A Conversation Between Giorgio Ferretti and Andrea Scrima

A.S.: Giorgio, the last time we spoke in person, late this past summer, it was about the state of vulnerability that arises when we remove ourselves from our ordinary environment. You were on the tail end of a two-month residency in Graz and about to return to Leipzig, I was at the end of a year-long fellowship and planning to stay longer. I remember you saying that being uprooted, being forced to adapt and improvise, to live without your books and other possessions, called many things into question, and ultimately your own identity.

We’ve both spent a good part of our lives living out “other” parts of ourselves, the parts that take place in languages other than our native tongue. I’ve written extensively for German-language newspapers and journals, but you’ve gone a step further and made German the language of your literary work. How does this affect your relationship to your past, or to memory?

G.F.: I get asked this a lot: what does it feel like to write in another language, or why do I even do it? But you’re asking me how it affects the past and memory, which is something I actually think about a lot. Sometimes I think the whole point of literature is to erase the difference between present and past, that its goal is to eliminate time, that a good work of literature is one where you lose yourself and everything seems so real—so timeless. Somehow, you have to trick the reader into thinking that time is not passing. I am interested in this temporal threshold, where the present and past seem not to exist. Language plays a big role in it for me. Primarily because I see language as a way to describe time, more than reality or space. I cannot really explain what that means, but I’ve been realizing more and more that I translate my memory: sometimes I find myself remembering situations with persons whom I couldn’t possibly have been speaking German with, because they don’t speak German at all, and yet in my memory we are speaking fluent German until I realize what is happening and I try to remember the situation in the language in which it happened. And yet, as you beautifully put it, I am living “‘other’ parts of myself” in another language when I speak in German or English. Writing is basically not letting things go, a kind of stubbornness about the fact that things have to carry on. I know my texts almost always begin with spiraling in on something, mostly something that happened to me. But why am I not letting go in German, then? When I think about this fact that I translate the memory, I always think about the person (it’s almost always one person) I am talking to, but until now I never thought about what I do with these memories. Why is it that the “other part of myself” that is not letting go is in German? I think I am more distant, a bit condescending, but also aware that while I have gained this skill (speaking German), I have lost something else. We think of learning a new language as a major skill-gain, but I am pretty sure that we think this way because we don’t realize that we are losing something else. I cannot really put my fingers on what it is—in German I would say “Selbstverständlichkeit,” some self-evident quality of being, but even that doesn’t really come close to whatever it is. Do you know, maybe? Do you have the same experience? Someone (maybe you?) told me that it’s probably like this because German has also become the language in which I began to reflect on what is happening or what has happened. I wanted to know if this resonated with you in some way.

A.S.: Perhaps your “not letting go” has to take place in German because the feelings attached to the memories are too intense? What you say about how memory reconstructs the language of an occurrence in retrospect is puzzling and unnerving, and it’s happened to me many times as well. I have often distinctly remembered entire conversations in German, with my sister, for instance, who doesn’t speak a word of the language. Perhaps it’s a subconscious need to insert your more mature self, the one who moved away and experienced various stages of emotional and intellectual awakening in this new language. It’s like you want to take this more aware, more adult part of yourself back into the past and rectify certain things, set things straight. Maybe. But it also has to do with the timelessness you speak about, with this layering of identities we’re all made of. It’s all there, every part of us, simultaneously: the problem is one of access, of figuring out what’s standing in the way.

