I love my country, but I have no patriotic spirit and no national pride. What’s more, I digest pizza poorly, I eat very little spaghetti, I don’t speak in a loud voice, I don’t gesticulate, I hate all mafias, I don’t exclaim “Mamma mia!” National characteristics are simplifications that should be contested. Being Italian, for me, begins and ends with the fact that I speak and write in the Italian language.

Put that way it doesn’t seem like much, but really it’s a lot. A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought. Not to mention our literary tradition, an extraordinary refinery of raw experience that has been active for centuries and centuries, a reservoir of intelligence and expressive techniques; it’s the tradition that has formed me, and on which I’m proud to have drawn.

When I say that I’m Italian because I write in Italian, I mean that I’m fully Italian – but Italian in the only way that I’m willing to attribute to myself a nationality. I don’t like the other ways; they frighten me, especially when they become nationalism, chauvinism, imperialism, and reprehensibly use language to wall themselves in, either by cultivating a purity as pointless as it is impossible, or by imposing language through overwhelming economic power and weapons. It has happened, it happens, it will happen, and it’s an evil that tends to cancel out differences and therefore impoverishes us all.

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I prefer linguistic nationality as a point of departure for dialogue, an effort to cross over the limit, to look beyond the border – beyond all borders, especially those of gender. Thus my only heroes are translators (I especially love those who are experts in the art of simultaneous translation). I love them in particular when they’re also passionate readers and propose translations themselves. Thanks to them, Italianness travels through the world, enriching it, and the world, with its many languages, passes through Italianness and modifies it. Translators transport nations into other nations; they are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein