Losing Myself in the Luscious Forest of the English Language – Part 1

The Italian Conundrum

Someone come and fetch me! Wistman’s Wood, UK, David Clapp/Getty Images

Wishing for more subscribers, in the last couple of months I've been toying with the idea of creating an Italian version for my Substack. At first, the idea seemed appealing: I'd get to write in my native language, where I can walk steadfastly alongside a path of olive groves and lemon trees, and take in the familiar Mediterranean view, instead of stumbling around in the luscious forest of the English language – armed with nothing but mugs of Earl Grey tea to fortify myself and be steady in my resolve – where even a discernible trail is replete with the danger of misspelling, misunderstanding, getting it totally wrong in terms of grammar, style, and common sense for those who haven't been treading on it since they were born.

Nonetheless, I'm resisting this temptation. The only thing I've ever loved about my heritage is my language: Italian has an architectural quality to it that makes it marvellously suitable to poetry and music. A gifted writer could concoct countless delightful stories in Italian. It sounds pleasant to the ears. And yet… I don't feel it anymore. I translate into Italian, therefore I use it professionally every day, and having been living in the Netherlands for almost 20 years now, I have to keep my native language alive. I speak Italian with my husband and daughter, with my Italian friends in the Old Country, and with those all over the world.

But when it comes to reading and listening, I'm in a bit of a pickle. I haven't been able to read Italian newspapers, without going berserk, in a long time. Apparently, in the 80's-90's, they decided to dispense with proofreaders, which resulted in a deluge of typos, happy disregard for spelling rules, grammar mistakes, and generally insipid writing. I don't read Italian contemporary fiction either, which is unfair maybe, but the industry standards have gone downhill even for the most renowned publishing houses. I don't watch Italian TV, and the last Italian movie I enjoyed was the funny, sweet, extremely well-written and acted Pane e tulipani. Hence, my consumption of Italian culture largely predates the 21st century. Does all that make me a grumpy old hag, totally not down with the kids? Why, thanks for the compliment!

Perhaps, I should spend some time in Italy, and have a total language immersion there. A couple of years ago, we were considering a small trip for family reasons, but I started to feel anxious and nauseated at the thought, and mission aborted it was. With a few notable exceptions, I don't feel at ease in the company of my fellow country(wo)men. Well, I don't feel comfortable around people by default, and so my childhood memories and social interactions as an adult in the Bel paese make me wary of reliving the experience. There's another disheartening factor in my aversion, a really worrying one, which is the malignant presence of fascism, something we never got rid of, inexcusably. While Italians at their best are a creative, friendly, caring bunch, at their worst they can be arrogant, narrow-minded, cowardly jerks, the fertile ground for fascism. We gave it to the world (you're welcome!), centuries after the Renaissance, lest the world becomes too comfortable, and thinks we are all artists and snappy dressers, who spend their time eating and singing, while romancing the ladies, or charming the gentlemen.

As the Poet said, Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. (Dante's Inferno, Canto III, 51: Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)

Let's rather talk about the star of the show.

English is a relatively easy language to learn, at least for those who speak other Indo-European languages, especially the Germanic ones.

I’m a language tree-hugger. Illustration and photo by Minna Sundberg

But this effortlessness is deceptive. Luckily for us foreigners, nouns and adjectives don't have either a masculine, a feminine or a neutral form; adjectives don't even have a plural. But there are a lot of irregular verbs, spelling is challenging, phonology is a nightmare😱, and its vocabulary is huge, oceanic, ever-expanding.

When the eager learner wants to venture further than “Hi! My name is X, I'm Y years old, I live in Z”, he/she quickly realises there's no such thing as an easy language, and there's no way around grammar and syntax. What's next?

Stay tuned for Part 2: Untranslatable words! Nabokov! More exclamation marks!

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