G.F.: I think what you say about the rectifying of memory might be very true for me too. Maybe that was exactly what I meant when I was saying that writing is not being able to let things go. In some way it makes me think that this is where writing begins: in the way one is accustomed to work with memory. But then again, does the way memory works lead you to writing or does the impulse to write lead you to a particular way of working with memory? I remember when I was twenty or twenty-one and obsessed with the concept of memory and this being strictly connected with writing: I failed at almost all the short stories I was writing at that time because my goal was to write exactly how things factually went down. Obviously, it frustrated me that there was no way to know if what I wanted to write really did happen or was just in my head, was just my perception of things. When I started inventing things, I thought I was actively betraying the way things went—as if there was one way which things go, one narration, one side of history (somehow it seems really Catholic of me to think this). I emancipated myself almost completely from this way of thinking, I know now that it’s the effect of reality that has to be true and that you can also tell “real” things through fiction. It’s the text itself that decides what the facts are—because facts are not real in literature, but the general mood of a text can be real if you don’t betray the text. Which sounds really simple, but to me, of all a writer’s jobs it seems to be the most complex: to really understand what a text needs. And exactly as you say, the problem is access, also to the text.

A.S.: Yes, the truth, if there is such a thing, lies in the text. When I published my last book, I had to answer the question of authorship and autobiography so many times that I was almost angry. I thought it was a given that everything we write—and yes, even when we think we’re sticking to the facts—is fiction. The very fact that we’re trying to take this tangle of lived experience and translate it into language is already a first step towards abstraction, towards changing the “story.” Even trying to take what you “think” and convert it into words requires a fundamental transformation. We often tell our deepest truths through fiction, because there is no other way to do it. I thought this was a known thing, but as it turns out, we have to explain it again and again that a first-person narrator or protagonist is not one and the same as the author’s person—that a book requires a feat of organization and structure, it’s an architecture, really, and that the form of the text dictates a lot of what we write. I’ve come to bristle at the word “autofiction,” as though writing from lived experience were some kind of automatic process: all you need to do is sit at the computer and it all comes pouring out, in coherent sentences.

Maybe writing in several languages sets all this into sharper relief, I don’t know.

But there’s also another aspect to all this. As a foreigner, an outsider, you can always stand on the sidelines and observe from afar, with the benefit of a multipolar perspective. This makes us very good cultural critics: we see things that have grown invisible to others through habit. We’re often able to recognize and name things that otherwise escape attention; we register cultural change with a kind of internal seismograph. But there is also a slippery, opportunistic side to this—I become an American when it’s inconvenient to be German and vice-versa. It’s the mindset of a professional diplomat or spy, and there is something very suspicious about it.

G.F.: It’s funny to compare our situation to that of a diplomat or a spy because I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the double and its implications when you live and write in another language. The concept is at the same time ludic and frightening, there is a truly funny aspect of being two, but it’s also a strange feeling, like being part of a scam. The (in)famous imposter syndrome is a major part of an artist’s life, and also of a foreigner’s life. And writing in another language also brings a responsibility with it. You’re sort representing your other language and culture, and so you basically carry two weights, two traditions. But that is also why I’ve been so interested in the concept of the error over the last few years. It too can be a laughing matter, but then again it can be a serious and suffered experience, since there is so much power in grammar, in the decision of who is saying something right or wrong and for what reason. I thought that questioning grammar was also a way of questioning power structures and I was interested in what kind of dynamics would appear if I actually showed the errors, which I obviously do as a person who doesn’t speak and write in their mother tongue.

A.S.: It’s interesting to think about error, grammar, and the power dynamics of being a foreigner. I have painful memories of my first year or two in Berlin, struggling to learn German, when I longed to tell people that I am normally a very articulate person. Because when you’re learning a new language, you always sound like an idiot at first, and it’s frustrating. This was before the ubiquity of English became commonplace. The fact is, we’ve worked hard to achieve fluency in this startlingly complicated language, and yet I’ve felt the loss very strongly at times; I have literally felt injured by it on some level. I’ve found myself wondering who I would have become if I’d allowed myself to simply stay in the US as a young woman, if I’d retained that “natural,” “self-evident” identity (there’s that word “Selbstverständlichkeit,” which is so hard to translate) that is now forever lost. I spent four months in the US last year and it was surprisingly easy to let go of German, and, later, surprisingly difficult to return to Germany. I remember wishing I could have stayed. I recall being unable to speak at all for the first few weeks; it was as though the muscles required to pronounce all these harsh consonants had grown lax, had eased back into the American slur. I recall telling my friends that it didn’t matter that I was fluent: I’d discovered that I was and would forever remain “monolingual.” I know that sounds nonsensical, but I think it had something to do with the fact that my oldest layers had formed in English, and I had finally been allowed to fully occupy that space again. I actually experienced the return to German as a kind of injury. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, I would suddenly switch to English. I think it came from a subconscious need to emotionally “know” whether or not what I was saying was even true. It’s often abrupt and somewhat embarrassing, but it happens: an affliction as opposed to an affectation. Day-to-day living in German means suspending my access to these deeper parts of myself—and sometimes a reconfiguring, a rewriting, as you’ve observed.

