Developing foreign language reading skills – Italian context reading #1

To kick off my context reading series, let me start with Italian. I have to limit myself to 3 sentences for now since I’m busy, busy, busy with chores around the house.

These sentences are taken from http://www.zam.it/home.php?id_autore=2669. I came across this website while googling for “Enid Blyton” in Italian.

Enid Blyton è nata a Londra l’11 agosto 1897 e si è spenta nel 1968. Si dedica all’insegnamento per potersi mantenere pur continuando a scrivere e nel frattempo pubblica poesie e articoli su molte riviste. Il contatto con i ragazzi la appassiona talmente che decide di dedicarsi alla letteratura per l’infanzia.

Analysis

11 agosto 1897: the 2 numbers close together and the similarity between agosto and “August” tells me it’s a date—August 11, 1897. 1968 seems like a year. If I subtract 1897 from 1968, I get 71, which sounds like an age. Nata is similar to “natal.” Spenta => spent, wasted? Putting all these together, I’d guess that this sentence more or less means “Enid Blyton was born in London (I know Enid Blyton was British, hence the guess for London) on August 11, 1897 and died in 1968.

 

Si dedica all’insegnamento per potersi mantenere pur continuando a scrivere e nel frattempo pubblica poesie e articoli su molte riviste.

 

si dedica: I’m looking at the previous sentence where it says si è spenta. See how similar they are? There is a si + -a. Knowing that reflexive verbs in Spanish and French have a structure like se + verb, I venture to guess that si is an indicator of reflexives in Italian. Dedica … dedicated, maybe? Moving on… Continuando … I have a suspicion this is the equivalent to the –ing form in English (continuing?) just based on my limited knowledge of the Spanish –ando ending. Scrivere … I know Enid Blyton was a writer, and scrivere looks like ‘scribe,’ so I’m guessing this means “to write.” Why am I thinking that this is an infinitive? It’s because of the continuando a in front of it à “continuing to write” Pubblica … the –a ending makes it seem verb-like, so “published” is my guess. Poesie à poetry. There’s still a lot of gap, so I’m not able to get a complete rough translation.

 

Il contatto con i ragazzi la appassiona talmente che decide di dedicarsi alla letteratura per l’infanzia.

decide di dedicarsi à decide to dedicate herself? I’m guessing here that dedicarsi is dedicar + si, signaling reflexive. Dedicar is probably just the infinitive for dedicate. One of the reasons that make me guess that is knowing that –ar is one of the infinitive endings in French. Letteratura sounds a lot like “literature.” infanzia à infant? I’m not sure if that’s the right translation or not here. Enid Blyton wrote children’s books, so instead of infants, maybe it means children instead? In any case that makes per a preposition, most likely meaning “for,” as in literature for kids. So, this sentence roughly tells me that somehow she decided to dedicate herself to writing children’s literature.

That’s all for now… Back to my chores!