Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Italian Language & Literature postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My Honours long essay began with a list of phrases I could not translate. Reading Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare in my final undergraduate year, I kept marking sentences that seemed ordinary in Italian yet carried a weight I could not account for. These were the father's outbursts, the mother's repeated sayings and the family words that the narrator says would let her siblings recognise one another anywhere. My essay examined how Ginzburg builds a memoir out of quoted household speech rather than interior reflection, and how the family's mixed Turin, Jewish and Triestine habits of speech become a record of a period the book rarely describes head-on. I would like to develop this into a dissertation on family idiom and the voice of witness in twentieth-century Italian prose.

I came to Italian through history rather than literature. I took it as an elective alongside History, expecting a useful reading language, and found that the grammar rewarded attention in the same way archival sources did. By my third year I was reading short stories without a dictionary for the first time, slowly, and choosing Italian seminars over others. In Honours I worked on translation exercises from Calvino and Primo Levi, and I learned to justify my choices in writing rather than settling on whichever version sounded smoothest in English. My supervisor's comments pushed me to quote less and analyse more closely. My final essay was stronger for that, especially the section comparing how Ginzburg reports her father's speech in direct and indirect forms.

The question I want to pursue is whether household language in Ginzburg works as shelter, as constraint, or as both. I am interested in reading Lessico famigliare alongside her shorter essays and possibly a second writer, which would let me test whether this method is distinctive or part of a wider postwar habit of writing memory through speech. I expect the dissertation to sharpen my reading of register and dialect, an area where my Italian is still developing. I have been working on it with recorded interviews and a grammar of regional usage.

Since graduating I have worked in the tasting room of a wine estate outside Stellenbosch. Many visitors are Italian, and I now lead tastings in Italian two or three times a week. It is not literary work, but it has made my spoken Italian faster and less formal. It has also shown me how much meaning sits in small conventions of politeness and humour, the same territory Ginzburg's book occupies.

Outside work I help an elderly neighbour, who emigrated from Calabria in the 1960s, by typing up and translating letters from her late sister. The handwriting is difficult and the language shifts between standard Italian and dialect. I have learned to ask her about words rather than guess, and to note uncertainties in the margin rather than smooth them over. It is a small project, but it has made me careful about what a transcription can and cannot claim.

I also play water polo for a club team and help organise our fixtures. This mostly means spreadsheets and a lot of messages, and it keeps me disciplined about time in a way I expect to need when writing independently.

A dissertation-based degree suits me because I work best with a sustained question, regular supervision and room to read widely around it. I am ready for the independence it requires. I hope to finish with a substantial piece of research and the skills to continue towards doctoral study or literary translation.