Literary Work
Dear Martha, SARAH CIPULLO
I don’t really like this language of yours, but I have a soft spot for you, and each time we talk, it’s as if once the conversation is over I’m coming back to Italian with my arms covered with notes about beautiful words you say I will never remember. It doesn’t matter if I close my eyes, focus on them, or stay silent in a still room full of darkness. In my memory, I’m unable to retain the words that naturally bloom in your bones. You are so inside your language that you’re very exact when you use it to move around me or to stay away from me. You are always at the right distance and I really feel like you measure it sharply with the phrases you choose, each time abandoning inches and feet. On the contrary, I am so clumsy while I try to express myself in a language that gives me no authority and makes me sound like an uneducated person with half Italian and half somewhere-from-the-North-of-Great-Britain accent. When I speak English I feel like a piece of wood shaped with an axe. Tina showed me great things that can be done with a chainsaw (besides, chainsaw carving is so American), but I’m sure there exist tools that allow greater precision and would not deprive me of my identity in such a way. They would not return a blurred image of myself to anyone I speak with. It’s so frustrating. The moment I cross the line that separates Italian from English and I enter your world, I have the same body, I’m standing on the same legs, my eyes are still greyish blue, my right arm is still damaged and it still slightly changes the location of my shoulder blade. But it’s not me anymore. It’s someone else, coming from afar. And sometimes she’s incomprehensible, most of all when it’s 6 p.m. and I’m so tired after a whole day spent computing syntax in your language. After 6 p.m. the only English I can perform is Drunk English, as you well know. During my mid-year performance review, Kate told me that I should learn to be short and sweet. At first, I wool-gathered about those words, while I was assimilating what they meant. Then I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t sure it was really me not being short and sweet. I believed it was probably my English that was not short and sweet. Each time I want to tell someone something, the phrases I have run in circles inside my head. I start to run after them while building each sentence and sometimes, while I’m looking for verbs and nouns I cannot find, I pile word on word, taking time. It’s like mining work and mining work is always tiring. Oxygen is scarce, but I dig. I dig well and deep and at times I dig more than I should, other times I still dig too little. Often, words are just not inside me and I get testy.
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Sarah Cipullo was born in Brindisi, Italy. She lived in Milan, Siena and Edinburgh and is currently based in Turin. She has a degree in Cognitive Science and Language, designs cars by sending emails and normally writes in Italian. In her free time she mainly reads, writes and plays chess. She doesn’t believe in borders.
