“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

Italian translations on the web suck big time. It is time someone does something about it. I am already having my occasional moments of disgust for the Italian dubbing of movies and for certain italian translations of books. But that’s a hard job anyway, not a science or anything, and the evaluation of it is often subjective so I’ll mercifully live it at that.
But when you browse the web and you have the disgrace of using a localized Italian Operating System, it’s another story. The excerpts of Italian translation you bump into are revolting. Like certain ugly translations of software, particularly Linux software, but worse: The Internet examples are so disgraceful they cease to be laughable the second time you read them.

One good example is MySpace. Incidentally, I hate MySpace: it is ugly, morbid, exposing and hypocrite (all those phony “friends” that only want to be reciprocally “added” or whatever, ugh). Anyway.
You are driven to myspace occasionally when bloggers you are interested into drives you there for one reason or another– and there you bump into the “italian version” of it.

To begin with, the word “visualizza” is all over the place. Congratulations, because it is the ugliest word on the planet. I don’t know who invented it (probably some Microsoft or MacOS translator years ago) anyway there is no reason to use it, when the world “vedi” or “leggi” are perfectly good and meaningful. Aside of the fact that using the imperative form is disturbing and rude. And where are the articles anyway? Italian wants the articles, even if someone thinks it’s a redundant habit. “Visualizza amici” is grammatically wrong, the equivalent of saying “usciamo a mangiare pizza?”, but “visualizza tutti giovanni: amici” is just total nonsense. No moron could utter that in his real life.

On the web is OK, I guess.

…”Visualizza altro”: I hate that thing. It is just not Italian. Ironically if it was, it would mean “view something else”: certainly it can’t mean “view more” as they suppose. Same happens on other translated interfaces where the horrible “leggi ancora” is used to translate “read more”. Funny thing is, “leggi ancora” sounds very much like “still reading?” as in: “still reading? Go outside and get yourself a life!!”

And hybrids? Hybrids of English and Italian language can be nice when they are a product of a rich imagination (like writer Beppe Fenoglio did in his books), not when they are used because of a serious lack of imagination. Blogger:

“Iscriviti al Post (Atom)”: what is that supposed to mean? What someone who is not aware of the moronic jargon of the web should make of that? I’m wondering, was it so hard to invent some other kind of expression? And, “Post più vecchi”? Please. Wasn’t there in the fucking italian vocabulary any reasonable word to replace “post” with? brano, messaggio, considerazione, pensiero, pagina, foglio, scritto are all usable words as far as I know.

Then, onto the background of a blogger blog, settings page (“global impositions” part):

“Visualizzare i link Post per email?”. What a lazy translator can come up with that? First of all, you can’t use that disgusting verb “visualizzare” to translate both “show” and “view”, that’s just a perversion.
Also, even if the original is a ugly “Show Email Post links”, there’s always a way to better the world a little. It’s a sin to fail the occasion.
And “modalità stesura”? That’s just sad. Is that supposed to translate “Compose Mode”? Why? How? “Stesura” means “drawing up” or something and is usually referred to either the act of hanging outside the laundry or the act of flatting the pasta or the act of writing something. A page can be written or can be “drawn up”. It has nothing to do with the fact that you have access to an advanced editor to edit the page.

Obviously there are dozens of other examples out there. Now, I know what you’re thinking: it’s the automatic translators, they’re robots, what do you expect? But this is just not true.
They have teams of people, with degrees of experience and my nationality on their passports who are paid to translate those interfaces and throw them at my face when I browse.
I hate them.

Regardless, I guess they think it is better to make up some inexistent, mistaken, sluggish, insulting language instead that just giving the English language to everybody.
Well, guess what: they’re wrong. It is better if they just throw the English language at everybody. At least one could imagine another world where his or her original language still lives, decaying but still a good tool –even if one is obviously into a sorry dream.

Getting the ticket, sweating on the prices, booking the place to sleep–
Regardless, I’ll be away for long– if anything because there really are a number of things that make me sick about going to New York the next spring (honestly they mainly refer to the part where I am actually going there, more than to the part where I am being there, which more or less I look forward to).

