Birth and midwifery in Italian

The thirty-fourth entry is la malinconia del dopo parto, and the two languages name the same few days from opposite ends. English names them by a colour: « the baby blues », the flat, tearful stretch that arrives around the third day and is gone within a week. The colour is doing real work there, because English keeps a whole family of it — « to feel blue », « a blue mood », and « the blues », which is that same sadness turned into the name of a music. None of that is available in Italian, where blue is a colour and never a mood. The language names the feeling outright, la malinconia, and then says only when it happens, del dopo parto. There is a second reason to handle the English phrase carefully: « baby blues » also means, in ordinary speech, a baby’s blue eyes, so only the surrounding sentence decides which of the two is meant. Italian is not short of colour idioms — essere al verdeis to be brokeun giallois a detective story — but it has never coloured sadness