Francesca Marciano, Italian fiction author who writes in English (except for major award-nominated screenplays, which she writes in Italian), talks about her new story collection, The Other Language, on the Pantheon Books blog.
What is your experience with “other languages”? What, do you think, happens to you when you speak a language not your native one?
The book’s epigraph is from a Derek Walcott poem: “To change your language you must change your life.” Learning a new language is an act of transformation; it means delving into another logic, a new mental construct. We become different people when we speak another language, and that can be exciting, rejuvenating—but often frightening, a bit like walking in the dark. In some way by speaking a new language we commit an act of betrayal towards our mother tongue, our past identity. But we also sometimes can, in moving beyond our comfort zones, find a new kind of freedom, and I think a writer can find great freedom in a language that is not his or her own.
Marciano visits the Writers Institute on Friday, April 11th: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html
More on the Pantheon Books blog: http://pantheonbooks.tumblr.com/post/81525379177/politicsprose-q-a-with-francesca-marciano-in
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