First of all, the sons of bitches will take my fingerprints and put them in their fucking database with the excuse of their moronic war on terror.
There was a time when such humiliating treatments were reserved for you if you were supposed a criminal: but not in this world anymore, No sir. How people don’t see that this –other than being the training for slaves via humiliation that it is– is a big favor to real criminals is beyond my imagination (not even going into the fact that only few months later and the son of bitches would feel entitled to monitor my credit card and my emails from the moment I get there);

Then the sons of bitches will ask a number of outrageously personal questions expecting an answer different from: “it’s none of your fucking business where I’m going to stay, sir”;

Then the sons of bitches won’t tolerate any joke and any not concerned bored disturbed facial expression (or, for that matter, political T-shirts), chance being stupidly held for further vindicative questions;

Finally, with all their monitoring stuff, and their soulless public spaces, and their phony smiles the sons of bitches will generally make me resent the fact that I’m part of the present civilization (making me wanna have learned to sail so that I could sail away at sea and live on a boat around the oceans for the remains of my life);

…other parts of the going-there thing are scaring the shit out of me, but will be dealt with more normally, or heroically, like:
flying –I can’t help it, I’m scared to fly. All the thrust and the noise and vibrations and energy involved make nervous, like waiting for a slap in the face when you know it’s coming one–
reading in public –I never had problem with that, but I always worry to death anyway–
meeting people and behave –being one among the others and not by myself, behave naturally: this is going to be hard and unsuccessful–
being away from the loved ones –how the loved ones will be without me– will Libi feel left alone, will love be ripped apart or will it survive– will I feel too lonesome if it breaks apart? will Libi hate me anyway? I have two months to ward that off, but she seem to be so disturbed by it already–
the silence at early dawn and the green tea at my pc and the walks in the less known parts of the city –all the solitary habits I got attached to in the last two years–
Like a guy couldn’t do without that for a while.

But all is going to turn out good, is it. I am not really able to believe that anything good can seriously come out of life (it’s the spirit of our times, I guess), but still. I’m taking my worries so early I may be able to develop a sort of belief –that I can have courage and faith in the whole thing, phony and real as it comes and possibly helpful, etc.
And sorry for the aimless rant, which by the way ends right here.

I usually don’t do that, but I must stop and share with you this fantastic google search that brought someone to my blog.

Obviously the lyrics of poet Laura Pausini were the object of that search. I have written extensively about her –and translated her powerful verse– in at least, well, two posts on this blog.

I admit that the confusion was probably caused by the fact that I have also written about pop singer Pierpaolo Pasolini here and there, but, please: One cannot put the two of them in the same league… Pausini has big boobs and a granny, I mean, grammy. What Pasolini has?

(Please take note of how I rank #3 on that search, for being the sole website in the whole world to put together on the same page Pasolini and Pausini. One can’t be proud enough of such achievements.)

It is kind of lazy to just grab someone else’s quote and re-use it like that, but I found this one so poetic and unusual that we can make an exception. Today, on Ceronetti’s “Altrove” (his collection of almost daily quotes selected by him for the newspaper La Stampa), Anna Maria Ortese (note: I mean this quote to be “unusual” compared to what is usually quoted by Ceronetti himself and others on the italian media. It is quite straightforward in itself):

Sometimes I find myself looking into the pages of this or that history of a nation, or of all the nations, or just forgotten chronicles, and I watch emerging and passing by like lights faces of joyless women, yet more resistant than the others, faces of women braver than men, in the act of saying goodbye to someone or looking towards a aurora impossible for them. Women who left orders, flags, testaments, without whom each one of us wouldn’t be a thing. Us, without these women, wouldn’t even be. They are the woman, that is, humanity. Here is what I mean for being a woman: to be a part — surfaced today — of such obscure groups, of their bravery, to recall forever their ensigns of fire and light.

So I tried to get in touch with Jawa few times these couple of days to no avail. Today I discovered they were out on a short trip. Jawa texted that we could meet for another dinner very soon, and I answered, sure (but this is not what I wanted, baby, we should talk). No I didn’t write her this, I don’t want to make the thing bigger by announcing it in advance– always hated the announce of the “talk”. My father used to announce the “talk” and the “talk” always degenerated in something violent one way or another.
Get to Jawa alone one afternoon and put the courage together and ask her to know a little more about the baby so that it is possible to wake up, whatever the verdict, and know what to do (I’ll know).

Put the phone down and imagine them traveling or sailing somewhere, the happy little kid among them. One cannot really be part of another family, that’s the essence of it, either you’re in or you’re out of any family or couple– they’re all seen from a distance. It is always from a distance and that’s good. The pretense of the cinema to put you closer to other people’s lives always sounded odd to me. When the truth is that you’re only closer to appreciate the distance. Eventually the premise drove me out of the theaters where the position of “spectator” was too awkward for me (I am a reader, a painting viewer, at most a record listener).
Nowhere closeness is more possible than in oneself’s imagination I guess, banale ma vero, wherein on the other hand nothing is real and clear and entirely sound and entirely visible or told (that’s the good part).

