JULY 1
Dear Sara,
Let’s pretend you never said Get out of my life and we still write to each other like we used to. The war is over but we never—not even from a distance—thought about rebuilding. But literature is predictable. The structuring of a narrative has its highs and lows, cycles and countercycles that lead to a happy ending. You wanted to disappear in India and instead you’re in Liguria. I’m almost forty and you’re immortal. Don’t you think we’ve grown up enough? We survived ourselves.
g.
JULY 4
Dear S.,
I won’t ask what happened these past seven years. Where you’ve been, who did what, if you were forced to come back to Italy or decided for yourself. I won’t keep asking. It won’t get to the point where you think that you’ve already told me, and that I understood it all, and that the world is simpler than it is. I’ll be still and quiet, I’ll listen to what you’re ready to tell me, if you want to. This is what nice people do.
Anyway.
g.
JULY 7
Dear S.,
We met when we worked together, and then at a certain point you stopped working with everyone I was in touch with, you cut off contact. You became a taboo subject: Have you heard from her? Shrug. And you? Not us..
Now you have reappeared, we—the two of us—are working together again, and I can tell you that it’s at once terrifying and magnificent.
You translate novels, and I revise them. You have a rare talent and this is why your work creates sparks, a fuse between authorship and service. I insert apostrophes and straighten out meanings, but you make everything better. No one has ever said that miracles occur, that books change, in good translations of bad literature. Then what’s the point of these crusades? Self-love? Flirtation? Altruism?
It would be great if publishing was just work. It would be great if you were just you and that was that, and I was less than zero, like in the eighties.
g.
JULY 9
Dear Sara,
Remember when in 2010 I put your name in an appendix? A tribute, a bouquet of letters.
That spring, we said good-bye on a train platform in Bologna. I was coming home from a wedding, where my father spoke about me to an acquaintance and thought I wasn’t listening. He said he was worried about his daughter because she’d never gotten over the death of her mother, it was as if she was plagued by it.
That was the first time I saw myself from the outside in, and it frightened me. I left without saying good-bye, got off at Bologna and asked you to meet me there.
You know the rest.
g.
JULY 11
Dear S.,
This morning our publisher forwarded me a complaint from a reader. He was vicious, listing typos I’d left in our book. I checked, and they were all there. Christ, he’d even marked the double spaces! There were some translation errors on his list too, and those are partly yours. Essentially, according to him, we’d totally distorted and betrayed the story’s spirit.
Here’s a man who knows what betrayal is, I thought.
g.
PS: Speaking of betrayal and interpretation: even with all the experience you have, can you ever fully be sure when you decide to translate with bye instead of see you?
JULY 15
Dear S.,
This morning the sky fell onto the city, a series of brief storms punctuated by lightning: the summer downpours of your concise sentences. When it doesn’t rain for ages and then comes all at once, even our world holds its breath. It doesn’t help to live somewhere full of disparity, like India, or of surprises, like Thailand.
With those haywire clouds and windows open wide to the tumult, it occurred to me that you’ve come back so alive that our lives seem aligned. Now you no longer write me letters, and rarely email. Instead, you send me voice memos on WhatsApp about when you can or can’t work on a text. You no longer tie each word with string and I can hear background noise—I never listen to your messages twice—but anyway it’s nice you’re there. It’s nice India didn’t make you vanish. You changed horizons, and now your Instagram photos are from all over the world but I know you’re nearby, with a time difference that’s bearable. With emails that don’t bounce back automatically.
g.
JULY 20
Dear S.,
You made me believe your universe was immense. Not just because you knew more languages, but because you could cut me out of your life and survive. What’s the solar system compared to galaxies? I’d raise my eyes to the sky and not find you. But when you stopped looking around and returned to point A, I was fixed at the same spot, waiting for you.
Let’s face it: for a long time, your universe was vaster than mine. You created chaos and I lingered to remember, to ask myself unanswerable questions.
g.
JULY 25
Dear Sara,
I never told you about the time I fell in love with C. It was terrifying, but it doesn’t exist for you because you were gone for so many years. There’s this gigantic ellipsis in our shared history, there’s our late youth frozen and taken up again after everything that’s happened, and now I feel sort of foreign with you.
Are we false friends?
g.
JULY 30
Dear Sara,
Sometimes I think you’re a ghost.
We only saw each other in person twice, but we wrote hundreds of emails and messages.
