Conclusion. Back to the Future and the Immanent Cosmopolitanism of Post-Multicultural Writers

Summary

My Uncle Willy's memoirs (he was a great- great uncle) are vigorously waiting to be dealt with, so to speak. I have a photocopy of the original handwritten German plus a typescript in English, both of which (the typing and the translation) were undertaken by Willy's wife, Lena, and they are a foundational text for what has animated my career for many decades— a kind of windmill I insist on tilting at. But first a detour.

In her recent book In Other Words, written in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri says, “How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine? That I don't know? Maybe because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language” (2015). I too attempted to learn Italian during my undergraduate years at Melbourne University, and not any Italian but Renaissance Italian so that I could read Machiavelli in the original. I was pursuing a double major in history and English and was inspired by Max Crawford to wonder whether Machiavelli was a closet idealist who was much more centrally wedded to his lengthy Discorsi (on Livy) than the infamous Il Principe (The Prince) and that the latter, rather than being a handbook, was a warning to the world about the consequences of unbridled dictatorship. Since German was my first language I already knew that languages produced very different interior worlds and I was curious about acquiring these tools of perception. While on one hand, our immediate context in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne was made up of many different languages, I was also aware from our induction into the society of the 1960s— through school, newspapers and television— that the Australian mainstream was not particularly receptive to multilingualism. Nevertheless, in my pursuit of other languages I had already gone for several years to Saturday classes in Russian since this was the closest I could get to Bulgarian (my father's language) and, indeed, reached a level where I could take dictation in Russian but didn't continue with it at university and so it has subsided again, lurking somewhere in my memory theatre (I like to think that I only have to open that door and…). Lahiri describes her move into Italian as a metamorphosis and alludes to Ovid's Daphne.