Incidental Inventions

Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

Maybe the truth is that saying goodbye seems to me a rejection of human warmth - even the minimal warmth that makes us feel solitude less. I mean real solitude, which rises up by surprise and lasts a few seconds, the solitude that derives not from lack of company or affection, but from our innate separateness from one another.

we protect the truth principally by telling the truth about ourselves.

Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.

los tres puntos canónicos ya no son suficientes; se ponen cuatro, cinco, incluso seis seguidos: Estoy aquí…, me atormento…, me pregunto dónde estarás…, pienso en ti…, me gustaría volver a verte, pero… Seguro que son muy comunicativos, indican muchas cosas: ansia, vergüenza, timidez, incertidumbre, la malicia de decir y no decir, un momento en que estábamos a punto de excedernos y después nos contuvimos e incluso una forma de tomarse tiempo

Si lo que leo o escribo me gusta, no pego ojo; si me disgusta, caigo en un sueño frágil de decepción y descontento.

Pero sigo pensando que cuando nos atribuimos de modo más o menos arbitrario la tarea de contar no debemos preocuparnos por la serenidad de quien nos lee, sino solo por construir ficciones que ayuden a contemplar la condición humana sin demasiados filtros.

el diario me provocaba un afán de verdad. Pensaba que en la escritura no tenía sentido contenerse, de ahí que escribiera

Talent is insufficient: if it’s not cultivated, it ends up, in the best cases, inventing the wheel, only to discover that this has been done already.

Do men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it publicly? Rarely, even today.

I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.

Why was I worried? Because if, in everyday life, I was so embarrassed, so cautious, that I scarcely breathed, the diary produced in me a craving for truth. I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking. This

Me invento para un periodista, pero también el periodista con sus preguntas se inventa para mí. Me invento dirigiéndome no solo a quien ha formulado las preguntas y a nuestras posibles lectoras y lectores, sino también a mí misma, o al menos una parte importante

We draw up lists of the good and the bad as if the many privileges deriving from chance aren’t there: your place of birth, your family, the inequality of opportunities.

I hope that in the free time of old age, the wonder will return.

Reading brought on a desire to write, and writing brought on a desire to read.

My only heroes are translators. I especially love those who are experts in the art of simultaneous translation. I love them in particular when they're also passionate readers and propose translations themselves. Thanks to them, Italian-ness travels through the world, enriching it. And the world, with its many languages, passes through Italian-ness and modifies it. Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

What we were at the beginning is only a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.

Reality can't stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously. An enemy may simply be someone who, out of a sort of emotional exhaustion, has avoided the effort, the complexity, the pleasure - all the ambiguities of friendship.

I love the word—in Italian, trasloco, or “across a place”—which makes me think of the momentum needed for a leap forward, a gathering of energy that propels you towards another place, where there is everything to discover and learn.

Novels, when they work, use lies to tell the truth. The information marketplace, battling for an audience, tends, more and more, to transform intolerable truths into novelistic, riveting, enjoyable lies.

But I still think that those who are more or less arbitrarily given the job of telling stories shouldn’t be concerned about the serenity of individual readers; rather, they should construct fictions that help seek the truth of the human condition.

The Italian word for “friendship,” amicizia, has the same root as the verb “to love,” amare, and a relationship between friends has the richness, the complexity, the contradictions, the inconsistencies

So I feel close to all women, and, sometimes for one reason, sometimes for another, I recognise myself in the best as well as in the worst. Is it possible, people say to me at times, that you don’t know even one bitch? I know some, of course: literature is full of them and so is everyday life. But, all things considered, I’m on their side.

The “too” of a woman produces violent male reactions and, in addition, the enmity of other women, who every day are obliged to fight among themselves for the crumbs left by men. The “too” of men produces general admiration and positions of power.

A young woman I’m very fond of said to me: it’s always a problem with men, I’ve had to learn not to overdo. She meant that she had trained herself not to be too beautiful, too intelligent, too considerate, too independent, too generous, too aggressive, too nice.

Translators transport nations into other nations; they are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking.