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Italian to English: America primo amore / America, First Love by Mario Soldati (Excerpt) General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Source text - Italian Amore a Brooklyn
A un tratto si irrigidì. Siccome continuavo a baciarla sulle labbra sottili e chiuse, si divincolò, si sciolse dall’abbraccio, si raggomitolò in fondo al taxi e mi tenne indietro facendo forza con la mano sul mio petto.
Le domandai che cosa avesse e alle luci saettanti delle auto che c’incrociavano scrutavo il suo volto vergognoso tra il disordine dei riccioli biondi.
Ritmiche, fulminee, ciclopiche sfioravano il cristallo le travature del Ponte di Brooklyn e spalancandosi a scatti regolari rivelavano l’oscurità e il grande vuoto su cui correvamo sospesi e le luci lontane dei docks e i riflessi sul fiume.
Guardavo l’immensità della notte newyorkese e la mia prima amica americana con la stessa avidità.
Brooklyn Bridge! Brooklyn Bridge! Non più sillabe astratte e gloriose come all’ignaro inquieto europeo. Ma, a volta a volta, queste travi colossali che mi corrono incontro e queste voragini di spazio che m’inghiottono.
Soltanto gli occhi della persona amata quando non più li pensiamo ma li fissiamo e li baciamo; soltanto la gioia dell’amplesso amoroso eguaglia la gioia di chi si strania in un paese lontano.
E la ragazza nel taxi non era che un elemento di gioia. Bionda, snella, forte, era diversa da tutte le donne che Ia mia adolescenza aveva pensato. Completamente ignara di me, della mia natura, del mio passato, mi associava tutt’al più ai fruttivendoli pugliesi, ai barbieri siciliani che, piccola, nella nativa Dallas, ella vedeva ogni giorno sulle soglie delle loro botteghe e chiamava vagamente aitèIien. Non aveva nessuna idea dell’Italia. Non aveva mai udito i nomi della mia patria, Piemonte, Torino.
Io parlavo l’inglese ancora molto male e lo capivo peggio: specialmente nella stretta pronunzia meridionale di lei, recente emigrata dal Texas. Ma iI rapporto amoroso tra due persone che non si comprendono a parole è purificato senz’altro da ogni struttura intellettuale, da ogni complicazione sentimentale. La cosa va o non va. Non sono possibili trucchi. A meno che questo amore esotico non sia esso il più pericoloso dei trucchi, il più grave degli errori.
Misteriosamente, ella continuava a respingermi. Scuoteva il capo e mi fissava dubbiosa. Che cosa era successo? Volevo sapere. Insistei.
rispose.
Lì per lì non diedi importanza alla frase. Pensai a una comune resistenza femminile.
Ora, che sono passati cinque anni e comincio ad amare meno l’America e a capirla di più, so che quella risposta aveva altra serietà...
Non era un bacio infantile. Con quello sguardo diffidente e pieno di rimorso mi chiedeva di lasciarla stare. Cercai nuovamente di abbracciarla ma ormai senza convinzione. La sua repugnanza, senza che io la capissi, mi aveva turbato. L’amore della donna e della città straniera mi era parso a un tratto suggestione nervosa e intellettuale. Per il resto del tragitto sedemmo dliscosti, in silenzio.
E tuttavia, quella notte stessa, nella misera comodità dell’alloggetto dov’ella abitava con Ia madre, tra i tristi mobili del salotto liberty, tornò, come incanto, la desiderata illusione.
Giacevamo sul sofa, abbracciati. Dalla stanza attigua si sentiva la madre russare, ignara della nostra presenza. Ma anche se si fosse destata avrebbe finto di non udirci. Almeno così mi garantiva la figlia. E certo, ogni notte, per due o tre mesi, usammo impunemente il salotto.
Ora cosa dovevo ringraziare: iI rispetto dei protestanti per l’individuo, il senso assoluto della sua responsabilità sia pure tra madre e figlia? o piuttosto Ia follia di emancipazione della moderna donna americana?
Comunque, non era la tolleranza della madre che più mi ricordava di essere lontano.
Me lo ripetevano con senso felice e sconfinato gli stucchi del soffitto che guardavo dal sofà. Gli stucchi sottili e bianchissimi. In fondo, la finestra a vetri verticalmente scorrevoli e la tendina a molla e la mancanza di impannate. L’armadio a muro, liscio, a un battente. La forma della lampadina elettrica e del paraluce. La qualità del silenzio, percorso da continui fruscii di auto e dal lontano fragore della ferrovia sopraelevata. La invisibile ma sensibilissima metallicità dell’ambiente: travi di ferro, tubi termici, fili elettrici: fitta gabbia mal mascherata dal tenue gesso delle pareti. E quell’odore acre di gomma bruciacchiata, quell’aria secca da interno di centrale elettrica che è l’atmosfera di tutte le case americane.
