The Lady has Taste (About me)

I have been working as a full-time self-employed professional language teacher, translator & proof-reader since 2000.

Between 2004 and 2008 I bolted to the side and made a professional escape in tourism sales & marketing.

The job was nice & I travelled a lot, mainly to trade fairs all over Europe & Italy, but living in tiny Trentino mountain villages was not my cup of tea, and I eventually returned to funkier urban settings.

All the better to go back to stimulating international classes (sometimes 11 different nationalities sit in a room of 12 students!) and take up again on the challenges of teaching & translating, especially now that courses focus on business communication, international tourism marketing and multiculturalism.

As an additional work & pleasure, in 2009 I started mentoring students graduating in literary translation at the Trento ISIT faculty of translation and interpretation, where I teach Spanish > Italian translation.   

As I'm addicted to reading and learning, 
you'll often find me "book-walking"© along the beautiful river Adige (Trentino) in the summer, and "book-pedalling"© on an exercise bike at the gym in the winter.

As for lifelong education, the latest courses I've attended disclosed to me the wonders of multicultural counseling and voluntary work in prison.

My translation studies background and professional experience mean I am meticulous, accurate (yes, I know, even a fastidious proof-reader, sometimes) and deeply concerned about the quality of my work.

Finally, I guess you have to know my studio library is my pride – there I store, dust and cuddle my dictionaries, grammars, school material and other treasured volumes: George Orwell* & Freud are in good company, as Asimov's works are piling up along with Granta issues, anthropology manuals, marketing handbooks and many other wonderful books.

* including the little-known "George Orwell at Home (and among the Anarchists) - Essays and Photographs)": .... As you can see, _He_ is comfortably sitting in my library! 

Scripta manent, luckily!

In the long (and a bit boring) debate on e-book readers vs. paperbacks, I guess I'll stick to paper forever and a day.

Even, I'm a sucker for early 1900's magazines – 

a snap-shot of my early 20th century magazines collection

 

the "treasures" in my library being some 1962 issues of the Italian monthly "La Storia Illustrata" I inherited from my grandfather, and 15 years (1959/1974) of the monthly "La cucina italiana", that my grandmother left behind.. (guess what? she didn't even like cooking!)

two snap-shots from a 1968 issue of the Italian monthly

"La cucina italiana",

(from my grandma Anna's collection)

 

Well, I do like cooking, so I must avoid buying too many cookbooks, but sure, there's plenty of them in my home, too.

My collection includes a recipe book of the ancient Romans and a cute booklet of pirates' cooking secrets.

"La cucina italiana" is actually still published today,  
I just bought the latest very special issue on Pizza, pies & focaccia breads.

   

As to "old journalism", last year at the tremendously inspiring second-hand market in Fortezza da Basso in Florence I found some great bargains, namely a 1919, 1921 and 1922 issue of the Italian Touring Club monthly, a photo crime & love story dating from the 1970's and a few more invaluable articles.

Of course, what happens next is that my friends & translation students have to bear with me when I get all excited and start showing them my old, dainty, peculiar, nowhere-else-to-be-found magazines, quoting old Italian style, long-forgotten, old-time unique words we no longer use, 
and I get overheated at the sometimes surreal atmosphere evoked by magazine advertisments of indestructible pots & pans (grandma Anna actually left 4 indestructible pots, too!), caravans, cigarettes, 1970's state-of-the-art colour TVs that promise  

"you'll get people that look like people automatically. Even when you change channels".

This authentic piece of artwork from the April 1972 issue of "Life" magazine is a gift I got from the USA from my supportive brother, who never forgets to feed my eccentric passion for quaint-bordering-brainy periodicals. 

I can't wait to see what he'll get his hands on in China & Russia!

As a side note: no matter how much I love real-paper books, 
I cannot live without the Internet, where a lot of wonderful books can be found.

Consider books in a foreign language were not easily found when I was a teenager in Trento... I guess I'll never make up for all that pre-Internet time:

 Amazon.uk 

& 

the lovely Brick Lane Bookshop are two of my favourite bookish haunts.

 You are welcome to take a peek at my library on Anobii, too

and, of course, to leaf through my books if you happen to come over to my studio. See you there!

§ from my early 20th century magazines collection, an array of beautifully revealing snapshots. 

Enjoy!

§ Escapes

S.

The head is oval and always somewhat tilted, like that of crippled animals.
He glances up at you and laughs. He laughs, grins, smiles; all at once, and with his eyes, too.
He seems to be all there - between his naughty warm eyes and his hushed words – spoken to be present without much noise, muffled to disappear without missing a thing.

But today.
Today the light is dim in his eyes.
The face swollen; big and dilated, the body in the blue suit; almost cumbrous.
Maybe I'm the only one to notice. Or unable to pretend.
But he is happy to be here. To be all here. To be here all, and much more.

I watch him.
I observe him.
I stare at him.

With the annoyance I feel whenever I put on weight, it is beyond me how he doesn't seem to care about his belly, so bloated it pushes out the T-shirt.

The swelling is not fat, though, and in the classroom we all know - «I was ill, but I saw I'm still enrolled in the course, so I came in today».

Everyone in the new IT classroom is at their seat and typing away; he can't use a computer, but is willing to learn, so we choose a table and as the screen lights up he speaks.

He talks. He talks to me. With me, he always talks much. To me, he always talks in a low voice. We're sitting there together, as if he were my boyfriend. As if it were all for me, for him, for us, this time we share in the classroom, and the others were but a nuisance or distraction I must pay heed to now and then.

I watch him whole as he presses one key at a time, with one finger. A big finger, and slow, but I want him to write on. To add one more word, 
when
I leave

I want

when I leave I want to go 
I will him to write more so that I can observe him a little longer. I had never noticed the scar on his head, and yet today his hair is longer.

I want to know what happened: who split your head open and why?

go on holiday
when I leave I want to go on holiday 

«How do you type a comma?»
 
A track so deep that the skin that stitched it up trying to blend it with acne marks and early wrinkles still couldn't hide a face torn to pieces. 
«How do I start a new line here?»

As I tell him about new paragraphs, he moves an accent and from behind a comma the sun comes out. There's clear water, and a beautiful sea, inside that file - with a lot of fish, music and downtime.
He smiles -
I smile -

Maybe it's just because I, too, am being smothered in my little mountain village, but his dream is the same as mine.
By the end of the lesson we are in Africa already, or is it Thailand?
Anyhow, it's hot there, it's good, we stay up all night and have a lot of fun.

At the end of the lesson I show him how to save his file.
Then, I leave the jail.

A.Dolzan


#cultural dump
#conversely free