Born in London to an Indian family but brought up in the United States, Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer, translator and academic who pays homage to her great passion for Italian in a very personal book. In altre parole is the first book American author Jhumpa Lahiri has written in the Italian language. This after two novels and two collections of short stories in English, led to numerous awards, including the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The memoir was published in 2016 but she began writing it in 2012 while living in Rome with her family. It began as a private notebook where she used to note down grammar rules and new words. As her knowledge of the Italian language grew, Lahiri ventured to put together sentences and paragraphs. Eventually, her personal notes became a sort of diary in which she reflected on her learning process and her daily life in Italy.
SUDDEN LOVE
Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language during a short trip to Florence, while she was still a university student. The writer felt an immediate fascination for Italian words and sounds, and decided to take lessons once she returned to the States, as she explained:
Jhumpa Lahiri (American accent): I went to Florence for a week and I came away with a deep, inexplicable need to learn Italian. I feel in some sense linguistically an orphan, and that there’s no language to me that isn’t a foreign language in some way. So I have a relationship now to three languages in my life: the Bengali of my family, the English of my education and Italian. And I think Italian is the only language I’ve really loved.
LEARNING PROCESS
Like any other student, Lahiri struggled at first; she felt insecure and ashamed to express herself in Italian. From looking up words in a dictionary to raise her confidence, Lahiri compares the study of a language to swimming in a lake: one has to immerse oneself in its deeper waters and leave the safety of the shore to experience its vastness. Learning a language requires a certain amount of bravery, says Lahiri, while at the beginning one can feel restricted by a poor vocabulary.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I like being at the beginning again as a reader and as a writer. I like that I am limited, I like that I only have a certain vocabulary and certain tools and I can only go so far… that appeals to me. It’s a sort of poverty, it’s a choice to make do with less and not more.
NEW PERSON
With countless metaphors and a very distinctive language, the book In other words describes Lahiri’s love for words based on her own experience. Lahiri compares herself to a traveller or a guest when she speaks Italian. She must leave behind her authority in English while she feels the freedom of being imperfect. The new language shapes a new identity, and she seems to live a different life.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I think learning a language is the most profound thing we can do. I mean, my respect for language as an entity has really deepened so much in these past years, finding myself on this path, immersed in a new language... writing, thinking, living in a new language. I just moved back from Rome and the thing I miss most in a sense is the language and it was what took me there in the first place. After all of this time, I feel that it was some form of destiny, really. I fell in love with the language and twenty years later it sort of changed my life. It gave me a new life and I felt reborn as a person, as a writer.
ON TRANSLATION
Lahiri translated a few Italian novels into English before daring to write in Italian. For her, “translating is the deepest, most intimate way of reading something,” and her experience as a translator helped her sharpen her understanding of the foreign language. Lahiri now only writes in Italian, she says.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I want to keep my Italian my Italian and I don’t want to mix it with the English. I don’t want to. And I think to translate myself would be another version of this hyphenated state of being which can be very interesting and very rich, but honestly I think this is one area where I really prefer to have a line and say ‘This is what I’ve written in Italian, these are the books I’ve written in English and there’s a division between those two things.’ And I don’t want to be the person going back and forth across that line.
UNDERSTANDING
As a writer, Lahiri is always examining words to better understand their meaning and structure.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Being a writer, whatever language you work with, even if you are born into one language and work with it exclusively for your whole life, I think part of what the writer does is deepen forever his or her understanding of that language. And writing allows that to happen and we meet, the mystery remains and deepens as one goes on.
exophonic writers
Over the last century many authors have chosen to write in another language that is not their own. They are called ‘exophonic writers’. Historically, that language has often been English – although that is changing. Polish-born Joseph Conrad learned English while working on ships. Novels such as Heart of Darkness delighted readers with their ‘foreignness’. But he found writing in English arduous, comparing it to ‘throwing mud at the wall’. Lebanese writer and poet Khalil Gibran wrote in Arabic, but found phenomenal fame with his 1923 English language book The Prophet, twenty-six mystical prose poems that became one of the best-selling books of all time.
Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian author of Lolita, was trilingual. He once said: “My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian and my ear speaks French.” He met with public success when he began to write in English, but he found this a “private tragedy.” Iosif Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poems and writings in Russian and English. He said language was about morality, not nationality: “For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”
Some have found liberation in another tongue. The Irish writer Samuel Beckett abandoned English because it felt ‘cluttered’ and evasive, and wrote in French instead. French-Canadians Jack Kerouac and later Yann Martel chose English over French to write about travel. Martel, who won the Booker prize with Life of Pi, said English “gives me a sufficient distance to write.” Contemporary Chinese author Yiyin Li described writing in English as her “private salvation.” Her native Mandarin Chinese was a functional public language, but English gave her “psychological space.” Polish author Eva Hoffman used English as a way to examine identity in a globalised world. Her memoir Lost in Translationrecounts her migration from Poland to Canada.
Some authors are victims of circumstance. Bosnian-born Aleksandar Hemon was on holiday in America in the 1990s when war broke out in his native country. He became an award-winner writer and professor of creative writing at Princeton. The most recent exophonic sensation, however, is Eugene Chirovici, a Romanian author who moved to Britain five years ago. His first murder mystery novel in English, The Book of Mirrors, is one of the most translated literary works in the world!