G.F.: Your experience in the US last year and returning to German is fascinating, as if the linguistic environment made you come back into contact with a primal place. While I was reading this, I was wondering if that is one of the reasons why I live and write in German. Because I “subconsciously” don’t want to have contact with that original layer? As if there were an original layer that cannot be influenced by all the experiences we’ve had in life. I find it extremely interesting what you said about needing to emotionally “know” if it’s true. For me it’s the same, but with the “tools” of writing—I learned this in literary theory but also in creative writing in German. And to me it speaks a lot to something else that is typical of writing as I see it: writing is for me a way of tidying up the chaos in my mind but also, in reality, it’s the first thing I do when I’m trying to understand something, anything: I take a piece of paper and write stuff, not even necessarily the things I want to understand, but random words—I grasp onto words trying to make it make sense. I use German as a way to see clearly through the mess. And the mess can be beautiful, but also overwhelming sometimes.

A.S.: Yes, writing can be a way of untangling the threads, of trying to make sense of a terrible inner noise. But for me it works a bit differently: I write quite a lot in German—I’ve had to crank out a regular column here in Austria this past year—because it’s easier than trying to translate myself into English, as every time I translate something of mine back into English, I discover that I am a very different author in German. Which is unsettling and sometimes weird and another topic altogether. But when it comes to my fiction and essays, I write in English because, for me, the initial digging into memory and the process of transferring that whatever-it-is into language has to be in English. Perhaps it’s different when you learn several languages simultaneously as a child and they all become mother-tongue bubbles of time, with varying degrees of proficiency. A friend of mine who grew up in Queens and whose parents moved the family back to Germany when he was 11 or 12 speaks English perfectly, but as an 11 or 12-year-old. It’s funny to hear him talk about current events.

G.F.: This is connected to the interest in errors I was talking about, but what I found out a couple of months ago was that showing the errors and working with them also shows that I’ve never completely left where I come from. The errors I make are part of my identity, if not the most significant part of it, because it’s where all the layers meet.

AS.: Showing the errors requires a kind of bravery I might have now, but didn’t used to have. When I think about how hard I worked towards not making errors, it really makes me stop and think. It’s like a form of self-erasure, isn’t it? I also love what you said earlier about writing being a way of not letting go, of trying to abolish time. I feel this too, and suddenly I see the paradox in these two different things being equally true—because insisting on the past is also a way of resisting erasure. I think it’s a fate that many writers share, particularly writers who have left where they’re from. This impulse to remain true to memory and to one’s origins is an impulse that probably requires exile in some form. And it didn’t begin with Joyce, of course. Ironically, the black sheep of the family are usually the most loyal: we never let go. I’ve been writing about my family for years; right now, for instance, in my writing I’m back in Italy, in the mountaintop village my grandfather lived in more than 120 years ago before he emigrated and wound up in the Bronx. I’m the only one in my family who really cares on this level.

