Anfibia/The Amphibian

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Following my first few encounters with the English language as a teenager, I – an Italian native speaker born and raised in Italy – fell in love with it and pursued it as a major at University; I then spent several years working as a linguist between Nigeria and China, always feeling my Italian identity very strongly.
It was only when I settled in the UK twelve years ago that I started realising how complex it is to be a linguistically and culturally hybrid human being: just like parents, over time Italian and English have forged my personality, each through its own strengths and weaknesses. And like every child must eventually do, in this poem I reflect on my linguistic identity as a clumsy attempt to reconcile a two-fold legacy, trying to embrace what I enjoy about it and accept what I have absorbed from it in spite of myself. Considering the different natures of Italian and English (more complete vs more concise), it felt just natural to write this Italian poem in longer (eight-syllable) verses and then create an English version made of shorter (six-syllable) lines. Although the poem was first conceived in Italian, the English version is not a mere translation of it: rather, it was born out of the original but then engaged in mutual contamination with it, eventually becoming an independent being.
– Antonietta Bocci


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