All posts by Deirdre Straughan

Cellphone Comedy

During one of my many trips to Silicon Valley, I was on a shuttle bus at San Francisco Airport, heading towards the rental car building. Four men got on together, talking animatedly, obviously colleagues on a business trip together. A cellphone rang, and all four simultaneously dived for their pockets. I burst out laughing, and one of them smiled at me ruefully. “It is pretty funny,” he admitted.

A friend of my stepmom’s was riding a commuter train out of London one evening when she witnessed the following: To the great annoyance of the other passengers, some guy was talking very loudly on his cellphone, bragging about a huge deal of some sort he’d just done, millions of pounds’ worth of business, etc., etc. He went on for quite some time, until everyone knew far more than they wanted to about his coup. Then the phone he was talking into… rang.

Holiday Hell – Italian Vacation Traffic

Almost every Christmas, we drive halfway down Italy to Abruzzo, where my in-laws are retired by the seaside. This puts us on the road with millions of other Italians going home for the holidays. Much of the flow is north to south: the many southern Italians who migrated to northern Italy decades ago to find work, but still have strong family ties in Sicily, Calabria, etc. So we are part of the grand “exodus,” carefully monitored by the media, with pre-analysis, traffic predictions, minute-by-minute developments, and (afterwards) death toll reports. In recent years we’ve driven on the 24th, when there’s the least traffic (except Christmas Day itself, which we may resort to one of these years). The Sunday before Christmas is also good, as no trucks are allowed on the highways.

There are trains, of course, but travelling by train with a lot of luggage is a pain, and trains have their own risks: The holiday season is when many public services choose to cause the greatest possible disruption, by going on strike. Trains don’t do it too often, but everyone else does. Public transit workers in Milan, Rome, and Genova were on strike for several days during the week before Christmas, causing huge traffic jams as everyone then had to drive to work. This probably put a considerable dent in holiday shopping; I suspect shop owners are not feeling very charitable about anyone’s right to strike at the moment.

Then another protest group got into the act. Italian milk producers are aggrieved because they keep getting fined for producing more milk than European Union quotas allow. For the last several years, they have brought attention to their plight (and won government support for discounts on their fines) by blocking major roads around Milan just before Christmas, particularly near Linate airport. There have been cases (though not this year) of holiday travelers having to walk the last five kilometers to the airport, carrying their own luggage.

(No, this has nothing to do with Parmalat, and I will refrain from any Parmalat jokes as I am sick of them already.)

Between Christmas and New Year’s there is a smaller but still significant movement of people, as many, having spent the obligatory “Natale con i tuoi” (Christmas with your family), now escape to go skiing or for more exotic destinations.

The big “counter-exodus,” of people returning to their working homes from wherever they’ve been, takes place around the Epiphany, January 6th. This year the air traffic controllers are adding to the fun by going on strike January 8th.

Italian Accents

“Stanlio, non fare lo stupeedo!”

When an American speaks Italian with a particularly bad accent, Italians often refer to Stanlio e Ollio: Laurel and Hardy, whose accents in the Italian versions of their films are legendarily hilarious, full of flat Rs and words stressed on the wrong syllable.

I used to wonder why these films had been dubbed so badly. Laurel and Hardy are funny enough without silly accents, and why pick on these guys in particular in the dubbing? Everyone else gets dubbed into a normal Italian accent, usually very well.

Then I learned that the films were not initially dubbed by Italians; the voices are those of Laurel and Hardy. When their first talkies came out, it was impossible to dub a new soundtrack onto an existing film. The only way to make an Italian version was to reshoot the whole thing, with the actors doing the Italian dialog themselves. They either read it off cards or memorized it phonetically (as some Italian actors do today when acting in English films). But no one had instructed them in the finer points of Italian pronunciation, so they made mistakes like ‘stuPEEdo’ instead of ‘STUpid-oh.’

Italians found this so funny that, even when technology improved and it became possible to use Italian voices to dub a new soundtrack, the silly accent was maintained, and sticks to this day as a cliche of Americans (or Brits) speaking Italian.

Ask an American to imitate an Italian speaking English, and most of the time you will get the sort of accent heard in American mafia movies, which appears to be loosely based on the pronunciation of someone’s Sicilian or Neapolitan ancestors.

To an Italian ear, there are marked differences in regional accents, and some regional dialects are so different in pronunciation and vocabulary as to be unintelligible to outsiders. Many northern Italians despise the ‘uncouth’ accents of southerners, and would be offended to be lumped into a language category with them.

But maybe that’s changing.

I’ve been meaning for some time to talk about Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano books, a series of police mysteries set in a small town in Sicily. Part of the appeal is that they are written in a semi-Sicilian dialect, giving a flavor that could be achieved no other way, though the publishers and Camilleri himself initially feared that the general Italian public would not be able to understand it. It turned out not to be a problem, even for me; after the first chapter or so, I didn’t find the language difficult. I’ve noticed that the language is becoming more and more Sicilian as the series goes on; perhaps Camilleri assumes that his devoted fans are now trained to handle it.

