken a sounding by way of these reflections. Investigating my discovery of the language, I think I have investigated myself. The verb sondare means “to explore, to examine.” It means, literally, to measure the depth of something. According to my dictionary the verb means “seek to know, to understand something, in particular the thoughts and intentions of others.” It implies detachment, uncertainty; it implies a state of immersion. It means methodical, stubborn research, into something that remains forever out of reach. A well-aimed verb that perfectly explains my project.
THE SCAFFOLDING
I conceived and wrote this book in a library in the ghetto in Rome. When I came to the city for the first time, more than ten years ago, it was the first neighborhood I discovered. It remains my favorite. I’ll never forget the emotion of seeing the Portico di Ottavia, a short distance from the apartment we had rented for a week. It made such an impression that after returning to New York I wrote, in English, a story set in the ghetto, in which I described the ruins of the portico: “its chewed-up columns girded with scaffolding, its massive pediment with significant chunks missing.” At the time, this ancient complex, ravaged, in pieces, rebuilt many times, yet still standing, for me embodied the sense of the city. And now it gives me the metaphor with which I would like to end this series of reflections.
I write to feel alone. Ever since I was a child it has been a way of withdrawing, of finding myself. I need silence and solitude. When I write in English I take for granted that I can do it without help. Someone may give me a suggestion, point out a problem. But in terms of the linguistic journey I am self-sufficient.
In Italian I’ve taken a different path. I was alone in the library, it’s true. While I was writing no one was with me. My only companion was a volume of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, the solitary poet who spent her entire life in Massachusetts, not far from where I grew up. A beautiful red book, an Italian translation, that among all the others on the library shelves happened to draw my attention. Often, before starting a new piece, I would read one of the poems or letters. It became a kind of ritual. One day I found these lines: “I feel that I am sailing upon the brink of an awful precipice, from which I cannot escape & over which I fear my tiny boat will soon glide if I do not receive help from above.” I was amazed. Writing these chapters, I felt exactly like that.
I wrote them in order, one after the other, as if they were homework for my Italian lessons. For six months, I drafted one more or less every week. I’d never undertaken a writing project in such a methodical way. I sent the first draft to my teacher, who was the first reader. During our lessons we worked together. It was a rigorous process, both for me and for him. He saw all the gross mistakes, all the mortal sins: gli penso rather than ci penso, sono chiesta rather than mi viene chiesto (I think about him, I’m asked). At first he gave me a series of copious, punctilious notes. (“Be careful not to use too many verbs as nouns”; “Mica”—at all, it’s not like—“is too colloquial”; “Lasciarsi alle spalle”—leave behind. “Lasciare isn’t wrong but it’s less natural.”) For the first story, which was less than five hundred words long, he made thirty-two notes at the bottom of the page. He gave me alternative words, he corrected (and rebuked) me when for the hundredth time I made a mistake in the subjunctive, a gerund, a conditional clause. He explained how English stalked me. He pointed out, always patiently, how many times a wrong preposition screwed things up.