E quando abbassavo lo sguardo vedevo la massa diffusa dei capelli biondi che le nascondevano il viso. Nonpensavo di stringere una donna. Ma una americana.
Subconsciamente mi cullavo di cantilene: chi l’avrebbe detto eh? sono qui sono qui, non è Torino, non è Roma, non è neppure Parigi. New York New York Brooklyn Brooklyn. Nessuno dei miei amici è capace di immaginarsi questa stanza, questa ragazza. Nessuno al mondo sa precisamente dove io sono ora. Potrei non tornare più. Potrei morire. Il piccolo salotto comune, uno degli infiniti salotti di Brooklyn; la piccola bionda comune, una delle infinite bionde d’America: mi avevano accolto dalla mia adolescenza oppressa e ribelle. E ora mi avrebbero difeso contro il ritorno. Mi avrebbero nascosto ai ricordi. Gli stranieri capelli biondi ora mi carezzavano, mi avviluppavano la faccia. Mi pareva di non esistere più che per sentirmi diverso.
Era l’ultima di dodici tra sorelle e fratelli. Una volta che i maschi furono in giro per gli States e le sorelle accasate, si era trovata povera e sola con Ia madre nella nativa Dallas ed era emigrata a New York seguendo un esempio e una speranza allora molto comuni.
Subito aveva trovato impiego in una banca a Fifth Avenue e guadagnava abbastanza per mantenere sé e la madre nell’alloggetto di Brooklyn.
Andavo a prenderla alle cinque pomeridiane, all’uscita dalla banca. Ma spesso tardava fino a notte, trattenuta in lavori straordinari. Usciva con gli occhi rossi per la fatica di tante ore curva sulle cifre. Ma sempre mi sorrideva di lontano e mi veniva incontro con passo ardito e poi, sia che si pranzasse soli e si andasse allo spettacolo, sia che si raggiungesse la compagnia numerosa e rumorosa di qualche cocktail party, serbava inalterabile allegria, vivacità, entusiasmo, apparendo fiduciosa dell’avvenire e contenta che New York avesse risposto alle sue speranze provinciali...
Translation - English Love in Brooklyn
Suddenly, she stiffened. Her lips were thin and closed. And because I continued to kiss them, she wriggled free from my embrace, curled up into the corner of the taxi, and held me back by pressing her hand on my chest.
I asked her what was wrong. In the darting lights of the passing cars, I peered at her bashful face through her disheveled blond curls.
The massive cables of Brooklyn Bridge whizzed by like rhythmic flashes of lightning, almost grazing the car windows; through the intermittent spaces I could see the darkness and the great void below us, the distant lights of the docks and their reflection on the river.
I watched the vastness of the New York night and my first American friend with the same fervor.
Brooklyn Bridge! Brooklyn Bridge! They were no longer abstract and glorious syllables to an unknowing and restless European but had become these gigantic cables flickering by me and this abyss swallowing me up.
Joy for a stranger in a distant land is found only in love’s embrace, only in our beloved’s eyes when we no longer imagine them but rather stare into them and kiss them.
And the girl in the taxi was nothing else but a part of this joy. She was blond, slender, and strong, unlike all the women I had imagined in my adolescence. She was completely unaware of me, my character, my past, and at the most grouped me in the same category as the Apulian fruit sellers and Sicilian barbers whom she would see daily as a young girl in the doorway of their shops in her native Dallas and whom she would indiscriminately call Eye-talian. She had no idea what Italy was. She had never heard the names from my homeland, Piemonte, Torino.
I still spoke English quite poorly and I understood it even less, especially her heavy southern accent, as she had recently moved from Texas. But the relationship between two people in love who do not understand each other with words is doubtlessly free of any intellectual framework and sentimental complications. It either works or it doesn't. It cannot be faked. Unless this exotic love is the most dangerous trick of all, the most serious mistake possible.
Inexplicably, she kept pushing me away. She shook her head and stared at me with suspicion. What had happened? I wanted to know. I persisted.
"Oh, this is not a childish kiss!" she answered.
I didn't consider her words very important at the time. I thought it was a way of resisting, typical of other women.
However, now that it's been five years and I'm beginning to love America less and understand it better, I know that her response was serious in another sense…
It wasn’t a childish kiss. With that distrustful and remorseful look she asked me to leave her alone. I tried again to embrace her but by this point unconvincingly. I didn't understand her disgust but it had upset me. The love of a woman and a foreign city suddenly seemed like a nervous and intellectual fascination to me. For the rest of the way, we sat apart, in silence.
Yet that same night, in the sparse comfort of the little home where she lived with her mother, among the sad furniture of their Craftsman-style living room, the coveted illusion returned as if by magic.