Montalbano in book form has been popular for years, and now has been made into a series of TV movies. Accent was again expected to be a problem, so for the first series our hero was made to sound ‘more Roman than Sicilian.’ For the second series, airing now, the accents sound quite Sicilian to me, though not so much that I can’t follow the dialog. Montalbano is wildly popular with all age groups, which seems to be having an interesting side effect: the Sicilian accent is now considered cool. My daughter and her Milanese classmates yesterday begged their school custodian, a Sicilian, to say ‘quattro’ (four), which he pronounces ‘quacchro’. He was baffled, and probably thought at first that they were making fun of him. But they explained that they like to hear him speak because he sounds just like Montalbano; then he was flattered!

The Montalbano books are being translated into English and appear to be selling well. They must lose something without the dialect, but they are still interesting stories with great characters, so I recommend them to mystery-lovers, and to anyone who might enjoy descriptions of Sicilian scenery and food. Montalbano loves good food, and so, presumably, does the author; the stories are frequently side-tracked by mouthwatering descriptions of dishes that Montalbano puts away with pittito lupigno (wolfish appetite). This is one aspect that, sadly, is not preserved in the television series; I guess they didn’t want to make it into a cooking show.

Montalbano links:

Watching Television in India

I rarely watch television as such. At home in Milan, our TV is used mostly to display videotapes, DVDs, Video CDs, and Super Video CDs. Italian television (almost completely in the hands of Prime Minister Berlusconi now) is so awful that it’s not worth switching on (except for Montalbano, about whom morehere).

So if I watch actual television, this usually occurs in a hotel room in some other country, when I’m too tired to do anything else. It’s a useful window onto a country and its culture. In the US, I was appalled at the number of true crime and crime re-enactment shows, in addition to the usual series about police and various sorts of private investigators. Flip a channel, see someone get killed. Yuck. No wonder so many Americans think they need to defend themselves with guns.

On my way back from Mussoorie, I spent a couple of days in a hotel in Delhi, where, since I was tired and not feeling well (sinus infection again), I spent many hours channel surfing, which was very educational.

There were CNN and MSNBC, in local editions with Indian announcers discussing Asian and Indian news and markets, as well as the usual international top of the hour stuff. There seemed to be a channel for each major Indian language, of which I could follow only Hindi (and that not as well as I’d like, given all the years I once put into studying it). There were Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jain religious shows. There were American cartoons dubbed into Hindi, and Hindi films with English subtitles. There was even a Hindi sci-fi series that looked rather like the original Star Trek, complete with cheesy 60s-stylish costumes.

There was MTV with the usual international pop stars, but there were also about six channels of Indian music videos, some of them numbers from films (almost all Indian movies are musicals), others stand-alone videos by popular singers. One of the most popular pop musicians is Daler Mehndi, a pudgy Punjabi who sings and dances to infectious bhangra dance music. He wears bright silk suits and turbans, and is generally surrounded by scantily-clad dancers. At least one of his videos appeared to have been shot somewhere in Italy.

At any hour of the day, you can see Amitabh Bacchan on every other channel. He’s a film actor, already famous when I was in school, sort of the Robert Redford of India, except that he’s made far more movies. I didn’t find him attractive when we were both younger, but I must say he has aged very gracefully; that touch of gray at the temples adds a lot. He’s still going strong, in fact was shooting a film in Mussoorie when I was there. (I didn’t see him, but it was big news in Mussoorie, and through a classmate I met a couple of bit players from the film.)

On an Indian equivalent to America’s Home Shopping Network (yes, we have them in Italy, too), I saw a long series of ads for ‘Sriyantr’, a crystal amulet purported to bring peace and prosperity to you and your household, for only Rs. 1999 plus postage and handling. I couldn’t make out all the Hindi, but it ran something like: ‘Aids concentration for exams or in driving! Small enough to put on your dashboard or carry in your purse!’ There were testimonials from a a student who passed his exams, a formerly nervous driver, and a businessman whose business perked up after the entire office gathered around Sriyantr to dopuja [worship] – I wonder how any non-Hindus in the office would have liked that?

One testimonial came straight out of myth. In the ‘Mahabharata,’ India’s great epic, the five Pandava brothers all marry Draupadi, a princess. Kunti, Draupadi’s new mother-in-law, tells her that it is critical for the brothers to remain united (they will eventually have to face their numerous cousins, the Kauravs, in battle), so she must try very hard not to play favorites, which would cause strife in the family.

So far, true to the original Mahabharata. The Pandavas, Draupadi, and Kunti are shown in elaborate costumes, smiling nervously at each other. Then Kunti takes Draupadi aside and gives her the magic item which will help to ensure family harmony: Sriyantr.

This seems to me a somewhat vulgar use of religion, a bit like having Jesus Christ endorse rosaries, which I’m fairly sure wouldn’t play well over here.

 

If you’re interested in knowing more about The Mahabharata, I highly recommend Peter Brooks’ version; you can buy it on DVD from Amazon here.