Hello there!

Hello there!

I am la jaune Schreibmaschine and this is the first post I make on this blog. I am wondering what I should write but maybe it is better to start with some introductions.

I am 26 years old and love writing multilingual poetry. It started almost 4 years ago as a pleasant but challenging free time activity. I do it by combining the languages I know because either I learned them moving around with my family or I studied them at school. Up to date, I know Italian and Spanish, which I would consider my first languages, French and English which I learned in secondary school, German which I studied at university and Dutch which I am learning in Belgium (or should I maybe say Flemish?). Curious fact: my first loves were ancient Greek and Latin - aka dead languages. Knowing them has definitely helped me get a deeper insight into the "logic" of languages' grammar. No surprise I am now a researcher in Linguistics and AI working on construction grammar!

My relationship with languages has not always been "rosa e fiori" (all roses). I was forced to become bilingual when at 8 years old I had to move from Argentina to Italy. I hated the feeling of not understanding people and not being able to efficiently communicate my needs and opinion.

After being targeted at school for my mispronunciation and curious SpanItalian code-mixing "neologisms", I put all my time and energy into learning Italian. It was full of sweat and tears but pretty quickly I managed to become fluent. Just in time to become my parents' interpreter and translator!

Learning Italian was just the first step of a long long series of stairs that I wanted to take up to... "endless knowledge and effortless communication" - that is what I thought as a child about languages. I practiced English mispronouncing songs from MTV during at-home improvised karaoke sessions. I exercised French by listening over and over to some audiobooks on my brother's CD player - which I secretly used when he was not home. It was hard but I love challenges. I was so happy to be useful in helping tourists visiting my little village and desperately searching for a soul that could give them some street indications. I was also very proud when at school I could do better at languages than the children who had bullied me when I was first learning Italian (la vendetta - lol).

Finishing high school, after five years of Greek and Latin studies and a won scholarship for a summer school in London, I was sure that I wanted to go to a more "international reality" than my little Italian village at the coast to continue learning languages. Used to not getting too sad when leaving my home for unknown places and people because of my family's migratory history, at 18 I left home to study Languages and Translation at the northest university of Italy. I chose German, English, French and some extra-curricular Spanish literature courses (because when you get a scholarship to study as a migrant family child you have to exploit it to the maximum! Plus, I was and still am the first in the family with a University degree - for short though, my sisters are coming for my title!). Let me tell you that I thought that learning languages was challenging but fun...Little I knew about German grammar and the case system! I can say it was the language that I was the most proud to be able to master after two years of endless practice and breakdowns (now Dutch has taken its place).

During my Bachelor, I met many international students and got confronted with open-minded mentalities. What a pleasant surprise after years of maladaptation in a little narrowminded Sicilian sea village! But I soon got bored - once again - and started to search for new adventures. That is the reason why I went to Germany to live the dream Erasmus experience and improve my German knowledge. I would say that the fact that people just talk German to you no matter what, and dialect, really pushed me to get better at pronouncing words and asking for info. Coming back to Italy after meeting other students planning to continue their studies abroad gave me another reason to leave what had been my "home" for the first three years of my adult life and put me into another "unpleasant", "uncanny" moving situation.

To my surprise, I was admitted to a trilingual Master's degree in the most beautiful and calm place I have ever lived in, South Tyrol. I love literature and translation but soon realised that I did not want to become a full-time translator, interpreter or writer (back then... now, maybe!). Therefore in those two years of my Master's education, I started coding and analysing languages from a computational perspective. Does Python count as a language too?

"No pain, no gain" was definitely a motto that I told myself a lot during the years I lived alone abroad thriving to become a good adult and a promising student to find a decent job - of course my mum had already carved those words in my brain forever since hard work, hard work, exploited migrants hard work was all my parents did to allow our family a "normal" life in Italy without the constant thieves, threads and economical instability from Argentina (but this story is for another post in the blog!).

Back to Python - I wanted to learn how to code well and fast. This universe fascinated me and it was such a trendy thing at the time that everyone wanted to play with neural networks and word vectors. I applied computational linguistic methods to implement some interesting problems and solutions comparing different languages, including sign languages (I published these works and they opened me the door to Academia). I also was an intern at two research centers and that was when I thought I had found my Ikigai (value and joy to my life) - and also the reason why I am now pursuing a PhD.

