Published in 2015, this is a memoir by Jhumpa Lahiri. She's a well-known (Pulitzer-prize-winning) author. In English...

This, on the other hand, is the first book she wrote in Italian...

The original title is In altre parole (which literally means In Other Words). In 2016 it was translated into English. But not by Lahiri, rather by Ann Goldstein (famous for translating Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, although I'm not familiar with her translation, as I read this series in a mix of languages, none of which was English). At this point Lahiri hesitated to translate her own work into English, her stronger language, because she felt that the translation would "devour" the original text.

I'm fascinated by authors who write in a language that's not their mother tongue. And I'm fascinated by language-learning (albeit at arms' length at the moment). So I should have found this more interesting than I actually did...


This is the Internet Archive version I read. I'm not sure who thought this cover design was a good idea...

First, the "story": Lahiri makes her first trip to Florence in 1994. It is love at first sight. That stay is just a week long. But already she's obsessed with the language. Back home, in the United States, she feels a strange kind of exile: "When I think of Italy, I hear certain words and phrases again. I miss them." She begins to take Italian courses. And in spring 2000, she goes to Venice. Again, there's that feeling of exile when she goes back home. There are more visits, more classes. It becomes clear to her that at some point she will have to move to Italy. And in 2012, she decides Rome will be her destination. Six months before leaving, she opts not to read any more in English: "I consider this an official resignation." She sees herself as a linguistic pilgrim, so she needs to leave behind what is familiar.

And so begins her in-depth journey with Italian. From hesitant learner to published author. Not bad.


"We don't know where to take the recycling," she notes when they move to Rome. Ha!

She gives us a lot of detail (too much detail?) on her language-learning progress. I wonder whether the concept of comprehensible input would have helped... There's the problem of memorizing words, for example. She goes over the lists of words she has painstakingly written in her notebook. She thinks about them while she's talking to someone, and she knows they're there, handwritten in the notebook. But words are tricky. They exist on the page, but they don't necessarily make their way into her brain, and then they don't necessarily come out of her mouth, staying, instead, in the notebook, stuck and useless: "All I remember is the fact that I noted them." Yep, we've all been there... The answer, I know now, but didn't know when I started learning languages, is input and context... And time, of course. Always time.

On the flipside, she also notes that she finds reading in Italian a more intimate and intense experience that reading in English. Again, that's a feeling I recognize.

One of the chapters I enjoyed most was the one entitled The Imperfect. Language-learners always have a particular element of grammar that they just can't get their head around. You're talking perfectly happily, and suddenly your words take a certain direction, and you see this THING you don't understand coming up on the horizon of the conversation. You panic, and you freeze... Yes. Been there... Even when you bend your mind very deliberately to sorting out what it is that's confusing you, and note down tons of examples, you're still not out of the wood, because you realize that for every example there's at least one exception...

Lahiri's writing starts with keeping a diary in Italian. It's terrible Italian, she says; it's like writing with her left hand. But in those first few months in Rome, her secret Italian diary is the only thing that consoles her, and gives her stability. She says it's a kind of literary survival: She doesn't have a lot of words at her disposal, but she feels free and light, and she rediscovers the joy of writing. She moves on to writing short stories (two of which are included in this book). There's much to correct in the language she uses, but writing in Italian unleashes things that wouldn't, she says, have emerged in English.


So much of language is cultural. Putting toilet paper in the bin (instead of down the toilet) is described here as "good manners" or "common courtesy". And yet, in many countries, it really would not be...

The most interesting thing about Lahiri's decision to write in Italian -- and, for me, by far the most interesting aspect of the book -- is the psychology that lies behind it.

Her "mother tongue" is Bengali. Her parents, originally from Kolkata, moved to England, where she was born. As a youngster, she moved with them to Rhode Island, but mum and dad were determined to bring their children up with a knowledge of their cultural heritage. Hence, she speaks Bengali. It was her main language for four years until she went to school in America. And her parents want her to speak only Bengali to them and their friends. But she speaks it imperfectly, with an accent; she can't read or write Bengali; and it's not the language that is spoken around her: "When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you feel a continual sense of estrangement."

So she feels like two people, separated by language, not fully identifying with either tongue. She speaks one to please her parents, the other to survive in America, and she remains suspended between the two. She ends up feeling as though she is fundamentally a contradiction in terms.

For her parents, English is something foreign that must not be surrendered to. Yet none of her teachers or friends ever shows the slightest curiosity about the fact that she speaks another language, and she longs to be like her friends, who don't speak other languages, and who are therefore "normal"... So she's ashamed of speaking Bengali, and she's ashamed of feeling ashamed...

She also sees the wall that her parents have to confront every day because they speak English less than perfectly. Sometimes she has to explain things to them, as though she is the parent. Sometimes she has to speak for them. In America, shop assistants turn to her because she doesn't have a foreign accent, as though her parents, with their accent, can't understand. And yet she too gets embarrassed when her parents pronounce words wrongly. She corrects them. She doesn't want them to be vulnerable.

