Losing myself (you got the gist by now)

Keeping My Cool

If you are here for the first time, a warm welcome to you, esteemed reader. I refer you to Part 1 and Part 2 of this essay.

No matter how long I've been translating, some words still defy all attempts to pin them against an irrefutable meaning that would make my work easier and quicker. One of such word is cool, not as in adjectives like “chilly; cold; fresh”, but as in “fashionably attractive or impressive”, and as in nouns like “calmness; composure.”

I'm part of a team, responsible for the localization into Italian of a US fashion house's product descriptions. Localization is a process, which focuses on the adaptation of a piece of content's meaning to a specific market, using translation, cultural elements, and associated imagery.

“Cool” is one of the most recurring adjectives in those descriptions. We don't have a semantic equivalent in Italian for cool. Actually we do have it – it's fico/figo (depending on how this term is pronounced in Central and Southern Italy, and in the North, respectively) – but it's an extremely informal, slangy word, not at all in line with our client's tone of voice. Therefore, I have to rack my brains every single time I stumble upon some “cool” item of clothes or accessories.

Let's digress for a moment, re: fico/figo. Fico means fig, as in the Mediterranean, late summer juicy fruit from the fig tree. How come it means also something along the lines of “fashionably attractive or impressive”? According to one of my monolingual Italian dictionaries, the term dates back to 1979 and is the masculine form of the word fica/figa, which might or might not have originated from the fig fruit. Now, things get complicated. As it happens, fica/figa is a rude word for vulva, like cunt in English. But, unlike in English, it doesn't also mean a stupid, unpleasant, contemptible person, quite the contrary, in fact.

When referred to a woman, it means “hot, sexy, a piece of ass”, a vulgar term, and a real gentleman should know better than saying it, he'd rather go for the unimpeachable and classic “beautiful and irresistible.” Fico/Figo, referred to a man, means “cool, popular, stylish, attractive.” Well, of course it does. 🙄 I'm so peeved that there are always two weights, two measures, and the same old sexist differences in semantic. Let us ladies reclaim the whole lot of feminine nouns and adjectives as positive signifiers of fabulousness, class and dignity. ✊🏻

On the other hand, when something is really great and cool, we say it's a figata. Still not an elegant word, but not that rude either, just informal. And, last but not least, in Swedish, fika means coffee break (with cakes!), an absolute figata in my book.

Swedish fika in Amsterdam. Not sure about the curly mat on the table, but those buns and coffee have my name on them. Photo by Oskar Yildiz on Unsplash

And we're back to cool. Sometimes, the American copywriters have fun, and come up with descriptions like “Keep your cool this summer in this versatile, refined linen shirt”, combining two meanings, double trouble for me, so I try to translate it in a way that reads smoothly or, at the very least, not too clunky. Do I succeed? One of my editors is a cherished subscriber, let's see what she thinks about my endeavors. (Ciao, Susanna!)

Now that I think about it, we do have a word for cool, it's sprezzatura. This word first appeared in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 Il Cortegiano, The Book of the Courtier. I read this book while at Uni, almost 40 years ago, but I have to say that never before then, nor afterwards have I heard this quite fancy term mentioned in any instance in Italy. I don't think our client would approve, though. So much the worse for them, because it's a perfectly cromulent word.

Sprezzatura at its finest, and a cute, lively Maltese dog: Titian, Portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, circa 1525, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

The fact is, English is a flexible and clever language, so much so that I think it has a mind of its own. It soaks up the Zeitgeist of any particular period of history, and creates new words and idioms, often drawing on its virtually inexhaustible lexicon, built up on a West Germanic substratum, plus the mighty, kaleidoscopic contribution of a variety of Indo-European languages, and many other languages from around the world.

In the end, English is my language of choice as a writer, just as it was for Conrad and Nabokov. Mind you, I'm perfectly aware that, compared to those shining stars (Nabokov is more of a galaxy), I am but a tiny speck of dust, If I am anything at all.

About Conrad, Nabokov – whom I adore and worship, but who could be a downright grumpy old man, albeit a very witty one – said in Strong Opinions, “(…) as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of all, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished cliches and primitive clashes.”

For Nabokov, the choice of English was born out of necessity, out of the historical cataclysm of the Bolshevik Revolution in his childhood's Russia “My private tragedy,” he wrote, “which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.”

Writing in a language different from our mother-tongue means to lay down all the common referents, the realia, i.e. words and expressions for culture-specific material elements, which we share with readers who speak our same language. His English, Nabokov argued, “was devoid of any of those apparatuses” he enjoyed in Russian, “the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frat-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”

The Nabokov shelf in my library, with a bit of poems and prose by Pushkin, and George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain for good measure.

I believe that it's thought that informs language, and not the other way round, as per Chomsky's Universalist theory of language, according to which “linguistic structures are largely innate and (…) what are perceived as differences between specific languages are surface phenomena that do not affect the brain's universal cognitive processes,” and as per Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, in which he argues that “thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, termed ‘mentalese’.”

Therefore, I'd say that the language through which we convey our thoughts is a space where we could either feel at home or abroad, but where we are never out of place. We belong in it, even if we have to learn to move inside of it. After all, isn't writing a process of defamiliarization, where we try to find and define ourselves?

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, you can share it, leave a comment, or buy me a tea. I’d be very grateful to you, I’d appreciate it more than I can express!