On Not Being Bilingual
On speaking Italian and not speaking Italian
This is yet another episode in a series of essays about my ‘life’ in Italy. Other pieces, variously about bureaucracy and immigration, decline and teaching, can be found here. It isn’t necessary to have read the others first.
I also wrote about learning languages in my essay ‘Three Oddities’.
On Not Having Watched Camille
Jorge Luis Borges—one of the very large number of writers whom I love and yet know only in translation—once began one of his short critical essays in the following manner:
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon, and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares.
If there is anyone out there able to guess, without already knowing, what exactly Borges’s topic is in the essay in question, I would certainly be impressed. His next sentence reveals what it is:
Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.1
There is something charming, as well as characteristic, in Borges’s willingness to go from Greek bestiary-texts and the Trinity to Hollywood melodrama in the space of a paragraph. And there is something comical too: both in his characterising the act of dubbing a film in such vehement terms—a malignity! a monstrosity!—and in the author of ‘The Library of Babel’ being so put out at having been denied the experience of listening to (of all people) Greta Garbo.
I can’t speak Spanish, have never been to Argentina, and don’t know who Aldonza Lorenzo was or why her voice should have been so objectionable. All the same, I don’t find it difficult to imagine that, in Borges’s situation, watching a film dubbed into Spanish, I would probably have reacted just as he did.
After all, I have been in the equivalent situation on many occasions, in Italy, and I have always reacted in precisely that histrionic way. I reflect that there were probably Argentines in 1932 (when Borges’s essay was published) who would have objected to his reaction in the same way as Italian friends tend to object to mine: who would have thought it exaggerated, for one thing, and who, for another, would have disliked the strong smell of elitism that it gives off.
It is not a reaction I would ever have had while I was living in England. For obvious reasons, the majority of films in the cinema at any given time in the English-speaking world are English-language films—so much so that in a mainstream, medium-sized cinema in the UK it wouldn’t be surprising to find no foreign language films at all. If you did, those films would likely be assumed to appeal to an audience of highbrows, and probably would be subtitled rather than dubbed. In Italy (and, I presume, in Argentina) both of those facts are reversed, and as a result a special sort of cultural niche, a new art form, has been created.
Every Italian I have ever spoken to about it regards the dubbing of films as an art form, in and of itself; many regard certain examples of it as equivalent, or even superior, to the original films; and Italian doppiatori (the fact that we do not really use any English word is telling) are sometimes as famous in Italy as the actors that they dub.
And fair enough, I might say, in a less snobbish mode. Given the dominance of English in the movies, what are you going to do? Do you really expect middle-schoolers to watch The Fast and the Furious movies with subtitles, or university students to follow the rapid interlaced dialogue of a Noah Baumbach film in two languages simultaneously?
From one angle, accepting and celebrating the art of dubbing seems one way of assimilating into Italian culture, and of fully embracing Italian life, which is probably one reason that I am unable to do it.
Borges doesn’t specify which film of Greta Garbo’s he watched in Spanish, though it doesn’t matter much. As it happens, I too have watched a dubbed version of a Greta Garbo film—the version of Camille that was released in Italy, with the voice not of Aldonza Lorenzo but of one Tina Lattanzi.2
You could call Camille a gorgeous film—romantic, nostalgic, otherworldly—in the same way as everyone everywhere called Garbo herself gorgeous; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Hollywood version of La Dame aux camélias, it is often regarded as one of the great American films of the 1930s.
Then again, I wouldn’t know: I’ve only seen the dubbed version. Even now, after all the time I’ve spent living in Italy and speaking Italian, I am still convinced that I have never watched Camille.
On Not Really Speaking Italian
An excellent writer I know via this platform recently joined the long list of friends who have advised me, gently, to tone down the self-hatred when I write.
