Friday, July 06, 2007

Struggling with Italian

I'm currently trying to read Silvia Ballestra's la giovinezza della signorina N.N in the original Italian and really struggling with it. I don't know why. Admittedly if I read novels by Italo Calvino or Alessandro Baricco in Italian I've read them first in English, but I read Andrea Pinketts Il Vizio del'Agnello pretty quickly and didn't feel lost at all, well not more than anyone would feel lost in such a wonderfully bizarre book! Plus I read Italian magazines quite a lot. So what's with this book? I'm enjoying the bits I do understand so I don't want to give up, plus I'm now treating it as language learning rather than reading for pure enjoyment and am reading other books at the same time. If anyone reading this blog has read this book (long shot I know!!) maybe you can let me know if you found it difficult too or give me advice about what's difficult about it? Thanks!

2 comments:

Fabrizio Zanelli said...

1. State you live in one of the city I most *love*
2. Considered I'm italian
3. Keeping on I didn't read this novel yet,

and admitting that the three things above doesn't match at all, let me know if I can help you in some sentence you most find hard to feel the meaning.

valentina said...

hello,
I'm Italian too, I wonder if u managed to finish this book. I haven't read it but I know she wrote another book and it was written in a sort of mix between italian and southern dialect. Could that be it for this one too?
have you read any other Italian novels recently? Im curious