We've got Agatha Award Nominations!
Hank Phillippi Ryan, Best Contemporary Novel for Trust Me and Rhys Bowen, Best Historical Novel for Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding.
Congratulations, Reds!
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: No. I'm not inviting you all into the gates of hell. That famous phrase is, when translated, the one part of Dante's Inferno almost everyone knows: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Dorothy Sayers translated it to: "Lay down all hope, you that go in by me," while Robert Pinsky's 1994 version is, "Abandon all hope, you who enter here." Yes, I have four different translations of The Inferno, three of my own and one belonging to the Smithie. Why? Because I am a great big nerd who loves The Inferno but who cannot speak or read Italian.
Okay, that's not entirely true. A summer spent touring and working on an archeological dig in Tuscany while in college left me the ability to ask for basic foodstuffs: "Quaranta grammi di formaggio, per favore," the nearest lav: "Dov'รจ il bagno?" and enough phone-Italian to get the receiver passed on to someone who spoke English (in the days before everyone had phones in their pockets, of course.) Unfortunately, Dante never wrote, "Pronto! Posso palare con Professori Evett?" so my expertise is useless when it comes to parsing his great work.
The thing is, I'm pretty good at languages. I still retain remnant German words from three and a half years in Stuttgart as a child, and I can pronounce written German well enough to fool you into thinking I know what I'm saying. I studied French for eleven years straight, from sixth grade through the end of college, and if I moved to Paris for a few months, I think I could regain fluency. I have a surprisingly large Latin vocabulary despite never having taken a single class - although I spent plenty of time helping all three of my kids with their own Latin homework. I can even toss out some Spanish phrases - no, not just "Mas cerveza."
So compared to many of my countrymen, I have foreign language chops. Sadly, in the global scheme of things, that's not saying much. Schoolchildren in Europe and Asia routinely begin learning a second language in the very earliest grades, while educated people are routinely fluent in three (including their native tongue.) Meanwhile, here in the US, in 2016 (the last date for such numbers) only 15% of public elementary schools offered language classes. Even in immigrant communities, where you might expect a strong bilingual foundation, fluency drops dramatically each generation. Only one in ten grandchildren of immigrants can speak their grandparents' native tongue.
Critics of the stubborn American tendency to monoligualism usually point out how we're falling behind in science and international trade etc, etc. I always think of the literature we're missing out on. I remember the first time I got a French poem - comprehended it as a whole thing, without mentally translating it into English first. It was amazing. What would it be like to see plays from Spain's Golden Age of theater in the original? To read War and Peace in Russian? To follow Der Rosenkavalier without surtitles?
So perhaps I should take the plunge and finally start those Italian lessons I've been thinking about for the past...thirty-five years. Because while this is lovely...
We climbed the dark until we reached the point
Where a round opening brought in sight the blest
And beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars
And we walked out once more beneath the stars
...it's not this.
Tanto ch'i' vidi de la cose belle
che porta 'l ciel, per un pertugio tondo
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
Dear readers, do you have a second language? Would you like to learn one? Let us know in the comments!
