If Only This Writer Spoke Italian

by Karen Harrington

Magari!

Magari (mah-gah-ree) is a common Italian expression meaning If only! Yes, yes, it’s true. I’m still a bit heady about my recent trip to Italy. Can you blame me? The food. The scenery. The language. So to keep the vacation spirit going, I cook, I look at photos and I speak a handful of Italian phrases to my girls during the day. Language is the food every writer loves to devour after all. Learning expressions that convey so much meaning and enthusiasm into a single word, well, that is one of the reasons I love to write.

I don’t know about you, but some sentences, leave me gob-smacked. I study them. I re-read them. I write them in my notebook. And after reading the following gems, I thought, Magari!

“So long as she sat at that machine concentrating on the straights and flushes and jackpots, she didn’t have to think about the money she wasn’t making at the antique mall, the expensive new mahogany bed where she and Lyle slept facing away from each other.”

Will Allison, What You Have Left

“My conscience is clear, but that doesn’t make me innocent.”

Paul, I Corinthians 4:4

“The terrible day dissipates in the pleasurable haze of memory.”

Laura Fraser, An Italian Affair

“Ransom Hill had fallen hopelessly in love with his own wife.”

David Payne, Back to Wando Passo

“It will be years before she begins to feel the shadow of hopelessness falling over her pained attempts to drive her life somewhere interesting; years before she begins to sense time biting at her heels.”

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

And here’s a little Valentine’s present for you. More common Italian expressions I find useful in my everyday life with two curious toddlers and two sneaky Labradors.

Il mio tesoro (My darling)
Ti ama (I love you)
Mamma mia! (My goodness!)
Che bello! (How lovely!)
Uffa! (Aargh!)
Mi raccomando! (Please, I beg you!)
Che ne so! (How should I know?)
Ti sta bene! (Serves you right!)
Non te la prendere! (Don’t get so upset!)
Che macello! (What a mess!)
Non mi va! (I don’t feel like it!)

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY (April 2008); the story of one man’s struggle to understand his wife and her sudden descent into madness.
www.karenharringtonbooks.com