MODICAN ENGLISHITIS

There is, as Tim Parks writes in Italian Ways, an Italian fantasy about English usage and the proof is in the execrable attempts at translation which can be seen on notices and in advertisements everywhere in this lovely land. The modicani, however, have taken this art to new heights and I have finally identified the habit as a disease called Modican Englishitis.  

Modican Englishitis first manifests itself in a stubborn refusal to imitate correct pronunciation, so that if an English teacher corrects a student who prononces guitar as gweetar, with the stress on the first syllable, the student will listen politely, nod, say, "Ah, gweetar" and happily continue with the erroneous pronunciation.

As the disease progresses, sufferers will insist on pronouncing all past simple tense - ed endings as a separate syllable [finish-èd] and are particularly resistant to the final -s on any English word. I used to think that this refusal to pronounce the final -s came about because foreign nouns which are used in Italian don't have plural forms but now I've come to the conclusion that it is just bloody-mindedness. Patients are perfectly capable of pronouncing the final - s, for where there is not one you can be sure they will add it!  

In Modica you will be invited to use "slots" [but not slot] machines, eat your dinner in the chicken rather than the kitchen and visit the say-ah [sea] to "have a bath". This last is presumably because you don't have a bathroom in the "eighth century" house you have purchased [a mistranslation of ottocento - the nineteenth century]. 

You may not understand a word of the English used in Modica, but never let it be said that life is dool hair [dull here]!

Saying "goodbye" if you have Modican Englishitis

A ONE-TRACK MIND?

Trains are generally held to be unreliable in Sicily and sweeping service cuts by Trenitalia since December have not exactly restored confidence. However, the unitiated might have been impressed by the company's announcement that on the Palermo-Messina line, a train would leave Cefalù at 06.56 and arrive in Castelbuono a mere seven minutes later, while a train running in the opposite direction would leave Castelbuono at 06.53 and arrive in Cefalù at 07.00 precisely.  The only detail the planners had overlooked was the fact that this segment of the line is single-track.

Needless to say, commuters in the area are not happy and I can't help wondering what Mr Tim Parks would make of it!

BOOK REVIEW - "ITALIAN WAYS" BY TIM PARKS

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo by Tim Parks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are some writers whose style is so pleasant, whose humour is so gentle and to whom you return so often that you feel you know them personally; to sit and spend an hour in the company of one of their books is like chatting to your dearest friend over a cup of tea and they have that rare talent of making you think without distressing you. Among my "comfort writers" I would number Alexander McCall Smith, Maeve Binchy and, when it comes to books about Italy, Tim Parks.

It is difficult to point out the disadvantages of living in an adopted country without causing offence but Tim Parks is one of the writers who has always managed it and he does so again in "Italian Ways". This is not a travel book, though there are elements of travel writing in it, nor is it about life in any one part of Italy: rather, it is about the author's journeys on Italian railways over a period of some thirty years and his encounters with people, conflicting systems and bureaucracy in the process. Through these stories, we also gain a fair knowledge of the history of the Italian railway system and the trains that run on it - a lesson presented in a most entertaining way.

No reader who knows Italy will fail to identify with Parks's dealings with the "pignoli" - whom we would call "Jobsworths" in Britain - of Trenitalia and other operators and I had to smile at his descriptions of southern resignation as he travelled down Italy.

Yes, Mr Parks even made it to Modica by train and, disappointingly, has little to say about the town. True, as he himself has said and as I have said above, this is not a travel book, but I hardly think it is fair that Lecce gets more space than Modica. Of course, I could be biased! Or could it be that Tim Parks, as he travelled deeper and deeper into the South, became more southern himself?

"Don't be concerned that you may have nothing to say about these places. Just be here, on the journey, at every moment of the journey."

- Very southern Italian and not a bad philosophy of life, really!

View all my reviews

This review is also posted on Goodreads.

CHIUSA

Tomorrow is the Ferragosto [Assumption Day] holiday and Italy is already closed for business. Italians, you see, all have to go on holiday at the same time and if you suggest that maybe an institution, company, bar or store could stagger staff holidays, you are looked at with incredulity.  To quote one of my favourite writers on living in Italy, Tim Parks:

"For in Italy people are remarkable above all for their conformity, for all doing the same thing at the same time."
- Tim Parks,  An Italian Education

You would think that, after seven years here, I would have got used to the two-week shutdown around this holiday but I have not and this year, in particular, I find myself throwing my arms up in despair as I imagine Mrs Merkel might when she contemplates the Italian economy.  Perhaps it is because this year I am trying to get quite a few things done during this period and, instead of accepting that I cannot, my anger has been boiling over for the past few days:  an important item which is supposed to have been posted to me three weeks ago from Bologna has not arrived and the excuse, of course, is the "time of year";  this morning the banks not only closed one and a half hours early, "because we're prefestivo", but every ATM in Modica was down too!  Come on, guys, if you are going to close the banks a day early, at least make sure the ATMs are working!  The other reason that all this gets to me is that the barista or shop assistant might be the only person with whom someone without a family exchanges a few words in 24 - 48 hours and believe me, such pleasantries as are uttered in these circumstances are important.

However, what one has to come to terms with is that the Italians and the British have totally different concepts of what constitutes a holiday and the Italians actually think it is a time to relax.  Tim Parks, again, explains this very well in the same book, remarking that, for the British, a holiday is more of an endurance test:

"Those were holidays that made a hero of you, that made you proud of our glorious centuries of miserable weather, holidays that made you.... English."

Well, I suppose I'd better grin and bear it, just as I must have grinned and borne sand in my sandwiches, impossible deckchairs, wasps on candyfloss and sitting on the beach in a plastic mac long ago in Britain.  Only another two and a half weeks of this madness to go!

Me "enduring" a holiday in Devon,
c. 1955

Happy Ferragosto, everyone!