Monday, January 22, 2024

Bella Lingua : a Good Book about the Italian Language


This is a book review by me for the newly published Chinese edition of the book: La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language writted by Dianne Hales. The Chinese edition was just published by the Zhejiang University Press in September 2023.


In the review, I mentioned Professor Mauro Guerrini, one of my friends in the IFLA Cataloguing Section. We went back from Seoul to Beijing in August 2006, after the IME ICC4 meeting and the World Library and Information Congress. During the Seoul-Beijing flight, we talked about the beautiful language. He was the president of the Organizing Committee of the 2009 WLIC in Milan as the president of the Italian Library Association.

The book also mentions the passage "Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate" in the chorus of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco, with a special Chinese translation for the word "pensiero" in the Chinese edition of the book.

I learnt the Italian from the book Come imparare l'italiano da solo, which was introduced by Professor Zhou Zixiang, Department of Mathematics, Fudan University, who was preparing to go to Italy as a visiting scholar in 1986. He still remenber our discussion about the beautiful language at that time.


The book is very special, because the author has diverse thinking. Linguistic theorists would not write such a book, and other writers without gold linguistic knowledge will not be able to do so.

美丽的语言
作者: [美]黛安娜·黑尔斯
出版社: 浙江大学出版社
出品方: 启真馆
副标题: 恋上意大利语
原作名: La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language
译者: 沈毅
出版年: 2023-11
页数: 346
定价: 69.00元
装帧: 平装
丛书: 启真·闲读馆
ISBN: 9787308240437

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