Abstract
“To Edvige, another Sicilian in exile”: Maria Rosa Cutrufelli in-scribes in her book Canto al deserto, the novel set in my hometown of Gela. My exile is geographical, like that of Maria Rosa, who left Sicily long ago and lives in Rome: For Sicilians, leaving the island is a form of migration and exile, even if one continues to live in Italy. We leave and take Sicily with us.
Questi, mi dico, non sono tempi ai emigrazione ma di mobilità: la memoria e il sentimento dell’esilio stanno solo nell’irrequietezza di chi vive altrove.
These, I tell myself, are not times of emigration, but of mobility: the memory and the feeling of exile reside within the restlessness of those who live elsewhere.
—Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Canto al deserto: storie di Tina, soldato di mafia—Song to the Desert: Story of Tina, Mafia Soldier (trans. Edvige Giunta)
Home for me is in the syntax, in the syllables. In the syncopations and in the silences.…
When I write sentences I am at home. When I make shapes. When I do not, I am damned, doomed, homeless; I know this well—restless, roaming; the actual places I’ve lived become unrecognizable, and I, too, monstrous, am unrecognizable to myself. In the gloating, enormous strangeness and solitude of the real world, where I am so often inconsolable, marooned, utterly dizzied—all I need do is pick up a pen and begin to write—safe in the shelter of the alphabet, and I am taken home.
La casa per me è nella sintassi, nelle sillabe. Nelle sincopi e nei silenzi… . Quando scrivofrasi mi sento a casa. Quando creo forme. Se no, sono dannata, condannata, senza casa; lo so bene—senza riposo, vagabonda; i posti in cui ho vissuto diventano irriconoscibili, ed anch’io, mostruosa, divengo irriconosci-bile persino a me stessa. Nella stranezza enorme e arrogante del mondo reale, in cui così spesso sono inconsolabile, alla deriva, completamente in preda alle vertigini—devo solo prendere una penna e cominciare a scrivere—sicura, al ri-paro nelValfabeto, e sono a casa.
—Carole Maso, “The Shelter of the Alphabet”—“Al riparo nell’ alfabeto” (trans. Edvige Giunta)
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© 2002 Edvige Giunta
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Giunta, E. (2002). Epilogue. In: Writing with an Accent. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05049-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05049-6_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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