second languages are easy to romanticize
or, 'what has been churning in my brain since i read andrea long chu's emperor of gladness review'
cw. suicide
A few weeks ago I was driving on an Italian highway in a van full of film equipment and other Americans. Between the grassy lay-bys and exit ramps, just past a small bridge crossing, someone spraypainted the words Pensaci Miché on the concrete structure at the center of a roundabout. I was the only one to notice. Think, Miché. A thing that would only make sense to an Italian. It was a miracle it made any sense to me.
I tried to draw attention to it and explain it to my fellow Americans, but I wasn’t expressing myself well. There was too much culture to wade through for the multi-layered meaning to be very exciting to anyone else in the car. I conceded that these kinds of things are probably only interesting and romantic to me.
Take the Ligurian folk singer Fabrizio de André. I call him “Italian Bob Dylan”. Like I do with LA NIÑA by calling her “Neapolitan Rosalía”, I am in the bad habit of making Italian artists comprehensible to American audiences by comparison, stealing away some of the magic that makes their art so special to me. It’s my lazy attempt to justify having such a special emotional connection with art in Italian. Even Italians that know and respect de André don’t quite feel it all as hard. I recognize this particular magic is one entirely of my own creation and one only I am capable of enjoying. I approach Italian artists with a reverence and generosity I don’t extend to artists working in English. And it is because art in Italian moves me too easily.
Art in English needs to work harder. A younger version of Giulia ascribed this to its lack of depth as a language– English, with its vast vocabulary and its exactitude, read clinical to me. Italian by comparison had fewer words, but the same scope of expression. Each word, then, had to stretch itself to fit, embedding several analogous or adjacent meanings within itself to be effective. It’s long been my favorite feature of Italian literature. That uncanny ability for one sentence to express what in English requires four or five sentences to clarify pleasantly.
But then I met Italians who read literature, and they had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
And then I read Andrea Long Chu’s review of Ocean Vuong’s Emperor of Gladness. And while there was much in that article that’s truly none of my business, Chu’s take on Vuong’s use of language hit me like an indictment.
“Vuong has long presented Vietnamese the way [Ezra] Pound presented Chinese: as a spiritual record of a people’s soul.”
Ouch. Ouch because I’ve always maintained that romance with my second language, believing that it contains that magic connecting me to a tradition I do not know and am not entitled to. Even when Italians themselves claim me for their own (most often for language alone!) I’ve still never felt capable of sincerely believing I am Italian like them. But my possession of the language is one small tendril I can wrap around Italian identity, tethering me to the great Something so I have an alternative to the great American Nothing on the other side. It’s a differentiating factor, a shard of the ancestral magic that proves I’m Not Like The Rest Of Them.
“But the idea that Vietnamese people are somehow more poetic because they happen to speak Vietnamese is an idea that belongs at the bottom of a metaphorical lake. It is hardly fair to bestow such a grave spiritual responsibility upon a country of people who, let’s be honest, have far more in common with one another than they do with Ocean Vuong, a celebrated poet whose relationship to language has been, as he constantly insists, forcefully altered by an experience of diaspora that by definition does not apply to those Vietnamese people still living in Vietnam.”
But following my own logic to its obvious conclusion announces that in my mind, English is still the de facto ‘default’, the ‘normal’ to which I compare everything else. Let’s face the facts: I am first and foremost an English-language user. I refuse to write in Italian. I have the equivalent of a fifth grade education in the language. I’m a mediocre translator. Sure, I studied entirely in Italian for two years at university, but I struggled the whole time and never felt so stupid. I will not be doing that again. I do not have a prodigious intellect in Italian. The truth is, the only reason I think Italian is so impressive is because I’m not very good at it. Expressing myself clearly in English is easy. Doing the same in Italian proves challenging. I certainly am not skilled enough to consider the quality of my prose like I can in English. Of course Italian prose is all magic to me; the version of Giulia that can read it is ignorant, poorly-read, and neither very smart nor verbose.
