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The first sentence
Translators often say the first sentence of a book is the hardest, because it sets the voice for everything that follows. Many keep it provisional and come back to it at the end, once they know the book from the inside; others, like Alex, need to choose it first in order to begin at all. Naples has inspired a great deal of Italian fiction, and its nights — loud, crowded, moving from one neighborhood to the next — are a literary subject in their own right. Translating a Neapolitan novel means finding an English that can be as noisy as the original without turning into caricature. This lesson introduces no new grammar. It brings back what the year has built — ci and ne, the congiuntivo after wishes and suppositions, relative clauses that make images, the impersonal si, the future of promises — in the scene where a new book begins.