He hasn’t yet met me in person, and is therefore perhaps under the impression that that self-hatred is a literary affectation, a way of anticipating or dealing with criticism, a disguised form of self-love. And it may be all of that, of course, though the people who have met me know that it is also a personality quirk; a literary affectation only insofar as my entire existence is a literary affectation; not something I am putting into my writing so much as something I am increasingly disinclined to take out of it.
I have in fact been told on more occasions than I can count, by lovers and friends and even family, that self-hatred—in addition to being helpful to no one—is by far my least attractive quality. One friend of mine once told me exactly that (in a kind way) while I was in the midst of some depression: he recounts now that at the time I apologised to him for said self-hatred, and reflected, entirely without irony, on how much I hated myself for it.
At the same time, another unattractive quirk I have—though perhaps it is really the same quirk—is criticising my own abilities in the Italian language, which, when I do so in Italian, creates a similar kind of through-the-looking-glass insanity, even at those times when I notice the contradiction. Ovviamente, I said to an Italian friend the other day, sarebbe assurdo dire in italiano che non so parlare l’italiano. Però…3
That is the doubt, and it is absurd, though I feel it, very strongly sometimes, all the same. In certain moods, I feel that that doubt is exactly parallel to my belief that I have never really watched Camille: since the sort of assumptions it depends on about language and about translation are similarly repugnant, and perhaps indefensible.
After all, if it is true that I have never really watched Camille, is it not also true that I have never really read Borges—or for that matter Fernando Pessoa or Schopenhauer or Turgenev or any number of writers who I feel made me me? Furthermore, would it not also be true in that case that the great majority of the world’s literature would be unattainable to me, and indeed unattainable to every single person on the planet (with the possible exception of David Bentley Hart)? And if it is true that I do not really speak Italian, then what is it, exactly, that I am doing every day when I speak Italian?
By now I’ve lived in Italy for more than a decade. There are a few areas of life, like cooking and driving, in which I know Italian words without knowing their English equivalents, since I never did much cooking or any driving in England. And, given that I was only twenty-five when I first arrived here, there are many ordinary-life activities—communicating with landlords, going to government offices, making police reports, meeting in-laws, arguing with bosses, going to trade union meetings, negotiating salaries—which I have done on multiple occasions in Italian and never done in English at all.
And yes, it is true that I don’t have any formal education or qualification in Italian—but, then again, given all the above, why should that matter? After all, apart from high school, I also don’t have any formal education or qualification in the study of poetry and… well, that hasn’t stopped me, has it?
On Not Writing Italian Poetry
My education, as my hero Groucho Marx once said of his own, is self-inflicted, and that includes whatever Italian education I have, however meagre. The day that I arrived in Italy for the first time I was unable to say even the phrase ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian’ in Italian, and had not even thought to look up how to ask for a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes in the language, in spite of the fact that at that time I knew of no other way of getting through an afternoon.
But then—all too suddenly!—things changed… On the evening of that first day in Italy I met the woman who was to become my first Italian girlfriend, imprinting myself on her like a hatched duckling to its mother, and understanding, once and for all, that I had last found the answer to the question of existence, and that she was it.
As a result, I spent a great deal of my time at the beginning of my stay in Italy trying to learn the language in order to impress her—so that I’m still convinced that about fifty percent of the Italian I now know I learnt in the first two months of being here.
Amour fou, as its name suggests, is a kind of insanity, and so, for that matter, is poetry. Furthermore, so is the propensity to connect the two: in my mind, being in Mad Love, and attempting, madly, to persuade someone to love me in return, is in fact inextricably connected with poetry. (That is why I still enjoy the embarrassing and ecstatic Beginning-of-Love Poem; that is why I seem always to believe, when things go wrong, in the Magic Poem that will win the person back…) Though I most emphatically do not believe that all poetry is worship, I do think that a lot of it is, and those of us who hate the world also need something, or someone, to praise.
It is probably unsurprising, therefore, that even in those first few months in Italy I set about trying to read poetry in Italian, and to translate it into English. There are surely not many people in the world so titanically stupid as to try to read Giacomo Leopardi in Italian on the same day that they first learn how to ask for directions to the train station, but I did.
