I left the recital hall after the talk given by Dacia Maraini with a lot more knowledge and food for thought than I walked in with- the marker of a successful presentation. Although I admittedly only went for extra credit, I walked out surprised at how she piqued my interest and captured my attention with her words. She spoke not just about writing as a process, but of Italian feminism and the power of theatre as a transformative art form.
Dacia talked about how musicality is lost with translation, something I truly felt in my soul. The loss of semantics within translation is why I began to take an interest in learning new languages. It is also reflected in my poem ‘Self-Portrait as Language’ which addresses how big of a part language plays in one’s identity. She also talked about how poetry is harder to write since she knows it will “lose sound and the words as you translate”. She mentioned a translator who was able to replicate the musicality of poems even after translating them to Greek, not because he was a scholar but because he was a poet. This stuck out to me as someone who also writes poetry and is beginning to explore the use of different languages to write.
She compared it to pitching a tent in places you find beautiful, as opposed to writing a novel like building a “huge palace” with details and a blueprint to be thought out. Writing takes time, effort, and intention in both cases even if I find that, just like Dacia Maraini, writing “comes easy” like an impulse. Her poem, loosely translated as “I write because”, really struck a chord with me as it talked about writing because she can and to capture what she sees in the world.
She also brought up very powerful points about feminism and worded them beautifully. She talked of how she cofounded a theatre for women in particular, and she clarified that it was “not in opposition..but to make space” for women in theatre. I appreciated her point about the reason behind a lot of femicide being the fragility of male identity. She said “certain men who are fragile who identify their virility as possession” tend to get angry when a woman shows signs of leaving them or not depending on them, which leads to the killings.
My favorite part was probably when she talked about how our memory is a form of resistance against war and oppressive cultures. She practices this by keeping her memory of being in a concentration camp in Japan alive, and by emphasizing how her usually silent father would talk to her to teach her.
Overall, I truly enjoyed the talk and took away so much more than I initially thought I would. I’m glad I ended up going.