It happens sometimes with certain pictures you take, that certain details on the background are like stills from a movie, only because in them is visible the life of a couple, of a family, like if it is a part of a story (which it is) and yet it is totally out of reach –sort of desperately distant from you and inexplicable, no matter how many stories you can make up about it, also because it is not happening now (it happened then) and you didn’t notice when you was there.

So is with the picture above, whose total is just a trivial picture taken in
Venice a while ago (St. Zaccaria).

I hadn’t seen coming such an amount of humor and wit and cleverness from George Orwell, whom I imagined more bleak and sorrowful and depressed than this. I’m almost done reading instead a (quite huge) book filled with precious reasoning and useful thinking and historical material, and some of the essays contained in it are small masterpieces of the genre. Many of the political ones are -simply put- still very useful tools today, when the authoritarian “New world order” and a “totalitarian world” are in my view nearer than ever.

One essay, dated 11th december 1945, is instead about the decadence of the english language, as Orwell saw it happening chiefly by the spreading of political and technical jargon. The funny and wittier part of the article is when Orwell picks or makes up pieces of bad writing and puts them aside with simpler and clear-cut pieces of literature (such as the Ecclesiastes, for instance). Quotes from communist pamphlets and psychology and history essays are put together to prove the ineffectiveness and the “slovenliness” of modern english, whose obvious faults are: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words.
Then Orwell puts down six simple rules to keep your written language at bay from contemporary decadence, and I thought I could share them with you. I personally saw in them all the potential and actual defects of my own writing.

1) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used in seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word were a short one would do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

In another part of the essay Orwell writes:

…political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck.. this is called elimination of undesirable elements.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

I mean, everyone can see how the examples Orwell gives (and of the bad use of the language that defends them) could not at all still be used in our world today, could they.

“I never understood why you don’t seem to want a little more for yourself. You seem quite fit to live to me.”
“Yeah, I know, I have a nice body and interesting face and everything. But my mind is wrecked.”

For those of my readers who may have noticed (I doubt there’s any), I’m changing the way this blog handles first names. I’m not using those J. and S. and F. initials anymore. They are confusing and lame and ultimately also too revealing, I am using proper names now (not the real ones, doh.)
So, S. is Libi now, and E. is the just mentioned Nina. My former loved one A. is Leni now. My friend (and also formerly beloved) F. is Gisa and her man M. is Loris (their daughter E. is Biba). J. is Jawa and her son M. is Piero, her husband A. Ernesto and so forth. I know you’re following.

(Honestly, I am writing this down so that I have a reference myself for the next time I have to write about all these people. At least until I get them automatically on my fingers, when they finally will turn as they should into their sheer characters. Incidentally playing the leads in my life.)

(…) I’m too unhappy to write, to answer to anyone. It is not the effort to put sentences together, but the idea to send and to give, that’s too tiring a thought. I don’t know what it is. I have no voices in my head –only a dull annoying mess without a shape… wish to be put to sleep for good–

I got your message. “Hi, how are you doing?” you wrote. “Here it’s working to the bitter end. I am not particularly happy but I’m living in a calm state, of physical and psychical silence –which I find enchanting. I’m sending you a kiss even though, harshly said, this place is eradicating any form of affection from my heart.”

Nina I am not interested about what is eradicated from your heart…. or what not. How can I tell you this? You’re probably too young and unexperienced to know that the heart isn’t a patch of earth from where you “eradicate” stuff… nothing is ever eradicated.
Maybe the heart is a blackboard badly cleaned by a dusty eraser… how about that? All that has been removed can be written again, in a jiffy, sometimes the trace of it is still visible beneath the whitish hand-made curves of pulverized chalk, if only you look close enough, if only the light in the room is right.

I never cared much for the declarations of un-love (de-love) just as I never really minded the declarations of love… What’s a declaration for? Illusions of control… (So you’re over me? When were you under me?)
It was a long ago that I heard from a girl the words of love for the first time — we were hugged kissing on a green bench in some public garden in the city, the girl’s brown eyes were wide open on me…. all I could see and think was that she was all in her eyes looking at me, and that she was waiting for an answer I had to give. “Love is in the eyes of a girl”. The answer had to be given. I just wanted to run… I’d still want to run to this day, if it wasn’t that I need to be loved.
All I ever cared in my life were the feelings, all kinds of them: I put everything second to the feelings that were felt… including my sanity and my job but the feelings I only cared for were those that cannot be contained into words, and cannot be exchanged like goods or favors– they are there, in between, and I am here, we are here, they’re in between.

