Someone once asked me — perhaps because he thought of me as “Danubian” — whether I considered myself to be a Mitteleuropean — or even German — writer or an Italian one, and what role the Italian language had in my writing. My native language, Italian, is crucial in my life, in my work as a writer and in such creativity as I possess. It is not a question of understanding; I understand German very well and can also read and express myself in other languages. I can write, and have written, in particular, in German, but only in my work as a German scholar — works of literary criticism, various ethico-political articles and speeches in German newspapers or in the German language. But my way of seeing the world, of perceiving, organising, ordering it, is entirely bound up with Italian, with, I would say, the syntax of the Italian language. My culture is much more German than Italian; I know German literature better than Italian literature and my philosophical categories, with which I philosophically and conceptually define the world and its problems, are derived essentially from the German culture. I read and speak French; I have more difficulty with English; I do not speak Spanish but can understand and read it and sometimes repeat to myself, in Spanish, the verses of certain Baroque or 20th century poets of whom I am particularly fond.
Generally speaking, my literary education since adolescence has been instilled with a sense of the universality of the human spirit and has included works from all literature: Italian writers, of course, but also the Iliad, especially the Odyssey, great Russian and French fiction, Leopardi, but also Baudelaire, the Tang poets and Tagore, whose works — his plays and poetry — I bought from a bookstall in Milan and read when I was thirteen. And the great literature of crisis — Kafka, Svevo, Musil. Dante alongside Shakespeare.
India has played an important role in my education, and not only because the first book I read, at the age of six, was a children’s story by Emilio Salgari, I misteri della Jungla nera (The Mystery of the Black Jungle), set on the banks of the Ganges. Without it I would probably not have written Danubio (Danube) many years later. At sixteen, I read some of the Rig Veda, some of the Upanishads, and, at the back of a Trieste bookshop found a charming 19th century translation of the Rāmāyana and shortly afterwards two different Italian versions of the Mahābhārata, both of which were obviously only selections, but each excellent. The influence of all this remains. As Borges said, let others pride themselves on the books they have written, I’d rather boast about the ones I have read — and which have become my way of being, of feeling and therefore also of writing.
All of this becomes, so to speak, flesh and blood for me in Italian; it enters into my awareness, my imagination, taking form in Italian. For this reason it would be impossible for me to write a story, a novel, a play, any literary poetical writing, in a language other than Italian. This is because my experience of the world is bound up with Italian; more, I would say, with its syntax than with its vocabulary. Indeed, if I may say so, it is as if, in imaginary and metaphorical terms, I were using, for example, many German “words”, but introducing them into an Italian syntax. For me the colour of the sea is more the German “blau” than the Italian “azzurro”, but in a novel I can describe this sense of the sea only in Italian.
I should also talk about the relevance of the Trieste dialect, a dialect from the Veneto which, especially in the past, contained many words of German and Slovenian origin that are now gradually disappearing, along with the dialect itself — it appears, for example, in odd phrases and fragments, in my play La mostra (The Exhibition). This dialect is the language of immediacy, of simplicity, almost the underbelly of life, of its tenderness and its brutality. Yet even this Trieste dialect has an impact — for me, on what I write — upon Italian, within which it continues to exist and has an indirect effect, through its echoes and reverberations. Sometimes, though rarely, it erupts in certain moments of violence, of crisis, in describing those moments when the life of an individual is shattered, explodes and dissolves almost into its basic elements.
La mostra (The Exhibition) is the work in which I have, in literary terms, made most use of multilingualism as well as a variety of styles: it is written in Italian but contains passages in German, in Trieste dialect, fragments of Greek tragedy in ancient Greek, German sayings and fragments from lieder and German quotations, courtly Italian as well as popular and colloquial Italian. This work could not have been written “only” in Italian; it is necessarily multilingual by nature, and yet, over all, it is an Italian work, since Italian is the crucible in which the many languages become one and there is, for me, no other crucible.
My experience of borders, the fact that I grew up in a city like Trieste — a border city between Italian, German and Slav cultures, an Italian city with many different national settlements and minorities, in other words the whole question of borders, with their great opportunities and their often frightening restraints — has, of course, had an influence on my vision of the world and hence also on my language. But this vision of the world, which is perhaps closer to Mitteleuropa than Italy, is expressed in Italian, and could not be expressed otherwise.
Perhaps the borders of which, in recent years, I have been increasingly aware are those separating and/or connecting those two kinds of writing which Ernesto Sábato — whom I was fortunate to have as a friend — called “diurnal” and “nocturnal”. In the former a writer, even when he invents, portrays a world he recognises, describes his own values, his outlook on life. In the second the writer is dealing with something that emerges without warning within him, which he perhaps didn’t know he had; disturbing feelings, impulses (even detestable truths, says Sábato) which shock us, appal us, make us face up to a part of us we did not know existed. It is writing which describes what we might be, what we fear or hope to be, what perhaps by pure chance we are not; it is writing which brings us face to face with the Medusa of life who at that moment cannot be sent off to the hairdresser’s to get her head of snakes tidied up to make her presentable. It is writing in which the writer’s double is speaking, and the writer would prefer that double to say something different from what he is saying, but has no choice but to let him talk. My last two books, La mostra and Alla cieca, certainly belong to this kind of nocturnal writing.
I am interested in so-called lesser languages, in other words, those spoken by small communities: for example “Cicio”, the Istro-Romanian language spoken by the Cici, a minority (822 people according to the last census) who live in Istria, Croatia; or “Bable”, spoken in Asturias, in Spain. I am also much interested in the Creole language of Martinique, a simplified archaic form of French once spoken by the black slaves transported from Africa, which became an important language for major French writers living there, such as Edouard Glissant. I think it is somewhat ridiculous, though, to talk about these things to Indian readers, writers and academics who belong to a country of such extraordinary linguistic variety and diversity, an expression of one of the world’s most universal cultures.
There is no conflict between particularity and universality, between the love for our own borders and for the humanity which crosses every border. Dante said that having drunk the water of the Arno — the river flowing through Florence, the city which was his birthplace and his home — he had learned to feel an intense love for Florence. But, he added, our true home is a vaster water; our home, he said, is the world, like the sea is for fish.
Claudio Magris, Germanist and critic, was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1939. He graduated from the University of Turin, where he went on to teach German Language and Literature from 1970 to 1978. He is currently a professor at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Trieste. He writes for the Corriere della Sera and for various other Italian daily papers and magazines. His numerous studies have helped promote an awareness in Italy of mid-European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth. A translator of Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler, his numerous published writings include Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna (1963), Wilhelm Heinse (1968), Lontano da dove, Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (1971), Dietro le parole (1978), Itaca e oltre (1982), Trieste. Un'identità di frontiera (together with Angelo Ara, 1982), L'anello di Clarisse (1984), Illazioni su una sciabola (1984), Danubio (1986), Stadelmann (1988), Un altro mare (1991), Microcosmi (1997), which won the Strega Prize in 1998, La Mostra (2001) and Alla cieca (2005).
Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His translations include The Prague Cemetery and Inventing the Enemy by Umberto Eco (Houghton Mifflin, Harvill Secker, 2011 and 2012); he was one of the translators of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone (Farrar Straus Giroux, Penguin Books, 2013); his translation of Ardor by Roberto Calasso, a ‘book-length essay’ about ritual and sacrifice in Vedic India, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux and Penguin Books in November 2014.