G.F.: It’s so true that the black sheep of the family are usually the most loyal. I think my family thinks I don’t care a lot about them, but I don’t think there is a text I’ve written in which some memories with them didn’t play an important role. That is also what interests me in your case: 120 years seems like a long time ago, but it’s actually approximately two generations. And yet I am assuming that the language of your village, probably a wonderful dialect of Southern Italy, is not something you come into contact with that easily. I am sure it’s one of those things that endures through the generations, but I don’t know how accessible it is. How are you dealing or working with this absence?

A.S.: The language is Arbërisht, a medieval form of Albanian. The Arbëresh are a UNESCO-protected minority that has been living in the southern part of the peninsula for over 600 years, but of course the language is dying out as the younger generation leaves in search of employment opportunities elsewhere. I’m actually trying to write a book about my grandfather’s village and his and his mother’s emigration; it’s also about poverty and racism and eugenics and working-class labor laws in early-twentieth-century America and anarchism and rebellion. I was in my grandfather’s village a few years ago staying with a lovely elderly couple and heard the dialect for the first time “live.” The wife, Rita, is the only person in the village who speaks English. Every time her husband Pino spoke Arbërisht, he grew a lot louder, to the point of shouting, although he never looked angry—he was actually a sweetheart. Then he’d switch back to Italian and simmer down again. And that’s how it went the four days I spent with them: from Arbërisht to Italian and back to Arbërisht, shouting in a harsher-sounding dialect, then Italian, then the shouting again, often mid-sentence. It was music to me. I have no plans to learn Arbërisht, but I’m relearning Italian, or trying to, which I spoke to some degree as a schoolkid until it was buried under the heavy weight of German. Again, another topic altogether. I’ve already written so much and there’s been so much spill-off in all sorts of directions that I’ve had to take a lot out, and so I have a growing essay collection parallel to this book that has to do with displacement in a more general sense. I am obsessed with the theme, and I suppose it’s quite likely the reason I have willingly displaced myself again and again—as though some force were inducing me to relive their experience, even if symbolically. But it’s emotional somehow, and so tied into a layer that feels like my naked skin that it’s taking me forever to write this. My father was the youngest of nine siblings, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know that the dialect his father spoke with the other people from the “old country” wasn’t Italian. It hurts me just to think about it.

G.F.: The Arbërisht language is a mystery and has a lot to do with absence. There is (was?) also an Arbërisht-speaking community near where my family comes from, in Pescara—I just looked it up. Of course, I think it has to do a lot with the heritage we have: in my family many people had to move to other places, it’s just how things are. It’s something that I am obsessed with too, the heritage we don’t see. We often think we’re the only ones going through this, but we are most probably not, and the people who did experience it first-hand are most probably in our own family. And I think it’s simply because we inherit the same struggles and the same way of seeing the world.

A.S.: Displacement is universal, it’s the way of the world. But there are families that seem more affected than others. Sometimes the roots seem to blend into the background but sometimes there are echoes that get passed down, although those born later have no idea there’s a connection. 

In my father’s family, where eleven people lived in two rooms and the kids had to sleep in shifts, there was a lot of mental illness—it affected at least four of the nine children, with two of them winding up schizophrenic. My uncle, one of the oldest, was institutionalized. I’ve done a lot of reading on the prevalence of schizophrenia in migrant communities. I remember my Aunt Emma reciting a rhyme her father taught her when she was a child. I didn’t write it down and forgot it—but it was supposed to ensure that she wouldn’t forget where he came from. No one else in my family remembers it, not even her sons. Evidently, it was up to me to retain this, but I only remember Via Orientale, and there is no Via Orientale in Greci, and so I’m wondering if it goes back further. These things really affect me for some reason; the rest of my family is indifferent. 

G.F.: I’m sorry for that lost rhyme, and yes, it’s a reminder to my own memory, too. I hope I’ll find the time to write things down. But as I was reading what you wrote, I had to think about Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, where she leaves space for what’s not there, because it was either not transmitted, or was not decipherable from the manuscripts. I love this book of translation, If Not, Winter, which I’m sure you know. It’s one of those books I come back to often. I love Sappho and Anne Carson, but most of all I love the book because it reminds me how even from the absence of things, art can be possible.