Italian is the language I cultivate attentively. I don’t feel the same obsessive compulsion to tend to my English. Any improvement in my English at this point is subtle, incremental, unsatisfying. Italian, on the other hand, grows quick and needy like a legume, seeking connection or some other tendril to wrap itself around. The improvements are exponential. So I’ve been going to the opera a lot recently. I’ve been so many times since I was a kid I’m now old enough to be on my second and third performances of certain Puccinis. In one of my many attempts to become a more intelligent Italian speaker, to tend my linguistic garden, I’ve been putting the Italian subtitles on and hoping whoever’s sat in front of me has the English in case I need it. Even my Italian-educated grandmother, whose mother tongue was frozen in 1960 and never really changed, finds opera Italian difficult to parse. The librettos are written in an anachronistic form of the language, and sound more like modern Neapolitan than standard Italian. It has been quite an education.
It turns out Italian has a much larger lexicon than I thought. Of course there’s a translation for everything I already possess in English, and hundreds of words for things we don’t have words for in English. My relationship with Italian until now was one of childlike incuriosity. The Italian of nineteenth-century opera forced me to confront a universe of vocabulary I refused to believe existed. I presumed everything I knew about the language was everything there was to know about it. And what little I did know was insufficient, an undeveloped photograph of a language that, of course, has the capacity to be just as exact and clinical as I know English can be. I romanticized Italian because it’s not quite mine. With few connections beyond my own curiosity to the culture underpinning the language, I had to fill in the blanks with inventions. The way children invent explanations for life’s mysteries in absence of comprehensible answers. Children’s imaginations are always more romantic.
“Vuong claimed On Earth was a “conversation between two Vietnamese people” that the presumably white reader could only “eavesdrop” on. But the novel was clearly intended for the eavesdropper, whose exclusion could underwrite Vuong’s claim to exclusivity. That is, the book had to be overheard in order to have something to say.”
La Ballata di Miché is a song by Fabrizio de André. It’s kind of like an Italian Marty Robbins song. It’s about Miché. He killed for his lover and landed in jail. He couldn’t bear the thought of living without her, so he hung himself in the cell. It’s a terrifically sad song, and It’s one of de André’s better known tracks. But Think, Miché is not a lyric in the song. Miché is already dead by the time you hear the first note. When the narrator begins to sing about Miché, it’s already too late. The song can only tell us what’s already transpired. But to Italians there is only one Miché worth knowing, and like others before it (Jolene, Roxanne, Billie Jean, Iris) the name alone had become a reference to the song. And the song had long been suicidally anthemic, like Elliot Smith’s Needle In The Hay or that one Sia song that was in the cyberbully movie. But I can’t be sure if that part is entirely true: that’s another ignorant, childlike invention. An assumption I made about the Think, Miché sign after assessing the pieces I had in hand.
The region we were driving through when I saw that sign has the highest suicide rate in Italy. I used to live there, I know why. There’s a sticky gloominess to the weather and a cold that lives in your bones. It’s a regional joke people tell: Ligurians are mean and thrifty; Milanese are snobby and annoying; Piemontese are suicidal assholes. A stereotype, but not an entirely unfounded one. The town I lived in, in fact, was best known as the birthplace of Cesare Pavese, a poet who famously also killed himself. Think of Pavese as like Italy’s Sylvia Plath. It wouldn’t be the first time I saw anti-suicide theses written near Piedmontese bridges and viaducts where people might jump. The song, the stereotype, the location all dragged me to the same conclusion.
I still don’t know if I’m right, or if I romanticized Italian out of ignorance again. But as we drove out of the roundabout and I got one last look at that sign, I concluded that Think, Miché was a plea. What someone wished they could have told Miché to starve us all of that wonderful, tragic song. They put it at that roundabout in the hope that it could save us from another such song in the future. It was a kindness.
Is that still as romantic in English?