Soffro anche spesso

“Being a part of something special makes you special, right?”

Those words, uttered by Rachel Berry in the first episode of Glee, are remarkable.  I remember watching the trailer for the series on YouTube last spring and instantly falling in love, mostly because of how moving I thought that line was.  The show, with its cast of mildly misfit highschoolers, is all about that kind of desperate enthusiasm that teenagers ooze.  But as we age, we somehow never completely get over that need to feel special.

It’s maybe just that the things that make us special change a bit.  I had that thought in the shower before bed last night, while I was humming Radiohead’s biggest hit, “Creep.”  Now, lest you think I have some affinity with the angsty grunge-rock lyrics (how 90s!), you should know that I think of that song in Italian (which is maybe worse).  But a cover of “Creep” was a huge hit while I was there last fall.  You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it playing on the radio, sung in appropriately grungy style by Vasco Rossi—a sort of Italian cross between John Mellencamp and Leonard Cohen in both vocal stylings and political activism.

Now you know that I hate my “when I was in Italy” stories, but this little episode actually gave me some insight into why people love to travel and why I still tell these damned stories all the time.  The song, in English, is of course about a guy who doesn’t feel he deserves to be with a girl who’s “so f***ing special.”  The Italian is a cleaner version about a guy who doesn’t want to leave a girl; he’s going to stay “ad ogni costo” (at any cost—the title of the song).  The Italian girl in question isn’t quite as perfect as Radiohead’s “angel.”  She has “eyes that are never honest,” but she’s apparently still special enough that you wouldn’t want to leave here.  Rossi makes that very clear in a kind of brilliant reworking of the Radiohead version.  The last line of the verse in English (with the infamous epithet) is

I wish I was special
You're so fuckin' special

The Italian version goes for a rhyme instead

Tanto è lo stesso
Soffro anche spesso

[Much is the same / I also often suffer]

The second line rolls around in the mouth (and sounds) almost the same as the English version.  The s-f-n-sp chain of consonant sounds is identical.  It’s hard not to imagine that Rossi started with this line and built the rest of the song around that.

Now this is much to say that a song I heard in Italy was about wanting to be a part of something special.  But that makes me think that one of the reasons that people love to travel so much is to capture some of that feeling that Rachel Berry gets from being in Glee club.  It’s also maybe one of the reasons we (I) reminisce so much about our travels.  We loved that sense of being special.  Of being a stranger in a far land.  Of being a part of something bigger than ourselves.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on people who have the bug for travelling.  My last post was perhaps too critical.  After all, we all want to have those radically transformative experiences.  They are the stuff of dreams, and of course, poetry.

Dante was a guy who met a pretty special girl at the age of nine.  It was that experience that inspired him to write La vita nuova, one of the most important works in literature.  It has a lot of wonderful poetry, but its most iconic passage is perhaps the first sentence, which is in prose. 

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.

[In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little that can be read, there is a heading which reads: here begins a new life.]

Just down the street from my apartment in Naples was the Piazza Dante, a lively and unsurprisingly run-down eighteenth-century square with a beckoning statue of Dante in the middle (above).  I’d sometimes perch myself at his feet in the afternoon and wonder when I could mark a new heading in the book of my memory.  Naples wasn’t that for me.  But I did feel pretty special to be there.