We were lying on the sofa in an embrace. From the adjoining room we could hear her mother snoring, unaware that we were in the house. But even if she had woken up, she would have pretended not to hear us. At least that's what her daughter had assured me. So, of course, every night, for two or three months, we got away with using the living room.
Now, to what did I owe the pleasure? The Protestants' respect for the individual, the absolute sense of responsibility even between mother and daughter? Or rather the madness of the modern American woman's emancipation?
In any case, it wasn't her mother's leniency that reminded me that I was far from home. It was the plaster decorations on the ceiling that kept telling me, with a boundless feeling of happiness. I looked at them from the sofa, brilliant white and delicate. At the end of the room was a clear sash window with a roller shade. The built-in closet with one door. The shape of the electric bulb and the lampshade. That particular type of silence, broken by cars constantly rushing by and the distant roar of the elevated railway. The invisible yet palpable metallic quality of our surroundings: iron beams, heating ducts, electric wires. It was a thick cage poorly concealed by the thin plaster of the walls. And that acrid smell of scorched rubber, that dry air from electric heating present in all American homes.
So when I lowered my gaze, I saw a sweeping mass of blonde hair hiding her face. I didn't think I was holding just any woman; I was holding an American woman.
Subconsciously, I clung to my dream. Who would have thought? I'm here, I'm here, it's not Turin, it's not Rome, it's not even Paris. New York, New York, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. None of my friends is able right now to imagine this room, this girl. No one in the world knows exactly where I am. I could simply not go back. I could die. The little ordinary living room, one of the countless living rooms in Brooklyn, and the little ordinary blonde, one of countless blondes in America, had welcomed this heartbroken and rebellious adolescent and would now protect me from having to go back. They would hide me from my memories. The foreign blonde hair now caressed me and enveloped my face. I thought I didn't exist except to feel different.
She was the youngest of twelve brothers and sisters. Once the brothers had moved to other parts of the States and the sisters had gotten married, she found herself poor and alone with her mother in their native Dallas. So she moved to New York following the example of other immigrants and chasing a hope quite common at the time.
She quickly found a job in a bank on Fifth Avenue and earned enough to afford a small apartment in Brooklyn for her mother and herself.
I would go pick her up at five o'clock in the afternoon at the bank's exit, but she often stayed behind to do overtime until evening. She would come out with her eyes red from working so many hours bent over figures. But she always smiled at me from a distance and met me with a spring in her step. Then, no matter if we had lunch together, or went to a show, or joined the large and noisy gathering at some cocktail party, she still retained her constant state of cheerfulness, liveliness, and enthusiasm, appearing confident in the future and happy that New York had fulfilled her provincial hopes…
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Master's degree - University of Portsmouth (UK)
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Years of experience: 8. Registered at ProZ.com: May 2017.
Italian to English (Institute of Translation and Interpreting) Italian to English (University of Portsmouth (UK)) Italian to English (Middlebury College (US)) Spanish to English (Institute of Translation and Interpreting) Spanish to English (Central Connecticut State University (US))
Italian to English (Central Connecticut State University (US)) Spanish to English (Universidad de Guanajuato (Mexico))
My name is Pasquale Di Matteo and I translate from Italian and
Spanish into English, my native language.
My areas of specialisation include medicine, education, marketing, travel
and tourism, arts and culture.
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I created my company Quality in Translation (website at https://www.qualityintranslation.co.uk/)
to help businesses and individuals reach a wider audience by concentrating on
superior quality and delivering a professional and friendly service. The hallmarks
of my service are meticulous detail and purposeful research.
Background
Significant experiences have made me into the translator I
am today. Born and raised in the United States to Italian parents, I became a
secondary school teacher of Italian, Spanish and French. I have learnt to adapt to new cultures and
different ways of working while teaching foreign languages for years in
international schools in Cairo and Ho Chi Minh City. I now reside in the United Kingdom.
My work in the tourist industry in Italy has also afforded
me great insight into the culture and language.
I have travelled extensively in Italy and Spain and continue to stay
current with my language skills.
In all my roles, I have always enjoyed being an integral
part of a greater project, knowing I contributed to the success of a student, a
school or a tourist company.
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Education
I am an Affiliate member of ITI and subscribe to their values and professional standards. To stay current in my areas of specialisation, I pursue a robust course of continuing professional development by taking various courses and constantly seeking opportunities for independent learning.
I hold a Master’s degree in Translation Studies from the
University of Portsmouth (UK) and won the Banco Espirito Santo prize for the
best dissertation in the translation field.
I also have another MA in Italian, with a specialisation in literature,
from Middlebury College (US). I earned
my teaching license in the state of Connecticut (US) in conjunction with a
Bachelor’s Degree in foreign languages.
Keywords: Italian, Spanish, translation, arts, literature, history, tourism, medical, technical, property. See more.Italian, Spanish, translation, arts, literature, history, tourism, medical, technical, property, real estate, marketing, film. See less.
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