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My Italian and I

December 2, 2015

 

I learned how to read and write in Italian. The first three years of elementary every subject was in that language. For me, going to school meant going to Italy from Monday to Friday. I was discovering the living language, but also the language of literature. In the meantime, I was discovering a part of me, a part of my origins. The first Italian school was located in Valparaíso, Chile, where I was born. It was called Scuola Italiana Arturo Dell’Oro, which today is considered a historic landmark. But in the sixties I didn’t know I was walking into a monument everyday. The school was beautiful, the teachers; extraordinary. There, I could enjoy the smell of paper, of pencils, of recently washed smocks, and my hand writing and drawing on my notebook.

Today, the port of Valparaíso has been defined as “World Heritage Site” by UNESCO, but for me, and my memories, it’s the place where I was born, my first encounter with life. Where my mother and I were very close, looking at the sea every day; where I learned to observe the world. Valparaíso is my most beautiful memory.

But in those days, living in Valparaíso meant living in a low-income neighborhood for the rest of the world, and, for that reason, we moved to Santiago, the capital of Chile. In that city, there was another Italian school, Scuola Italiana Vittorio Montiglio, where in fourth grade they added Spanish as an extra subject, but I never forgot my first connection with the real and imaginary world. And the memories and the language remained in me forever.

Now that I decided to translate my book into Italian, I realized that I hadn’t used the language for over thirty years, since I lived in Milan, Italy. We can see that, purists would say, but, in my opinion, there is always a value in the use of a language learned from a distance. There is also value in recognizing our origins, because it is an act of respect for the different cultures and for ourselves. As I do with the other languages, when I write in Italian I think and I feel in Italian, there is no translation in the middle. It’s me and the language, period.

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