Declarations are even less important when you’re away, Nina. One sees the real face of the heart when is next to it. Heart isn’t a wireless fucking connection from a 12 miles high spying blimp or something– true we haven’t done anything, changed anything to be together because we never wanted to… but if we meet tomorrow, who’s to say what’s written on it? I know that this doesn’t change anything, fuck, who wants to change anything?

I can’t talk to Libi and I can’t talk with you Nina about what’s happening because of all the lies I said, and all things I omitted. Because I don’t remember the dates, I don’t know who or what came before and I am too ashamed to ask. Yeah I lied to you too, I’ve been hiding my feelings and I’ve been unable to share my worries too many times. Always took life from the wrong side (…)

Me and Jawa are crouching next to the little boy and Ernesto is standing near the stove cutting artichokes. That’s us here tonight. It’s the first time we’re being in the same room in like four or five years. Well, except when me and Ernesto met again at the hospital a month ago, when the baby was in intensive care.
I’m looking down at the head of the baby, and the evening is about to turn weird. It’s probably my fault because I didn’t worried about it. I just came with few presents and my face and all. Now the head of the baby, still half-covered by bandage, has what in Italy is called a “rose”, a visible and very delineated area on the back of his head where the hair seem to converge or depart in a spiral, creating a small bump or irregularity (this has certainly an everyday name in English which I don’t know).
“Look what a beautiful rose” I say out loud.
“Isn’t it?” says Ernesto. He has his normal tone of voice, stirring the artichokes in the paddle. He says: “I don’t have one.”
“Me neither” says Jawa, squatted next to me.
“I can’t believe it!” I say. I even stand up and go behind Ernesto to check. He really doesn’t have a rose on his head.
“I have one!” I say. “That’s where my hair are all standing up” I say touching my nape.
Funny how my voice has faded out towards the end of the sentence.
I put down my glass of wine to do the gesture a second time, properly. I feel my hair standing up and bouncing against the middle of my fingers. I do the gesture again as the silence grows for few more seconds in the kitchen.

When I was a kid I thought everyone had a rose between his hair. To a certain extent, until tonight I thought everyone had one, large or small.

I can’t believe it I am this baby’s biological father. I don’t believe it. It is so unlikely and fucking ironic and absurd. It just shouldn’t be. No, it can’t be. Seriously. Shouldn’t she tell it to me? May be she isn’t talking about it because he made her swear to never do so. It would be logic. Maybe we are grown-ups and not supposed to– But have they talked about it? Maybe everyone is just removing the thought. Would it ever be possible to speak about something like that? And with me?
I won’t ever do anything to harm them, to harm this family, I swear– what a hypocrite, I’ve done that already, plenty!
I must say something now. I should really. Why all these fantasies? They’re all fragments of my imagination. Just a fucking rose in the hair. It is the most unlikely thing. Yet every time I look at this baby he has something else weird that– And we connect too–
I sip the wine now–yeah– Oh God, must I be such a mythomaniac?
Is everyone thinking the same thing now?
I don’t know what I’d give to hear our three voices coming out of our minds like in a movie now, spelling out what our thoughts are.
And yet maybe they know, and are worried also for me. Or they hate me. He doesn’t seem to though. Jesus, I’m always thinking that everyone knows when no one knows, I must remember that.
Say something now.

“And so, have you thought about sending him to the kindergarten?” I ask.
“It’s too early” Ernesto responds.
“Yeah, it’s early, ” she says, lifting the baby in her arms.
Is this normalcy? I wonder.
We start grating the botargo.
We chat.
The baby has the attention.
We laugh. It’s normalcy.
I feel deadly alone and hopelessly falling for many many more minutes into the night.
I am convinced that we are all feeling that way except the baby.
Maybe it is only because we are grown-ups that we make it to the other side.

Afterwards I wish I had something innocent to feel tonight, to say to them, at least rightful, at least dividable.
So I end up staying for too long– drinking and hypertalking– and then being stupefied to go away– where there’s the streets and the the dusty smell of the city and could be raining tomorrow.