“A person has to get used to the idea that we live among mortal remains”: this is what Mimì tells his childhood friend Lello and his girlfriend Nina, and this is also the key to the secret hidden behind the title of Domenico Starnone’s The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan.
Starnone’s loyal readers will find themselves surrounded by a landscape of familiar settings and themes, especially of his later works. Following in the wake of his recent books Ties (2014), Trick (2018), and Trust (2021), Starnone produces a novel in which love and human relationships are fertile soil for deep, universal reflections. But the experience of reading the book – our walk through this landscape – is arduous and painful. The characters confront profound matters of life and death, loss and memory, love and affection, and their shifting identities as they grow up and grow old. Through his brilliant prose, Starnone grasps the complexities of the human psyche, exposing our flesh and making us vulnerable.
The book, a retrospective narrated by Mimì from the present day, opens with a young Mimì who has “set out to find the pit of the dead.” Having learnt of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, he declares himself ready to travel to the underworld – which his grandmother Nannì described to him as a tormented, folkloric land with Dantesque echoes – to save the girl he is in love with, if she ever is to die. When her premature death comes, after being run over by a car, the reflections on death that began in his childhood come to haunt him.
Proceeding, at first, through contrasts and oppositions, Mimì’s narration illustrates the girl as though she belongs to another world. She is both a perfect, unreachable figure of elevated beauty and social status, who Mimì believes can only come from a nobler place like Milan (he himself is from the Neapolitan neighbourhood of Vomero), and a spectre-like presence always precariously balanced between life and death, her favourite entertainment being dancing on the ledge of her third-floor balcony. Just as the young and beautiful Nannì in an old picture cannot be the same old and ugly grandmother he lives with, the mystical girl from Milan seems to have nothing to do with the humble, poor world Mimì inhabits, and she needs to be kept separate from the family he is so ashamed of. Nevertheless, we come to realise that at the core of Starnone’s novel is Mimì’s slow understanding that all the elements and dimensions that he used to so adamantly isolate from one another – like life and death, youth and old age, literature and reality, Italian and Neapolitan – are instead intrinsically connected in a bond of togetherness that cannot be unravelled.
Although all the people inhabiting the novel are round, interesting characters whose relationships with each other are rich and profoundly real, perhaps the most compelling of them all is Mimì’s grandmother Nannì. Lonely, and lacking the recognition of any type of value and love from her family, she lives as a servant in her son-in-law’s house, having meaningful interactions only with Mimì who, however, is ashamed of her appearance and strong Neapolitan dialect. Despite this, she is crucial in her grandson’s maturation and understanding of the world. Towards the end of the novel, whilst working with her for his university Glottology exam, Mimì realises how important her knowledge of the impoverished world he always dismissed is in the prestigious, high-brow world he always praised: “It was as if the university, by making her the foundation for my studies, had suddenly given her value and granted her freedom from her role as our servant, or anyone’s servant for that matter.”
I am an Italian student of English literature, and so Mimì studying Letters at university is particularly interesting for me, especially because of how his studies further explore and problematise his concerns with language. From the very beginning of the novel, language emerges as one of Mimì’s major preoccupations, mainly in relation to the roles he imagines for the Neapolitan and Italian language. Growing up in an uneducated family, his mother tongue is Neapolitan. He presents the acquisition of Italian as a process filled with all those problems that torment us second-language learners, as well as those Italians born and raised in places and contexts where dialect – or other languages like, for instance, German in the northeast of Italy – is the primary language used: “Neapolitan, which I had heard and spoken since birth, continued to ambush my Italian, which I had learned mostly from reading. Getting rid of my native language and appropriating the language of books was […] a battle.” In the constant to and fro between Neapolitan and the language spoken only “in books or on the radio,” the dialect becomes a means through which the novel explores both how dialect expresses the fictions of subordination, mirroring Mimì’s journey of understanding his (and his grandmother’s) place in the world relative to the girl from Milan and her family.
The English translation by Oonagh Stransky adds a further complicating layer to the relationship between Italian and Neapolitan in the novel. The Italian colours and atmospheres clearly emerge in the novel mainly through the characterisation of the people around Mimì, and the recurring appearance of Neapolitan words and expression that are presented as a living part of the plot and society. The highly expressive nature of the Neapolitan dialect, and the occurrence of actual Neapolitan words and phrases, with their long, open vowels and severed finals, reproduce the warmth that is so typical of Southern Italy. Being myself from Central Italy and, therefore, neither speaking nor understanding Neapolitan – like the vast majority of Italians – this language is foreign enough for me to find more comfort in English than in Neapolitan. Nevertheless, it is also familiar enough to make me feel the sense of belonging I needed each time I was faced with an English word I did not know. This sense of belonging is, however, lost whenever some translation choices break the illusion of standing in the presence of a text that breathes authentic Italian air, such as the choice to render measurements in “pints” instead of the metric system that we Italians use.
In the case of this novel, the translation itself is both a loss and a gain, as English must necessarily substitute Italian. It is a loss because it makes it difficult for the readers to fully explore and understand the interplay between Neapolitan and Italian, especially for those who are not familiar with Italian or the complex and rich crowd of dialects in Italy. On the other hand, the translation layers in Italian as another spectre-like presence, haunting the novel like the girl from Milan. As a result, the book might equally be called The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Italian Language.