The attempt, needless to say, was over-ambitious. Leopardi was a bad choice for a start: as a poet, he has almost no presence in the English-speaking world precisely because he is infamously difficult to translate; and in any case his language is very different from that spoken by ordinary Italians today—much more so than (say) the language of Lord Byron as compared to modern English. Furthermore, there is probably no text more difficult in a second language, even if you do know that language well, than a poem.
Nonetheless, I produced my excruciatingly bad translations of Leopardi’s ‘L’infinito’ and ‘A se stesso’, and it was quite some time before I finally concluded that the task of translating the Italian Philip Larkin was best left to somebody else.
What interests me now, however, given the subject of the present essay, is the thought that—notwithstanding the madness of romantic love—I never once considered writing poems in Italian, though I have occasionally met other expats who would probably have done so, in my situation. If you can impress a girl by being able to talk and listen to her in her native language, you would certainly impress her—wouldn’t you?—by writing a sonnet to her, even imperfectly, in that language. But I never tried to do so; indeed, I don’t remember the possibility of so doing ever even occurring to me.
Even today, in fact, it is not something I would try to do: whenever I write even a single sentence in Italian in one my notebooks, I immediately feel like a fraud. Why would I do such a thing? After all, I don’t really speak Italian…
On Not Being Albanian
I wrote in the last instalment of these interminable essays that everything would have been different for me if I had gone to Albania instead of Italy, an observation so thunderingly banal that it must be true. Equally, I suppose—as of today—that things would have been different if I had been an Albanian, rather than an Englishman, in Italy.
I assume that few people outside of Albania know even the rudiments of the Albanian language, and that therefore any Albanian in Italy has no choice but to learn Italian well. This is not the case with English: almost everyone in Italy—whatever Italians may claim to the contrary—knows at least a few words in English, and very many people know much more than that. If you wanted to, therefore, you could get by living in Italy without knowing Italian well, and, if you lived in a big city, you could probably get by without knowing it at all.
I have met other expats who feel guilty about this fact and other expats who, if their behaviour is anything to go by, don’t. In the latter camp is an American former colleague of mine, resident in Italy for longer than me, who as far as I know cannot speak word one of the Italian language: going into a tobacconist with her once, I was startled to find that she was unable or unwilling to say even the words ‘Can I have…’ in Italian.
At the other extreme, as part of the former camp, you will occasionally find those expats who are extremely keen to let everyone know, in every single interaction they have, how fluently they speak the local language. This is the sort of person who will, for example, complain theatrically about the parochialism of the English-speaking world, or spontaneously break into Italian in the middle of a conversation in English, or tell anyone present that every other Italian phrase is ‘strictly speaking’ untranslatable, or (worst of all) make a big show at every opportunity of having forgotten how to say certain things in English.
This type of person is also, probably, the type who will throw themselves into Italianness in a way that I never have: which is to say, not only by speaking Italian but by speaking Italian in an Italian way.
I tend to speak Italian in rather an English way: even when my sentences are grammatical, they still tend to be arranged as they would be in English; I tend to be quiet and undemonstrative, two adjectives not always associated with Italy; I rarely shout or gesticulate.
Besides, I have a foreign accent when I speak Italian. If I really concentrate and make an effort and force my mouth, tongue, and lips into unnatural positions I might just be able to conceal the fact that I’m English—and perhaps get closer for a few seconds to something like Standard Italian—but if I speak in a natural way any Italian can tell that I’m not Italian, and in most cases they can tell that I’m English.
That shouldn’t (and doesn’t) matter much. Few people who learn a language in adulthood are able to entirely lose all trace of their native accent, and there’s hardly any point in complaining about that fact. I sound English because I am, unfortunately, English: as an English friend of mine once drunkenly told a Scottish friend of mine, it upsets me just as much as it upsets you.