Perhaps that’s why, despite your good-bye, I was prepared to see you come back. It’s the thing about you I was most familiar with: your delays, your breaks, the fine-print flaws in your punctuation, your regionalisms. In some way I knew you’d leave the subject blank in your next email, to bridge the time in our distance.
Actually, an instant was enough to stop time.
g.
AUGUST 2
Dear S.,
Once I told you that after my mother died I started seeing a spirit in my room. I couldn’t banish it so I called it Holy (never give names to ghosts, a friend once scolded, unless you want to adopt them).
Years apart, you disappeared too, and your absence became matter in the same way. I told myself at least I’d learned something: it’s good to keep some disappearances alive. So I started dressing this new ghost in your colors: a bright-red sari, gold at the neck, flat leather shoes. It used to walk next to me, it inhabited all my houses (the ones you’ve never seen), it visited countries and cities you’ve never been to. I’ve called to it in so many ways, but it hasn’t answered me yet.
g.
AUGUST 8
Dear S.,
In the past, we sent each other small treasures: photos, newspaper clippings, coins, matchbooks, sugar packets, origami, books with underlined passages that, if arranged in a row, formed little stories within the larger narratives. Despite our distance, we appropriated places, time, light. Often, these novels were about terrible, thoughtless love. I wanted to exorcize it—you celebrated it. Not long ago, I picked up the last book you sent me, the one where you’d underlined the line “to live love as despair,” and right after: “to escape everywhere, criminal-like.”
g.
AUGUST 16
Dear S.,
I opened a dictionary and looked up betrayal, and there were many more synonyms than antonyms. Then I looked up loyalty, which also had more synonyms. How could this be?
g.
AUGUST 28
Dear S.,
I’ve been thinking again about the leaf cigarettes you used to send me from India when we first met, and about my past lovers’ gold-and-pastel Sobranies (similarly foreign), and I can’t make peace with my straight-cut tobacco and this evening’s Bombay and sparkling water. Where have we ended up? Did you really come back to Italy? It doesn’t seem like you did. Perhaps you’re in France, Aotearoa, or Cuba. Perhaps you lost your meaning in translation, and it’s not up to me to find it.
g.
SEPTEMBER 2
Dear S.,
Last night I dreamed that C. found the key to Simenon’s success by studying combinations of words according to their length. I looked at her admiringly, I thought: It’s so simple, so straightforward, to write a perfect novel—until I understood that C. had analyzed the Italian translation and not the original. Does it still count?
And you: Do you still count?
g.
SEPTEMBER 9
Dear S.,
When we met we wrote to each other continually, I could scarcely keep up with the pace of our enthusiasm. You were omnipresent, omnivorous, omnipotent, like jellyfish. You stitched tigers.
I sent you photos from Florence, Venice, Rome—I answered when I was entirely myself and also often when I was entirely elsewhere.
Then one time I told you that from backgammon I’d learned to cheat and you started responding to me differently, until you ended everything.
Maybe I broke something with the backgammon story? Did I become for you, from that moment, an unreliable narrator?
Anyway, I spent the years you were absent discovering and cultivating the so-called truth of narrative, where whoever is writing dictates the rules. It’s something that relaxes me. Now I no longer need to play backgammon because cheating does nothing for me: I revise the rules whenever I want, I decide what is real and what isn’t.
I’ll get to the point, S.: it’s time to choose whether you want to be part of this private universe. You can leave, if you prefer. I can delete you from my rules, if it’s what you really want. Then we’d truly lose each other, not like in the past.
g.
SEPTEMBER 10
Dear S.,
I wasn’t being serious when I talked about our chances of losing each other.
Is it because you took me literally, to the letter, that you stopped responding to me?
g.
SEPTEMBER 12
Dear S.,
…
SEPTEMBER 25
Dear Sara,
You probably won’t read these last lines of mine, but today something incredible happened, and I can’t keep it to myself: your ghost started to speak!
This morning it uttered its first word in a language I’d never heard before in my life. It sounded strange, the voice of a Machine: mechanical yet at the same time ancient. The rest of the day, your ghost stayed quiet, indifferent.
I tried to reassure it, said that we always have to start somewhere, that each word—irrationally—has more synonyms than antonyms, etcetera.
And as for us: thank you for being there.
g.
Lourdes Contreras researches Italian literature and visual arts at the intersection of ecocriticism and Mediterranean studies. She is a coeditor of the journal Bibliotheca Dantesca and teaches Italian language courses at the University of Pennsylvania.
Julia Pelosi-Thorpe’s translations of Latin, Italian, and Dialect poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, the Poetry Review, Chicago Review, and elsewhere.