It may seem that I have lost "le fil rouge" after so much diving into my personal experience, which I think, however, shapes a lot the themes and style of my poetry so it is worth keeping it in mind while reading. Back to the topic of "multilingual poetry". I used to write little poems, or maybe better call them "haikus" (俳句 - Japanese short poems) nowadays, when I was feeling down and not understood - a feeling I have had often since I moved around to different places and struggled to establish deep connections with people, not always because of language but because of my inner short-term attachment trauma - I think other people with migratory infancies can relate. However, I never gave too much importance to these poems. Later on, I read Rupi Kaur through a friend, Ilaria, who talked to me about her during my Master's degree. She also shared a poem by Gaby Comprés (@gabywrites) written in Spanglish. That was the moment I started to think that maybe I could play with the languages I knew when writing my poems. This would have kept those languages alive and challenged me to combine them in a nice and meaningful manner.

At one of my walks in nature in South Tyrol, I found a collection of type-written poems given out for free in a flea-market. I read the collection in four days. The week after, at a parochial sale I put my eyes into huge black luggage boxes thinking they could contain old computer pieces. To my surprise they contained typewriters. This is how I have found and fallen in love with my first typewriter, Adler Tippa S in bright yellow. It took me 15 minutes of walking around and playing with it to know that I could not leave it there. It changed my life. Inspired by the poetry collection I had found type-written before, I started my own. Typing on a typewriter gives you such a unique and immersive feeling, a feeling that became sort of an "obsesiòn" for me - I own 15 typewriters now... They are unique pieces that people no longer value and I like to believe that I am saving them by valuing their meaning.

Back to the multilingual poetry writing topic, I had these 5 poems that I shared with Ilaria, two of my student dorm friends, Alessia (Mexican- Italian) and Marion (German with a very open-minded personality), and Moises (a Mexican friend I met while in Erasmus who shares my love and passion for languages). Their feedback was so positive and curious, they wanted more and they thought that my kind of weird but unique poetry was worth sharing. I created an Instagram profile (@lajauneschreibmaschine) where I started to share the process of writing, the poems, and my experiments...However, not everyone understood or liked my poems and that turned my initial excitement a bit down. The point for them was "I cannot understand everything in this poem" and expected a full English translation for each.

I do not write multilingual poetry because everyone has to fully understand it. Just some people speak and love several languages, or simply had to learn them, and can, therefore, understand most of the verses in my poems. For the rest, each reader can get a unique, singular interpretation of a poem depending on what they can understand and feel. This is what I think about it. Poetry is always subjective, my multilingual style makes it even more personal and open to different interpretations. And for all the polyglots out there this might be as well a pleasant reading exercise or a moment when code-switching and code-mixing are not to be condemned as sins but can be fully embraced as a skill.

Later that year there was an open-mic event in our little South Tyrol students' village. I wanted to go and read my poems to people. Reading poetry and listening to it are two different experiences. Maybe sharing them in written form was not the best manner to convey mine. South Tyrol inhabitants are trilingual by nature, they speak German, dialect and Italian, plus most of them also know English. I thought that maybe they could be a good initial public to experiment with. Supported by my friends I dived into this experience. The hosts of the event were fantastic and the public response was also really good. I was happy, full of adrenaline, and had the feeling that I had found my legitimate and true-to-myself style.

Now in Belgium, I still write poems and participate to open mic events. Brussels has so far been the best place I have ever done so at the Speak Easy multilingual evenings. However, the little town where I live has also a lively open-mic poetry scenery. I was really scared to do my first open-mic here when I arrived. But the amazingly kind people from De Stroate, Chiara and Siebrand in particular that night at the @eydingeopjescherm event, really helped me to get over my inner fears and just share my poems with love and passion. I wish I could talk to that scared version of myself and say that months later she would have not missed a chance to participate in open mic events in Brussels, Ghent and of course, Kortrijk, with the amazing traveling podium of @veelvijvenenzessen.

Writing and sharing my multilingual poetry has been and is still a long journey where I confront myself with my past, my roots, my story, my feelings and the people I meet and share moments with.

You can read and listen to my poems on my Instagram profile https://www.instagram.com/lajauneschreibmaschine.

I will be publishing new ones also on this blog. Thanks for reading and follow for more!