The obvious downside, however, to speaking with the accent that I have is that it immediately identifies me as a speaker of the world’s second language, and what that means is that there are some Italians out there apt to switch a conversation from Italian into English for no good reason, just to show that they can.
My private rule has always been that the language a conversation starts in ought to be the language that the conversation continues in. If someone at a school or an exam centre asks me a question even in very bad English, it is only polite for me to reply in English: not doing so, I always think, would seem to imply that their English is so bad that they ought not to have bothered.
Many Italians know this from their own experiences travelling. Almost every Italian I know who has visited France, for example, has reported to me the same experience: that they try their best to speak in English in order to make themselves understood and that the French respond to them in French. And I tell them, honestly, my own experience, which is that whenever I am in France and try my best to speak French the French respond to me in English. And so I conclude that the French do not wish to speak to anyone, except maybe to each other.
On Not Making a Home
I used to imagine, before living abroad and before ever learning to speak a foreign language well, that there would come a moment, for one immersed in a language, when Fluency is at last reached, just as young people the world over make similar assumptions about the stages of life that you get to: that there will come a time when you just meet that person, or just get that job, or just find your place. My uncertainty, most of the time, about whether this moment has or will ever come is probably one of the main reasons that I feel insecure about my abilities, and why I tend to feel insulted when people switch language in this way.
I can think of occasions when I’ve gone into a café for the first time, and a bartender has overheard my foreign accent and said to me ‘You are English! I speak English! Come here and we speak English!’ and I immediately think to myself: ‘I’m never setting foot in this café again.’
Italian friends of mine tell me that this is not intended to be insulting: on the contrary, it’s supposed to be welcoming. Well, maybe for tourists it’s welcoming, but not for me; I take it instead as a reminder that I am an outsider and always will be. Y’all just our guests here but you act like you at home. Brother, you ain’t home.
Occasionally, the assumption that any and all British people speak only English and want to speak only English reaches surreal heights, as happens when somebody switches into English a long way into the interaction, as though the things already said in Italian hadn’t been said.
I remember ringing an Italian estate agent once, in search for an apartment in one of the cities where I was living. When I rang the office, a woman with a deep voice, of the kind gravelled by smoking sixty a day for forty years, picked up the phone. And I said, with only a hint of English timidity, something like:
Buongiorno, chiamo a proposito dell’appartamento in via Roma che ho visto su Subito.it.4
Eh sì, said my interlocutor, pausing as though having to answer the phone at all was an imposition. E che vuoi? What do you want?
‘Ah, well,’ said I (still in Italian) ‘I’d like to see it, if that’s possible.’ ‘But we can’t just show you,’ said she (still in Italian), ‘we need to know something about you.’ ‘Okay,’ said I (still in Italian), ‘what would you like to know?’
I am repeating the phrase ‘still in Italian’ to highlight the oddity of how the conversation continued.
‘Eh… ma… che fai?’ she replied, in answer to my question. What do you do?
‘Insegno l’inglese,’ I said. I teach English.
‘Eh?’
‘INSEGNO L’INGLESE!’
‘Oddio…’—oh my God—she said, with something like terror. ‘Aspetta un attimo…’ There was a long pause with some indiscernible background discussion, and then a second estate agent spoke down the phone: ‘Hello, hello, I speak English, how can help?’
I continued the conversation with this second estate agent, who was much friendlier but whose English was slightly in need of improvement.
Second estate agent. How many time you stay in Cagliari?
Alexander. But do you mean for the future? How long am I going to stay?
(small pause)
Second estate agent. How many time you stay in Cagliari?
Alexander. Indefinitely.
(small pause)
Second estate agent. I want say: You stay in Cagliari for a long time?
Alexander. Yes, a long time. Indefinitely. Forever.
(small pause)
Second estate agent. I try different question. You want stay in Cagliari only for summer?
Alexander. Indefinitely!
Second estate agent. Ah—you don’t know.
Alexander. Yes… Indefinitely. For an indefinite period. Forever. Per sempre!
