Tamara Landau

I was born stateless in Italy, of parents of Hungarian origin from Transylvania, survivors of the Shoah.
Since my birth, I have been their psychoanalyst and their interpreter.
Immersed in a sonorous Babel of languages that were not addressed to me,
Hungarian, Rumanian, Yiddish, German and Hebrew,
I constructed myself in the margins of the privative alphas that enamel my forenames,
Coiled up in the sensual warmth of Italian, my adopted language.
Already as a little girl, I wore myself out trying to teach this language to my mother.
My dream as a child, when I talked to myself in all these languages in front of the mirror,
Aping gestures, but above all searching for someone to speak to,
Was to invent a language that would at least be European.
I have battled all my life, sustained by this desire,
And am left, by way of a vestige, with a very mixed accent.
I consider myself today as a polyglot artisan-psychoanalyst:
I have learnt my trade with the seniors of psychoanalysis of different languages,
And position myself, in my ordinary practice, on the side of women and the naïve.
I am neither a scholar nor a scientist, and I proceed intuitively,
Trying to hear, to “see” with my eyes, and to continue to think.
Putting my thoughts into writing has been an ordeal for me.
To do this, I first had to work on stone with my hands, using a scalpel and chisel.
I dared to cut into the “original rock” of primitive castration,
To formulate the unthinkable about the primordial Mother,
And to imagine the inhuman reality of procreation.