Jan Morris
About fifteen years ago, I stumbled across ‘Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere,’ and, as soon as I started reading it, I could feel it easing its way gently into my soul. It’s never completely gone. The book opened up new ways of seeing Europe, of seeing Italy, of seeing history, of seeing our place in it all, of seeing the discipline of the north and the exuberance of the south, of seeing myself. It challenged me to think about how easily I’d dismissed ‘conservative’ values like decency, respect, dignity, quietude, tradition. It made me reconsider how we can feel right in the centre of everything and on the outside simultaneously: not one thing or another; belonging and not belonging.
Seduced by TATMON, I went to Trieste a few times, becoming more and more engrossed in its sweet, harsh linguistic and cultural stews, by its myths and its raw, contested histories. For a while, I tried again and again to write something that honoured it all - I wrote about James Joyce teaching Italo Svevo to speak English there, about his cruelty to Nora there, about Isabel destroying all of Burton’s work there, about fascism and the Risiera di San Sabba camp, about the wild bora raging in and from the Adriatic, about the closing of the asylums, about the beauty and proud, battered civilisation this sharp, soft, weird, conventional city still holds close to itself.
Nothing I ever wrote really worked. The place won’t let itself be pinned down. And I’m not Jan Morris. I talked a lot over the years to people, too, about the city and about the book, but I’m not sure I ever really convinced anyone of the magic. And now I’ve got older and Trieste has faded a little for me, as it has for Europe and for history, into the shadows, and my urgency to translate it has dimmed.
Ah well. I love a lot of the other stuff Jan Morris wrote, but I’ll always be most grateful to her for introducing Trieste to me. And, when all this is over, I want to go there one last time, visit Mirimare and the ‘segregated’ beach, take the tram up to Opicina, drink too much Zanna, eat too much presnitz and fritto misto, and salute this incredible woman and this incredible city. RIP Jan.