A.S.: Yes, I love it too, but it suddenly occurs to me that maybe that’s why we write, in the end: to enter into those absences. But on another note: Giorgio, you won a German literary award for America, a piece for the stage that traces the beginnings of a young man’s sexuality and his growing awareness that he’s gay—and you performed two feats: you wrote this in a German that’s easy and natural, and in a way that really universalizes the experience of sexual shame, in other words—and this is going to sound ironic—is “inclusive” to people outside this particular coming-of-age experience. I really loved reading America. What was it like to write this? Did writing it in German give you enough of a distancing effect to deal with something that might have been harder to approach in Italian, the language of your upbringing, your family, the teachers at school, the Catholic Church, and so on? Shame is like a black box for most of us, I think—we repress, deflect, go deaf and dumb, and we’ll do anything not to “go there”—and so it seems that switching languages can be used as a psychological strategy to face the Thing. It occurs to me that we might be getting at the core of something here.

G.F.: I wrote America approximately four years ago in a period where I was actively trying to figure out what the “Thing” for me was, as you wonderfully put it. I was writing frantically, trying every possible type of text, and I had a lot of ideas. I was eager to find something that would define me as a writer but also as a person (as if it were possible to separate the two). I know this last bit sounds very egoistic, as almost everything concerning writing does, but actually the goal is basically to be honest with whoever is reading the thing you are writing. And in order to do that, you have to interrogate what it is with you. That’s why most of the time you go and look for what you’re most ashamed of, because you want to bond with others through writing and to do that you need to develop an honesty pact. You sort of have to say to the reader, “all right, that’s the worst of me, we cannot go lower than this, let’s begin,” but the craziest thing to me is that every text is a new beginning of this process. Somehow, you find new things each time that define your honesty. And so in every text, to begin the conversation, I try to find the worst thing about me.

During the time I was writing America, it had a lot to do with errors: most of the time I feel that my sexuality is an error, or the way I live it—even if I don’t live it, or probably precisely because I don’t or didn’t live it. This is a peculiar experience of homosexuality, of course, but then again, who hasn’t felt weird or like a freak or simply ashamed because of their desire? I think everybody has! Society might be better at transforming heterosexual shame into something better, or into a “phase,” while the shame of homosexuality or being queer—and generally of all marginalized people—lingers on like a permanent stain. But it’s in all of us, and that’s the reason why America works on another level than “just” for queer people (I would hope at least!), but it does connect a lot with queer people and people who have to move places to find their way.

The other thing I was really interested in is how to translate orality in texts, especially in performative texts. Writers learn very soon that things you say in a natural environment don’t work on paper. It’s a strange phenomenon, but somehow you get used to it. In this phase, though, I was really obsessed with trying to be as faithful as possible to an actual way of speaking. That is why there are grammatical errors in the play: the errors in my texts are somehow proof that I cannot or should not be writing, and they both define me and shame me. I tried to hide them for a long time, asking various people to proofread my German before sending my texts out. But during the period I was writing America, I focused my attention on the errors themselves and instead of hiding them I put them at the center of my literary attention.

Also, I wanted the main character to be someone who is not “finished yet,” somebody who comes from somewhere and is going somewhere—and that is why he hasn’t mastered the language he’s speaking in.

I am curious, what is your relationship to errors? For me it used to be the very core of shame somehow, I don’t know if it’s ever changed, but I look at it in a different way right now.

