Forse Trepanning, Forse Frontal Lobotomy

My brain feels like mush.  Mushy mushy mush.  I have been speaking Italian more or less, every day, often without another English speaker to assist my awkward construction and attempts to explain complicated ideas in very simple terms.  In the process of breaking down my brain to the molecular level by continuous attempts at speaking another language, I have realized two things.  The first is that I should just stick to small talk.  The second being that Italian does not quite lend itself to the elegant wording that make me so happy in English.  That isn’t to say that Italian does not have it’s own style and nicely turned phrases, but I have become frustrated because English and Italian do not work the same way!

More specifically, there are certain concepts that can be translated exactly and ideas that have no translation one way or the other.  This is, of course, the same when dealing with any two languages.  What I find frustrating, is the simple things, such as not utilizing synonyms when one feels a word or phrase has been used too much (buono/a, mi piace, che bello, etc).  In English we have a wealth of words that mean somewhat the same thing that can be substituted when one has been overused.  I like cookies, I enjoy reading, or what have you.  In Italian, as far as I understand (and perhaps this is also because I am in rural Italy) I just have to continue with “mi piace”  (I like) until I find something “non mi piace.”  If I want to use something synonymous it just gets complicated beyond my tenuous grasp of the language.  If I want to be more than “felice” (happy) to attend the New Year’s party tomorrow then “non vedo l’ora” (I can’t see the hour, meaning “I can’t wait”) thereby entering the realm of not just idiom, but conjugation.

I have been studying the grammar for some time now, so conjugation is not “una cosa che fare paura” (this actually translates to “something scary” literally “a thing that causes fear” crazy, I know) but I am starting to find myself out of a comfortable depth.  I fancy myself quite competent with the English language.  Not only am I able to present my ideas with a modicum of organization; but, I like to think I have a sense for the subtlety of nuance that many English words carry.  What am I to do when the nuance is removed from the words and posited in the construction of a phrase?  I am finding Italian word choice to be very limiting (perhaps a good thing since I don’t really know what I am saying half the time.) 

Yesterday I was speaking with an Irishman (not a man-child)* who has been living here in Italy for many years and speaks mostly Italian with his Italian wife and son.  He made the comment that to him, Italian is the language of emotion, and English is a working language.  He can only best express his feelings through Italian, and he uses English only for functional matters.  For me, I am struggling against this paradigm as I am struggling against the constraints of how Italian is less about the specific word and more about how every word in a sentence qualifies the previous.  Often, when starting a sentence one needs to know exactly what one wants to say beforehand.  Hence not having two words for “something scary” but five.  At least in this example the order of the words correlate between translations.  As my dad pointed out, Italian has not seen “the superlative inflation of adjectives” hence a lot of “mama mia” and nothing that really correlates to “awesome.”  Again, I am stumped every time in conversation with an Italian after I have said “si, si” for the eight hundredth time. 

So, after my conversation with the Irishman (again, not the man-child) I started to think about how I use English to convey emotion.  Often times, when writing about Christina’s feelings, the words feel trite.  Everyone has felt shy and out of their depth when confronted with real world problems with their first big break out of college.  It is exactly those feelings, and how we navigate those early work crises that develop our character, work ethic, and sense of professionalism.  But I wonder if they sound trite to my ears because English does not have the capacity to express emotion properly because in English, specific emotions are expressed in specific words.  Italian uses whole phrases to create meaning, why has English developed in a way that is so much more economical, and is it also less precise because of that economy?  

*I thought about putting a link here to my ex, but that would be a) childish and b) horrendously unprofessional.  When the idea came in to my head I entertained it for only a couple of seconds.  I don't like to think I am that girl.