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Even for native English speakers, emails can be minefields of
misreading, Erminia.  But that misunderstanding is very interesting.
Does this mean Italians are normally rude? :)

Cheers

Alison

>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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Alison Croggon

Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/