A.S.: My relationship to errors? It’s still kind of complicated. For a time, I was fascinated by Hannah Shygulla in The Marriage of Maria Braun, and as I’ve mentioned, I had this weird fantasy of being a spy. We’re all, in a sense, spies when we master a foreign language, because we get an “in” on a world that we wouldn’t ordinarily be part of—but in my mind it was more literal: I wanted to know if I could really pass as a German, in other words, if my life depended on it. There have been many situations in which I was able to keep up the masquerade, and it really makes me wonder a bit about myself—what’s interesting is that a small amount of alcohol made it easier to eradicate the traces of an accent. Maybe because of the disinhibition—as we know, learning a language also requires a kind of roleplaying, a willingness to take on another identity—but I’ve lost interest in it, almost completely.

G.F.: Oh, I can very much relate to what you say about “passing as a German!” But I gave up way before you did and decided to embrace it. Probably because of my interest in “errors” in a literary or artistic sense—but of course embracing it came from the fact that I could never be “one of them,” so it seemed necessary if I wanted to continue living there. Sometimes people said they thought I was German, but I think they were saying it out of politeness, or they thought it was my goal, since knowing German is basically my only skill.

A.S.: That’s so funny—it’s like we’re demanding someone give us a medal for going through all this torture! Seriously, though: I’ve grown indifferent, I allow the English accent to creep in, I interject English words and even sentences, there is this insistence now of being foreign that maybe wasn’t there before, in the “assimilation phase.” The question of error always seems to bring us back to the question of identity. I make very few mistakes in written German, but when I speak, people understand that I’m from somewhere else, I actively signalize this, although they can’t always place it. I prefer to expose myself now.

I’m wondering, though—we’re both editors of literary magazines and have both worked with translated writing—how does all this factor into the editing process for you?

G.F.: I’m not really sure how any of this ties into the editing. I guess knowing what it’s like to be an author writing for a literary magazine, I try to communicate with the authors as I would like people to communicate with me. Sometimes I think that writing is basically making a series of choices in written form, and curating a literary magazine is much the same. But most of all, I think that, although the job seems very similar to writing, it’s actually very different because it comes from a different place. Writing comes from the impulse to create something, while editing comes from the impulse to observe something, to read. I’ve only been an editor for the magazine, so I don’t know how it would feel to work in a publishing house, but with every issue I feel a certain responsibility and I want to make sure we do a good job. This means that the texts we choose are thought through and edited, and when we edit, we always try and communicate to the author what we think the best outcome would be, and what the text still needs. Sometimes, or most of the time, the texts are very good but they don’t harmonize with the other texts, and so we decide against them, but even then, it’s not a choice against a text or an author. The ultimate goal is always to make good literature and good authors visible, because good literature is one of the things I love the most.

But you know, I wanted to really ask how you are—I mean, we can pretend we’re speaking in a vacuum without time and space, but it is very much the 15th of January 2025, with less than a week to inauguration.So I want to know how you are and if you’re okay. I could understand if writing feels different for you now. It feels a bit like the bad guys are winning.

A.S.: Yes, the bad guys are winning. I have one positive experience to report on that front: right before the election, on the way back from Vienna, I got a call from a young journalist asking me if I’d take part in a three-way pre-election panel. I almost said no: I’ve been desperate to write and to stop filling my schedule with things that take up all my time. And yet, as you say, we’re not living or writing in a vacuum, and so I agreed. I’m glad I did—it turns out they’re two very young, alert, passionate journalists trying to hold up their side of reality at a paper known for its reactionary editorials, and we quickly formed a bond. A few days later, they asked me to write an editorial for a pro and contra format. Essentially, faced with a “sanesplaining” piece on Trump by one of their renowned elder editors (who, in all seriousness, quoted FDR: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”), they needed me to confirm their take on reality by providing an argument for why we do, indeed, need to be afraid of a second Trump presidency. I suddenly understood the degree of gaslighting they had to deal with every day, and that they were hoping I’d kick ass. These are unexpected moments of grace, and we have to learn to recognize and be humble and grateful for them when they happen. I see it as a survival strategy: focus on each thing as it comes and try to be as clear and honest as possible, as though the future depended on it. Because, as it turns out, it does.