X.v. The Spanish College
"One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves."
Miguel de Cervantes
Tonight I was invited to dinner at an apartment shared by three Italian girls, across the street from one of Bologna's most reclusive sights, the Collegio di Spagna. This institution, built and founded in 1364, annually hosts twenty-four students from Spain who have demonstrated outstanding ability in the field of jurisprudence. The students must be male, catholic, and of a good family, and in return they receive full tuition, prestige, and a generous stipend. The College building, which I visited in the fall, is rarely open, as it has the same status as an embassy; officially it is Spanish soil and all its students are subjects of the Spanish crown. Dark and forbidding, the building contrasts with the rest of the university in its exclusivity.
The trio of girls who cooked us dinner seemed to be quite enamored with a number of members of the Collegio, and one of its members visited us later in the evening. He was rather arrogant, denying the mere possibility that I could ever have been allowed to visit the institution. I left without much regard for the royal subject or his college.
2 Comments:
Nicholas,
The volume on the art of the Italian Renaissance, which you presented for my "edification," seems at some points to debunk both the influence and genius of Giotto, and displays in its chapter on "Late Medieval" painting a decided bias towards Sienna rather than Florence.
I was troubled by these stances because they seem, if not to directly contradict, to come into a certain amount of tension with your own approach to the art history of this period, which focuses more heavily on Cimabue (to whom the volume barely pays a passing thought) and his supposed student Giotto, and which seems more centred on Florence and the Florentines than their southern neighbours.
I would appreciate your further guidance and clarification of this matter, and look forward to your reply. I remain, until then
Your humble servant,
Aldous Cheung di Toronto, detto "Il Cinese"
Il fait chaud en Toronto en Juillet, et sans le vin de la Champagne c’est vraiment brutal. Mais, comme l’adage lit “quand on est jusqu'au cou dans la merde, il n'y a rien à faire mais chanter…”
At any rate, I was having a bit of a metaphysical moment earlier this afternoon, and was only snapped out of it at the point that I realized I was being EVER so cliché, and began asking myself “how is it even possible to know that I am in a metaphysical moment?” and even “what can one possibly know?” Realizing I had shifted into an equally hackneyed epistemological moment, I gave up the entire project of thinking altogether, which brought, logically (but unthoughtfully!) my thoughts to your little nook or cranny on the Interweb!
Yes, your working boy has gotten into the habit of Capitalizing this or that mot to imbue his words with an ample degree of Pretension, and as you see, the metaphors get horribly mixed in the process so as to cause utter confusion to even the most stalwart reader.
But to cut to the chase, and get to the point, without dilly-dallying or sitting on my thumbs any longer, what struck me about your little corner of cyberspace was this: isn’t it time for a title change?
For you are no longer IN Italy in precise terms. You have departed, have you not? And therein lies the question, implicitly, exactly how to connect the words ‘Nick’ and ‘Italia’ in an appropriate way following your departure from her bountiful shores?
You can immediately note the obvious challenges. “Nick” is hopelessly Anglo-Saxon, buried beneath centuries and centuries of the history of the creeping expansion of The English Empire. “Italia,” with its dual-vowel termination and its effusively Romantic infusions, stands quite near the other end of the spectrum. What kind of hybrid, nonsensical word crafted by Swiss engineers to signify meaning in both English and Italian yet mean absolutely nothing literally in either, would be appropriate?
I thought of combining the English “from” and the Italian “di” to get the conglomerate “Nick fromdi Italia,” but it sounded almost like you had inexplicably burdened on yourself a mispronunciation of the surname of a certain Torontonian (but now McGill-tied) Italian Jewess. I reversed the two and attempted “Nick difrom Italia,” but now it just sounded like you were doing something illegal to the peninsula.
I gave up in frustration, and, my limited command of the Modern Languages finally catching up to me, decided to move forward in English. What could we rename your ‘blog’ so as to be both accurate and cheeky? “Nick in Italia” certainly wouldn’t suffice – you are no longer in Italy. “Nick from Italia” would reflect the indelible impressions your year-long Emilian (and no, I don’t mean she of Scottish descent) sojourn has left on you, but I reject this as being far too heavy and Teutonic. The throaty “from” certainly sticks badly in one’s throat, like a particularly offensive scrap of fish bone.
Deciding now that the Barbarian influence on English had marred it too completely to be of use in re-Christening your site, I moved back to generic Romance conglomerations. And of course, I knew the answer all along. You must rename your cyberhome “Nick d’Italia” Keeping the Anglo-Romantic hybridization, the preposition “d’” (“di” or “de,” for it could be Italian, French or Spanish too) captures the true meaning of your online being. No longer specifically IN Italy, you are now both a little bit OF Italy, but also FROM Italy (qualities which the “d’” prepositions admirably possess), for one cannot doubt that a little Italian has haphazardly leaked into you these past months, but one also knows that shortly you shall be returning home, FROM Italy, which country can never truly be your homeland. The Anglo-Saxon “Nick” ensures that.
I hope that you have found my rather elementary and, now that I look back, self-gratifying discourse on Communicative Interaction, Power, and the State: A Method. I hope that it helps guide you through the Calvinist purgatory of Geneva and brings you joyfully back to our postmodern Promised Land here in Canada. Until then, I remain
Sincerely yours,
Il Cinese
Post a Comment
<< Home