That is a great description of the rending effects of biculturalism.

It is while straddling these two languages that she discovers, at the age of 25, Italian. This is a language she can learn without pressure. Italian is born not of her surroundings, but of her desire, her toil -- it is born of her. It's the third leg in her linguistic triangle, offering a way to escape the longstanding clash between English and Bengali, and reject both mother tongue and stepmother tongue.

But it's not really a wholesale flight... English is still the basis of the triangle, its most stable side. Bengali and Italian are both weaker. Bengali is her past, Italian is her future, and she feels a bit of a baby in both. English will always be the permanent, indelible present. Even so, she's ambivalent about English. On the one hand, it always equated to struggle, conflict, failure, a rift with her parents. It's a heavy, encumbering piece of her past, and she's tired of it. On the other hand, she became a writer -- a famous one -- in English. English ensured she was no longer anonymous.

Writing in Italian, she can flee both her failures and her successes in English. She can start again: "I inevitably fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, I am not tormented or embittered by it."

Very interesting...


Love does not always go smoothly...

Despite the exhilaration her Italian efforts bring her, her current situation is still not easy. In America, when she was young, she recalls that her parents seemed always to be struggling for something. Now she understands: It must be the language. They looked forward to letters in Bengali, read them a hundred times. When a language with which you identify is far away, you do everything to keep it alive, and these letters gave them back a life that had disappeared. Back in America, after only a year of living in Italy, Lahiri feels the same way. She can't even find books in Italian. So she's cut off twice. There's an ocean between her and Italian, but also and a distance between her and English, a language in which she no longer feels entirely at home.

When she returns to Italy, she's happy to hear Italian all around her at the airport. But she's also unsettled: "I'm different, just as I was different from my parents when they went from the US to Calcutta on holiday. I'm not returning to Rome to reunite with my language. I'm returning to continue my courtship of another language. If you don't belong to any specific place, you can't, in reality, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even from my desk. In the end I realize that it was not a real exile, quite the opposite. I am exiled even from the definition of exile."

And in Italy, her appearance means that people often assume she can't speak Italian, and turn to talk to her husband, whose Italian sounds Spanish... She'll go from discussing her work in Italian with her editor to being addressed in English by a shop assistant. "'May I help you': Four polite words that, every now and then in Italy, break my heart." It's like a wall... But she encounters the same wall in the US, where people sometimes ask her why she chose to write in English. She has to justify her choice of language, even though it's a language she speaks perfectly. And there's even a wall in India, because everyone assumes that she, an emigree, only speaks English...


Pitfalls

So that's all problematic. Adding a further difficulty is the fact that it's an uphill battle to find her own style: "I remain, in Italian, an unaware writer," she writes, comparing herself as a child let loose in mum's wardrobe. This, perhaps, accounts for Hannah Gersen's impression: "The problem with Lahiri’s Italian is not that it is odd; instead it is sometimes smooth to the point of vagueness. In English, she is a wonderfully precise writer, but in Italian that precision is gone and her sentences can feel watered down."

I must admit that the account of how her words made it into print was a bit gobsmacking. Initial efforts were corrected by her teacher. Then the draft went off to two readers, both themselves writers, who suggested more subtle modifications. Then the pieces went to the editor of Internazionale, the magazine where they first appeared. I couldn't help feeling that this is a highly artificial way to be a writer... How much of you is left after all those filters?

And Lahiri admits that the undertaking isolated her, estranging her from anglophone writers, while she was necessarily different from Italian writers. At this point, she doesn't see herself as a legitimate member of the group of writers who chose different languages: Beckett, Nabokov, or Conrad. Daring to write in Italian after living for barely a year in the country is an unusual project, and she feels alone in it.

Perhaps it's this combination of factors that accounts for the book's uneven quality. I found it interesting as a language-learning memoir, and as a psychological study. I admired her willingness to show vulnerability (operating in a foreign language, at any level, makes you terribly vulnerable, and when you're a renowned writer, that must be all the more challenging).

But I found it a tad repetitive. It was originally published as a series of newspaper columns, and I think it probably worked better in that format: Each week, a little meditation on what it means to learn a language. Stuck together, on the other hand, they feel a little samey.

Nor was I super-keen on the two short stories that are included in the memoir. They're both too dream-like for my taste (although I understand that this might be part of her move towards abstraction, and away from culturally-bounded characters, with all the baggage they bring with them).

But I am still interested enough to proceed. I'd like to experience the English-medium Jhumpa Lahiri, and explore some of her more recent Italian writing.

The picture at the top (taken in Portopalo di Capo Passero) talks about building bridges not walls. And that's definitely what Lahiri is engaged in doing: "Every sentence that I write in Italian is a little bridge to build, and then to cross." More power to her.


"You are always like the sea that, breaking against the rocks, always finds the strength to try again"