Second estate agent. Ah, per sempre, okay, understand…
On Not Being Tim Parks
That sort of thing, I tell myself, would never have happened to Tim Parks. A British novelist living in Italy, Parks has made a sideline as one of the great English-language interpreters of Italian life. (His book Italian Ways, which describes his experience travelling across the country by train, is one of the best books I’ve read about my adopted country.)
As far as I know, Parks’s Italian books have sold quite well; they appeal not only to those who would like to visit or live in Italy but to those of us who already live here too—and he is the kind of man who puts us to shame.
Like me, Parks came to Italy in his twenties with zero Italian; like me, he immediately started teaching himself the language; unlike me, he did not do so solely in order to seem more attractive to someone he was in love with.
When my relationship ended, I settled back quickly into laziness, alcoholism, and isolation. Parks, however, already married to an Italian before coming to Italy, continued his self-education; by now he is a translator of Machiavelli and Leopardi. Though I have no idea how much he may shout and gesticulate, he worked hard to become truly bilingual in a way that I never have.
And yet in his writing I find that even he occasionally has some of the thoughts that I do. There are moments in Italian Ways when he seems to convince someone that he is Italian, but then doubts himself; on another occasion, he speaks Italian so well that the other passengers in his train carriage burst into applause. Though I believe he has written lectures and newspaper articles in his second language, he hasn’t, as far as I know, ever attempted to write novels in it, for the simple reason, he says, that he wouldn’t be as good.
I have always remembered a comment he made about the feeling of words in Italian, though I have forgotten where he made it and can only paraphrase it. ‘Beyond question,’ he said—and this must be true for a translator of Machiavelli and Leopardi—‘I know more words in Italian than my Italian children do. And yet certain words will have a kind of resonance for them, as people who spoke and heard the language from early childhood, that they can never have for me.’
That hasn’t stopped his self-education, but perhaps it stopped mine: perhaps that is the real reason I feel I have never watched Camille. Films are just as important to me as poems are; the shiver I feel down my spine at hearing the actors speak in some of my favourite films—Chinatown, for example, or Goodfellas—I do not feel in Italian, in spite of wanting to.
One case in point is swearing, of which, in Goodfellas, there is a fair amount. The phrase ‘How the fuck am I funny?’, even delivered in an accent which is foreign for me, has all kinds of resonances that ‘che cazzo ci trovi di tanto buffo in me?’ just doesn’t have. I know how to swear in Italian, but I almost never do; in those moments when we are most likely to swear—which is to say, in orgasm, in pain, or, if you really know how to enjoy life, both at the same time—we tend to swear in our native languages.
I know, if I am honest with myself, that I do not have, and at this point probably never will have, the kind of direct sensuous relationship with the Italian language as I do with the English. It is not a question of what is said, but how. Talking of poetry again, those two things seem to be inseparable.
I think for example of the following lines taken from plays and poems:
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Why all the souls that were were forfeit once…
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners…
And that silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain…
Long shadows over major roads, and for…
Above your head, the shrug of unreal wings.5
I remember reading each of these lines for the first time; each of them made me shiver; each of them creeps down my spine every so often when I’m not expecting it. They do that now, even in isolation, ripped from all context, so that I’m not convinced that it is the context that causes the effect, just as I am not convinced that the effect is caused by the exactness of a physical description or the precision of an idea or anything like that: rather it is simply some kind of music in the lines themselves; a music that can be heard by one who speaks a language with an unconscious competence, and who has had a relationship with that language since infancy.
I could in fact write a long list of lines like this, and, again, from films as much as from poems, as indeed from ordinary life. I can think of certain individual words in English which move me almost to tears. And I know, for all my pretensions, that that is not the case in Italian.
