bitful

Ti piace Harry Potter?
Do you like Harry Potter?
Literally: 'To-you is-liked Harry Potter?'

I cannot quite put my finger on why I have enjoyed reading all seven Harry Potter novels. I can see why they have such mass appeal, yes, but I thought I was immune to that. Plus, magic and wizards and shit? Yawn. A book with over 300 pages? Fear.

I don't know, either I have the literary sensibility of a seven year old (with the emotional development to match) or it must have something to do with the affection you develop for the main characters. I noticed this the other day when I kept being moved while watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and not just because it was playing on the HD-DVD XBox add-on that Dr B. got from his brother for Christmas (days before all but one of the major movie studios pulled from the HD-DVD format and embraced rival technology Blu-Ray exclusively - grrr).

I have now just watched A Year in the Life of J.K. Rowling, a documentary that Dr B. had recorded over Christmas (repeated on Friday 18th January at 20:00 on ITV 2), and it gave me a little more insight into this, as I understood that the author is absolutely passionate about her characters, so much so that she has constructed in her mind their whole future, because she felt she needed to know how they would end up. And not at all in case she runs short of money and is talked into writing book number eight, of course not.

Mi piacciono i libri di Harry Potter.
I like Harry Potter books.
Literally: 'To-me are-liked the books of Harry Potter'.

If you want to find out more

• 'I like' is expressed in Italian by 'To me is liked'. This means that if you like more than one thing you must change the 'is' to 'are', which is done by changing 'piace' to 'piacciono'. A bit complicated, but it's an expression you'll hear several times a day so it's worth learning it.
• The genitive case (i.e. when you want to widely express a concept of 'belonging to' like 'Ann's job', 'Picasso's creativity', or 'Harry Potter books') is very easy in Italian. You invert the words from English to Italian, and add 'of' in between the two: 'Il lavoro di Ann', 'La creatività di Picasso', and 'I libri di Harry Potter'.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 7:45 am and is filed under books, italian, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.