Saturday, March 6, 2010

born 6 March 1970

Betty Boo, London, England, musician

Dan Põldroos (died 5 May 2007), Tallinn, Soviet Union, actor

David Whyte, Paisley, Scotland, film editor

Erica Shaffer, San Diego, California, actress

Forrest Sloan Wright, Baltimore, Maryland, producer

Gennadi Mitnik, Moscow, Soviet Union, actor

Gesine Bullock-Prado, Washington, D.C., sister of Sandra Bullock

Hani Khalifa, Sohaj, Egypt, director

Jean-Luc Lemoine, Morangis, France, actor

Lino Martone, Caracas, Venezuela, actor

Paris Jefferson, London, England, actress

Patrick Sevigny, San Diego, California, short filmmaker

Regine Seidler, Leipzig, East Germany, actress

Robbie Tobeck, Tarpon Springs, Florida, NFL football player

Shane Brolly, Belfast, Northern Ireland, actor

Simona Vinci, Milan, Italy, writer

Tim West, Birmingham, England, sound mixer/composer

Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, birthplace unspecified, Japanese ultimate fighter



The one I think I want to be friends with today is Simona Vinci. I think that’s a very mellifluous name, first of all. Also, she too has a blog. A lengthy recent post concerns a public appearance in Bologna by James Ellroy.


More to the point, Simona Vinci is a fine writer. I know this because the Italian-to-English translation of her writing reads almost as if it were written in my own language. Only a lucid and deft writer can achieve this; for something processed and rejiggered by a robot, despite some syntactical hiccups, her message comes across in a distinctly ungarbled fashion:


There are no boundaries between fiction and reality, in things I write, he says, those boundaries dissolve into the moment of writing. The real historical facts may blend with the invention and the new world takes shape, and this is what a writer of fiction must do: force the reader to believe what he is telling.


The light falls outside the windows of the meeting room, and Bologna is colored by cobalt blue, for a while. The coffee has cooled, the cakes and ice fell into the pitcher of juice begins to melt. Before he exits the door, you do, that's why you're here: you put up a pen and your sacred copy of My Dark Places. In the other hand, a copy of your little book, first American edition. I know you do not read anything, tell him, so imagine if you read this. However, the only thing I can try to offer you, thank you for your book, this is because writing is my life. As it is for you. What changes if I am tiny and you're great big? And he thanks you three times, and does not bark as he had feared, and not make you any more fear because you know that knows the hearts of human beings, and how much respect them. The most important thing you said today, was precisely this: "the books maybe they can change things and can not generate social revolutions, but may create compassion in the hearts of those who reads them." And there is nothing, perhaps, more important and decisive than this: compassion.


I’m not sure I’m ready to get to know any other bloggers who are from the United States, but bloggers in languages I don’t speak I am totally down with. I need to get to know more Italians generally, I think, somehow.

1 comment:

  1. There's this weird formatting on the cut-and-pasted translation. It was not my intention to include it, but I'm leaving it in, because it's kind of cool. If you scroll over certain parts of the English translation, the Italian original appears by its side. But it seems to only apply to some chunks of the translation, but not others. Sometimes hypertext has a mind of its own.

    ReplyDelete