On Not Being Bilingual
Though there have been and continue to be some counter-examples, it is probably not that controversial to say that most writers have only one language to write in. This is true at times even for some authors who are famous for writing in second or third languages: as far as I know, Conrad never wrote in Polish and Svevo never wrote in Triestino. T. S. Eliot wrote a few poems in French, and later regretted it, telling his Paris Review interviewer that the English language, in the end, has more resources than the French (which seems like an odd way of saying that French had fewer resources for him).
Even the two most famous examples of bilingual writers in modern English literature, Beckett and Nabokov, are not straightforward cases. Beckett, after all, supposedly adopted the French language as a way of avoiding style (as well as a way of trying to shake off the influence of James Joyce). Nabokov, on the other hand, switched from Russian to English mostly for reasons of expediency (i.e. because he wasn’t about to go back to Russia any time soon), and once rather alarmingly described his competence in English as ‘second-rate’.
It would sound more controversial (maybe) to say that there are some writers, and even very great writers, who have one language in which to read. Of most of them that probably isn’t true, though there are surely some: as it happens, monolingualism is one area in which my native country can truly shine. Perhaps then I can blame on repressed patriotism the fact that I have never fully embraced my second language.
Though there is clearly a sense in which somebody could say that I have never read Jorge Luis Borges, I don’t think there’s any meaningful sense in which somebody could say that I haven’t read Giacomo Leopardi. I can read in Italian, after all, and in the case of Leopardi, some of whose poems I know very well by now, I probably do feel something like the shiver. And yet even now, after all these years, I never read a poem in Italian for the first time and feel anything like it. Deep inside me, I know that all of the books that I really love are in English, which is probably the main reason I have written an essay with the title ‘On Not Being Bilingual’. Then again, perhaps it’s just that I have never truly accepted that this is in fact my life.
It was around the same time as I spoke to that estate agent that, walking in the city of Cagliari, I ran into the mother of one of my teenage students and exchanged pleasantries and work-talk. How was Giulia doing? We so much appreciate that she has the opportunity to hear a native speaker like you! She’s actually very intelligent, you know, though she lacks confidence. Would you consider doing private lessons?
Only later did it occur to me that this may have been the moment, if there was ever going to be a moment, when that mythical Fluency was reached. It was only when I was walking away from the conversation that I realised I’d been speaking in Italian the whole time during it, and doing so without consciously translating from the English in my head.
As with more than a few other grand significant changes in life—losing your virginity, for instance, or driving a car—it is too easy to imagine, before it happens, than when it finally does you will be altered essentially; that nothing will ever be the same again; that a true turning-point will have been reached. But of course it was nothing of the sort: the possibility that I had truly arrived at a second language did not linger for very long.
Later that day, when I arrived home, I continued with the usual hobby of one whose education is self-inflicted, and went on studying for non-existent exams. And my burst of confidence, it turned out, was very short-lived: Dante Alighieri will do that to anyone. A true master of self-hatred, I soon contrived not to notice what I had noticed, felt very angry and embarrassed at not understanding this or that phrase in La Divina Commedia, and reflected, in my diary, about how disgracefully bad my Italian really was.
Borges: ‘On Dubbing’ in Selected Non-Fictions, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine.
Its title in Italy is Margherita Gauthier.
‘Obviously, it would be absurd to say in Italian that I don’t know how to speak Italian. However—’
‘Hello, I’m calling in regards to the apartment on via Roma which I saw on Subito.it.’
Lines respectively from: Henry IV Part 2, Twelfth Night, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, Poe’s ‘The Raven’, Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, and Wilbur’s ‘Lying’.
Of course you don’t understand Dante, we don’t either. Any high schooler here knows this very well, but when we grow older we forget how much we struggled with the Divina Commedia
“I tend to speak Italian in rather an English way . . .” That got a chuckle from me. You tend to do everything, or at least everything we hear about, in rather an English way. You do it in an English fashion, and then you tell us about it in an even more English fashion.
Enjoyed the entire essay, particularly the exchange with the “second estate agent” in which you say “Indefinitely!” and the agent replies “Ah—you don’t know.”