The translator returned home, defeated. She was forced to wear the other sweater, because it was still raining. That night she fell asleep without eating, without dreaming. 
The next day, when she woke, she saw a black sweater on a chair in the corner of the room. It was again familiar to her. She knew that it had always been hers, and that her reaction the day before, the little scene she had made in front of the two other women, had been completely irrational, absurd.
And yet this sweater was no longer the same, no longer the one she’d been looking for. When she saw it, she no longer felt revulsion. In fact, when she put it on, she preferred it. She didn’t want to find the one she had lost, she didn’t miss it. Now, when she put it on, she, too, was another.
THE FRAGILE SHELTER
When I read in Italian, I feel like a guest, a traveler. Nevertheless, what I’m doing seems a legitimate, acceptable task.
When I write in Italian, I feel like an intruder, an impostor. The work seems counterfeit, unnatural. I realize that I’ve crossed over a boundary, that I feel lost, in flight. I’m a complete foreigner.
When I give up English, I give up my authority. I’m shaky rather than secure. I’m weak.
What is the source of the impulse to distance myself from my dominant language, the language that I depend on, that I come from as a writer, to devote myself to Italian?
Before I became a writer, I lacked a clear, precise identity. It was through writing that I was able to feel fulfilled. But when I write in Italian I don’t feel that.
What does it mean, for a writer, to write without her own authority? Can I call myself an author, if I don’t feel authoritative?
How is it possible that when I write in Italian I feel both freer and confined, constricted? Maybe because in Italian I have the freedom to be imperfect.
Why does this imperfect, spare new voice attract me? Why does poverty satisfy me? What does it mean to give up a palace to live practically on the street, in a shelter so fragile?
Maybe because from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.
I wonder what the relationship is between freedom and limits. I wonder how a prison can resemble paradise.
I’m reminded of a passage in Verga, whom I recently discovered: “To think that this patch of ground, a sliver of sky, a vase of flowers might have been enough for me to enjoy all the happiness in the world if I hadn’t experienced freedom, if I didn’t feel in my heart a gnawing fever for all the joys that are outside these walls!”
The speaker is the protagonist of La storia di una capinera (Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird), a novice in an enclosed order of nuns who feels trapped in the convent, who longs for the countryside, light, air.
I, at the moment, prefer the enclosure. When I write in Italian, that sliver of sky is enough.
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. I feel tormented, just like Verga’s songbird. Like her, I wish for something else — something that I probably shouldn’t wish for. But I think that the need to write always comes from desperation, along with hope.
I know that one should have a thorough knowledge of the language one writes in. I know that I lack true mastery. I know that my writing in Italian is something premature, reckless, always approximate. I’d like to apologize. I’d like to explain the source of this impulse of mine.
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.
If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me — everything that makes me react, in short — I have to put it into words. Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too much.
What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.
Given that I try to decipher everything through writing, maybe writing in Italian is simply my way of learning the language in a more profound, more stimulating way.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on the earth.
What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.
IMPOSSIBILITY
Reading an interview with the novelist Carlos Fuentes in an issue of Nuovi Argomenti, I find this: “It’s extremely useful to know that there are certain heights one will never be able to reach.”
Fuentes is referring to literary masterpieces — works of genius like Don Quixote, for example — that remain untouchable. I think that these heights have a dual, and substantial, role for writers: they make us aim at perfection and remind us of our mediocrity.
As a writer, in whatever language, I have to take account of the presence of the greatest writers. I have to accept the nature of my contribution with respect to theirs. Although I know I’ll never write like Cervantes, like Dante, like Shakespeare, nevertheless I write. I have to manage the anxiety that those heights can stir up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t dare write.
Now that I’m writing in Italian, Fuentes’s observation seems even more pertinent. I have to accept the impossibility of reaching the height that inspires me but at the same time pushes me into a corner. Now the height is not the work of a writer more brilliant than I am but, rather, the heart of the language itself. Although I know that I will never be securely inside that heart, I try, through writing, to reach it.
I wonder if I’m going against the current. I live in an era in which almost anything seems possible, in which no one wants to accept any limits. We can send a message in an instant, we can go from one end of the world to the other in a day. We can plainly see a person who is not with us. Thanks to technology, no waiting, no distance. That’s why we can say with assurance that the world is smaller than it used to be. We are always connected, reachable. Technology refutes distance, today more than ever.
And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can’t accelerate the process, you can’t abbreviate it. The pace is slow, hesitant, there are no shortcuts. The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is. The closer I get, the farther away. Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It’s taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far.
In that sense the metaphor of the small lake that I wanted to cross, with which I began this series of reflections, is wrong. Because in fact a language isn’t a small lake but an ocean. A tremendous, mysterious element, a force of nature that I have to bow before.