Reading in tongues

Since my Italian tutor is away this summer, I've been working my way through a collection of short stories, a few pages a day. At the same time, my research has taken a turn that means much of the scholarship I need is in French. So I've been reading an article here, skimming a book there. Eventually, I also have to read a long scholarly essay in Italian. (It's been sitting in a file drawer for two years. I like to think I'm working up to it.)

This is a pleasant turn of events. Though my research has certainly required foreign-language knowledge before now, studying the literature of seventeenth-century England means that I don't need it that often, and certainly not to the degree that an historian or a comparativist of my period might. Ninety-five percent of the time, when I call upon my French or Latin or Italian "skills," I'm just double-checking someone else's translation. That's important to be able to do--to see where a translation is imprecise or where there might be a pun or ambiguity in the original--but it's not high-level stuff.

Reading scholarship in a foreign language is more complex. On the one hand, interpretative nuance can be hard for someone of my skill level to follow. On the other hand, it's still a deeply familiar genre and the usual rules of scholarly due diligence apply: I skim to find the key ideas and the major claims, slowing down only when something seems truly interesting or immediately relevant. And as with the English-language scholarship I dredge up, at least 50% of it isn't that relevant.

This also doesn't require anything close to fluency, but it's still gratifying to feel that a whole new area of knowledge is opening up. I've always wanted to read Dante in the original, and maybe I will someday--but I can read Dante in translation. A scholarly article on some minor motif in medieval romance? No one's translating that shit.

Maybe my third or fourth book will involve a direct engagement with Continental literature, and maybe I'll eventually have a fuller appreciation of stylistic, syntactic, and poetic virtuosity in a language other than my own. But for now, having a working sense of the wider scholarly conversation feels like achievement enough.

When you think dumb thoughts you like dumb people

As I struggle along with my Italian here where I'm surrounded by it, I realize what a comfort, what an absolute joy, the boring, the conventional, the formulaic, and the repetitive are. Bad detective shows and their stern, furrowed-browed heroes and bumbling sidekicks? Awesome. I've seen 'em all before. Glossy women's magazines with their rhapsodies over lipstick and dollops of personal-life wisdom? Even better. I love commercials and print advertisements, the stupider the better. (Really bad not-quite jokes? I get them! It's fantastic!)

As Cosimo has observed, the people you'd most avoid if they were speaking your native language--the loud, slow-talking, pedantic ones--are those you're most grateful for when you're trying to work up your language comprehension. Whining children? Pretty great! That guy opining loudly to his buddies outside the tabbachi shop? Also great! Ditto for old ladies narrating their purchases aloud at the supermarket, couples breaking up in public, and angry dudes with bad cell phone connections shouting the same sentence over and over. We went to mass at a local church (itself awesome, since the formulae are the same and lots of the terms are cognates and/or Latin loan words), and I briefly thought I'd been granted the gift of tongues when I was able to follow most of the sermon. But no: the priest was just a tedious young guy, fresh from the seminary, giving a deliberative, repetitive, and essentially theological sermon. It was terrific.

I guess I look forward to the day when I dislike tedious Italians as much as I dislike tedious Americans and Britons. But for now I embrace them. Eloquent, original, and complex thinkers just ain't for me.

Fare come fanno i romani

So we made it to Rome, and with the exception of the mosquitoes, who have given us an overly-enthusiastic welcome, everything here is pretty near perfect: the weather, the apartment, the neighborhood.

If this is how the Romans do it, I'm sold. Check it:

A corner of the kitchen, opening onto the terrace

The back of the terrace

The view from the living room

Another view from the living room














So who knows how much I'll be blogging. Unless you're more interested in my adventures in verb conjugation than I imagine--or have a very high tolerance for hearing about bad Italian t.v., the many bottles of wine, prosecco, and limoncello already lining my fridge, or how tiiiired my feet are, there may not be much to report.

Flavia's guide to foreign travel

(Note: I do not always follow my own advice.)

1. Unless you're traveling for research purposes and/or have a place of your own (i.e., not a hotel room), the ideal trip is 12-15 days long.
2. Never stay for fewer than three days in any one city.
3. Never visit more than two different countries in a single trip. This is especially true if those countries involve different languages.
4. Your first 12 hours in any new city will be annoying and cranky-making, even if you're not suffering from jet lag. Roll with it.
5. Sight-seeing is exhausting. If you're walking all over tarnation every day, budget more than 8 hours of sleep per night.
6. You must learn how to say at least "please," "thank you," "excuse me," and "the check" in the local language.
7. Every country has its own marvelous wines, liqueurs, and/or beers. Get to know them intimately.
8. Tourists are a(n extremely tedious) breed unto themselves. Happily, American tourists are generally no more annoying or offensive than anyone else.
9. If you dress well, you will get treated better.
10. Don't just see sights. Do stuff.
11. If service industry personnel routinely address you in a language other than English, you're doing it right.
12. If you're traveling in a tourist-rich environment, and especially in a (European) country with a minority language, your best bet when squeezing through crowds, etc., is to say, "Pardon!" in as French an accent as you can muster. Everyone understands it, and you can be as peremptory as you like.
13. Don't worry about doing it all. Assume that any trip to a new place is merely your first visit.

Polyglot dreams

I spent last weekend in Toronto, crashing a conference that several friends were presenting at. It wasn't a huge conference, but it was an international one--and unlike most international conferences I've attended, it was multilingual: approximately one third of the panels were in French and the rest in English.

This fact barely registered on me when I first skimmed the program, and since the panels were segregated by language I didn't expect to have much interaction with the francophone attendees. Whatever, I thought. It's Canada. I guess that's what they do.

But in fact, all the conference-goers took coffee and cookies in the same entrance hall and we all attended the same plenary talks, and when people squeezed past or apologized for bumping into me they were as likely to say "merci!" or "pardon!" as "thanks" or "excuse me." The chair introducing one of the plenary speakers gave his opening remarks half in French and half in English (not translating: just switching languages midway through), and one speaker on a plenary panel did something similar, occasionally switching to French for a few sentences for emphasis.

It was a disorienting, strange, and rather wonderful experience, and one I'm pretty sure I've never had before. Whether at home or abroad, I'm used to being in a place where one language is the dominant one, and the other language or languages are used for private or domestic conversations: tourists talking to each other, immigrant parents murmuring to their children. But being somewhere that two languages were treated equally, and where no need for translation was assumed, was something new.

Now, I know that the politics of language are touchy in Canada, and that it's not a perfect bilingual paradise. Nevertheless, as foreign language departments are being eliminated in this country, it's hard not to look with longing toward a neighbor country that seems, at least from the outside, to be valuing language study in a way we do not.

And I should 'fess up: although I work in a period and on authors who are ferociously multilingual--and although my grad program required three foreign languages--French is the only foreign language I have any real claim to being able to speak or understand; I took it throughout high school and for a couple of years in college, but since I don't need it for my work, it's atrophied terribly. I have adequate reading knowledge of Italian, can work v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y through Latin (albeit with lots of errors), and a year's worth of ancient Greek in college left me with the ability to pronounce ANY WORD I SEE that's written in Greek characters (although I can no longer understand a line of it, if ever I could).

I have colleagues and friends with a serious command of multiple languages, and I wish I were among them. As it is, I sometimes think that I and many more academics than are willing to admit it are the PhD-holding equivalent of the kids who flounder through a year of college-level foreign language study, fulfill their requirement, and call it a day.