Meeting in town
Today, Sunday, at the Quod Bar in Oxford, I met a couple of English
artists, one a poet of my Backroom Poets Group, the other a novelist, who
had asked the poet if he could introduce me to her to help her with the
translation - from English into Italian - of five pages of idiomatic
sentences to be attributed to an Italian guy in her novel.
The sentences were mainly hard swear words and idiomatic expressions that
she hoped to have vividly rendered into true Tuscan Italian, so ….there we
sat, for two hours, translating verbal brutality out loud from English
into Italian.
At the end of these two hours work session - imagine the three of us
swearing in English and Italian in the very middle of this posh
Oxford/Italian Bar restaurant, with waitresses and guests horrified about
the severity of our repertoire of obscene words – the novelist, satisfied
and relieved, greeted me with gratitude and left.
But before she left, I told the two English writers about the
misunderstanding caused on Poetryetc by me writing to David why he and
Alison couldn’t just be “normal” to each other (me alluding to the fact
that all e-mails from him to her seemed quite over honeyed and over
polite, almost courteous, a comment that was meant to be amicably teasing,
nothing more and nothing else…)
So, the poet and the novelist explained to me what are the implications
around the issue of the word “normality” in the English speaking world. I
found these implications very complicated and explained what the idiom “to
be normal” meant in Italian: “be un-courteous”.
It was good to have two Oxford writers explaining to me what the
misunderstanding was caused by: idioms are the real obstacles to
communications, at times.
Erminia
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