Italiano per straniere

Learning Italian in situ here is a much better experience than languages at school. Oddly, though, I do miss the reciting just a little. Not having been through all the days of the week endless times like we did with French I can only work out which one is which by thinking, e.g., Thursday = Thor = Jove = Giovedi. (This is thanks to my old DoS, who pointed out to me that the English days of the week are not named after English pagan gods, but are simply translations, which I never noticed at school when doing French.) Also one of the standard regular verbs is amare, learnt as an example for all ~are verbs, but I don't think I can quite cope with that, and I'll have to find another. Amo, ami, ama; amiamo, amate, amano, versus amo, amas, amat; amamus, amatis, amant is one thing; but once we get into all the amevi's and such I think it would just get too confusing after Latin.

Otherwise I am loving the way Italian often feels rather like cheating; if it's a Latinate word in English, then just slur it a bit and add an Italian accent and you're probably there. Example becomes esempio, adjective is aggetivo, etc. (I've been told you can do something similar with Modern Welsh, by taking an English verb and adding ~iau on the end, but it really winds them up if you do it too obviously, apparently.) Also I like it very much when Italian is like Latin, although it makes it harder for me to spell. The Italian for wife sounds exactly like mulier, though it's spelt moglie.

I'm quite disturbed by the high quality of the bookshops here. I know it's a university town, but so is Cambridge, and there's seriously no comparison. If I could read Italian fluently I'd be buying loads. As it is I've bought quite a few little portfolios of art reproductions, and today I got a cheap hardback facing-page translation of Catullus's Poems. We read them briefly at school, and they were one of those rare things which weren't killed by the classroom (also in this category, Wuthering Heights, and Anouilh's Eurydice). I like best the one that's a translation from Sappho, which starts something like He is more than a god in my eyes. Also I bought a cheap paperback facing-page translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets, but so far this is not pleasing me so much. I looked up one I memorised back when I was a little eleven-year old, the one that starts Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments, and it's translated as Io non farò ai costanti impedimento Di matrimonio. I think that means "I will not (future) do to the constant ones an impediment to marriage". Where are the minds in that? It's supposed to be about minds! The eleven-year old me would never have memorised this version, it's just about how true lovers should be allowed to get married. I may be being unfair, cos of course my Italian is still pretty rubbish, but I suspect that the pressures of translating into the strict sonnet form are at work here, turning something strong into something banal. (In Italian, banale.)

I didn't buy T. S. Eliot's Book of Practical Cats, but I did buy "Beh, che c'è di nuovo, Charlie Brown?" because I couldn't resist the front cover of Snoopy on top of his doghouse, typing "Era una notte buia e tempestosa". And they had a cheap paperback facing-page translation of Orlando Furioso! That's been on my to-read list for ages. Can you imagine going into Borders in Cambridge and finding a cheap parallel text of Orlando Furioso? (Admittedly, Ariosto is local.) Maybe I should buy it anyway, even though I won't understand either side of the page, just as a sort of celebration of intelligent book-selling.

Small random piece of information: Parker is held to have invented the facing-page translation with his Testimonie of Antiquitie, the first book ever printed in Old English. Diligent googling has failed to disprove this as yet.