My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation. Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it.
In a sense, I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
In my case, there is another distance, another schism. I don’t know Bengali perfectly. I don’t know how to read it or even write it. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too.
A few months later, I receive an invitation to the Mantua literary festival. There, I meet my first Italian publishers. One of them is also my translator. Their names are Marco and Claudia.
Marco and Claudia give me the key. When I mention that I’ve studied some Italian, and that I would like to improve it, they stop speaking to me in English. They switch to their language, although I’m able to respond only in a very simple way.
They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. Thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language.
Returning to America, I want to go on speaking Italian. But with whom? I know some people in New York who speak it perfectly. I’m embarrassed to talk to them. I need someone with whom I can struggle and fail.
One day, I go to the Casa Italiana at New York University to interview a famous Roman writer, a woman, who has won the Strega prize. I am in an overcrowded room, where everyone but me speaks an impeccable Italian. The director of the institute greets me. I tell him I would have liked to do the interview in Italian. That I studied the language years ago but I can’t speak well.
“Need practising,” I say. “You need practice,” he answers kindly.
In 2004, my husband gives me something. A piece of paper torn from a notice that he happened to see in our neighbourhood, in Brooklyn. On it is written “Imparare l’italiano”—“Learn Italian.” I consider it a sign. I call the number, make an appointment. A likable, energetic woman, also from Milan, arrives at my house. She teaches in a private school, she lives in the suburbs. She asks me why I want to learn the language. I explain that I’m going to Rome in the summer to take part in another literary festival. It seems like a reasonable motivation. I don’t reveal that Italian is an infatuation. That I cherish a hope – in fact a dream – of knowing it well. I don’t tell her that I am tortured, that I feel incomplete. As if Italian were a book that, no matter how hard I work, I can’t write.
A few months later, I receive an invitation to the Mantua literary festival. There, I meet my first Italian publishers. One of them is also my translator. Their names are Marco and Claudia.
Marco and Claudia give me the key. When I mention that I’ve studied some Italian, and that I would like to improve it, they stop speaking to me in English. They switch to their language, although I’m able to respond only in a very simple way.
They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. Thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language.
Returning to America, I want to go on speaking Italian. But with whom? I know some people in New York who speak it perfectly. I’m embarrassed to talk to them. I need someone with whom I can struggle and fail.
One day, I go to the Casa Italiana at New York University to interview a famous Roman writer, a woman, who has won the Strega prize. I am in an overcrowded room, where everyone but me speaks an impeccable Italian. The director of the institute greets me. I tell him I would have liked to do the interview in Italian. That I studied the language years ago but I can’t speak well.
“Need practising,” I say. “You need practice,” he answers kindly.
In 2004, my husband gives me something. A piece of paper torn from a notice that he happened to see in our neighbourhood, in Brooklyn. On it is written “Imparare l’italiano”—“Learn Italian.” I consider it a sign. I call the number, make an appointment. A likable, energetic woman, also from Milan, arrives at my house. She teaches in a private school, she lives in the suburbs. She asks me why I want to learn the language. I explain that I’m going to Rome in the summer to take part in another literary festival. It seems like a reasonable motivation. I don’t reveal that Italian is an infatuation. That I cherish a hope – in fact a dream – of knowing it well. I don’t tell her that I am tortured, that I feel incomplete. As if Italian were a book that, no matter how hard I work, I can’t write.
We meet once a week, for an hour. I’m pregnant with my daughter, who will be born in November. I try to have a conversation. At the end of every lesson, the teacher gives me a long list of words that I lacked during the conversation. I review it diligently. I put it in a folder. I can’t remember them.
At the festival in Rome, I manage to exchange three, four, maybe five sentences with someone. After that I stop; it’s impossible to do more. I count the sentences, as if they were strokes in a tennis game, as if they were strokes when you’re learning to swim.
My daughter is born and four more years go by. I finish another book. After its publication, in 2008, I receive another invitation to Italy, to promote it. In preparation, I find a new teacher. An enthusiastic, attentive young woman from Bergamo. She, too, comes to my house once a week. We sit next to each other on the couch and talk. We become friends. The teacher is very encouraging, she says I speak the language well, she says I’ll do fine in Italy. But it’s not true. When I go to Milan, when I try to speak intelligently, fluently, I am always aware of the mistakes that hamper me, that confuse me, and I feel more discouraged than ever.
In 2009, I start studying with my third private teacher. A Venetian woman who moved to Brooklyn more than 30 years ago. She’s a widow and lives in a house surrounded by wisteria, near the Verrazano Bridge. It takes me nearly an hour to get there. I ride the subway to the edge of Brooklyn, almost to the end of the line.
I love this trip. I go out of the house, leaving behind the rest of my life. I don’t think about my writing. I forget, for several hours, the other languages I know. Each time, it seems like a small flight. Awaiting me is a place where only Italian matters.
I am very fond of my teacher. At a certain point, the lessons become my favourite activity. As I study with her, the next, inevitable step in this strange linguistic journey becomes clear. At a certain point, I decide to move to Italy.
I choose Rome. A city that has fascinated me since I was a child, that conquered me immediately. The first time I was there, in 2003, I felt a sense of rapture, an affinity. I seemed to know it already. After only a few days, I was sure that I was fated to live there.
In preparation, I decide, six months before our departure, not to read in English anymore. From now on, I pledge to read only in Italian. It seems right, to detach myself from my principal language. I consider it an official renunciation.
Suddenly none of my books is useful anymore. They seem like ordinary objects. The anchor of my creative life disappears, the stars that guided me recede. I see before me a new room, empty. Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A kind of voluntary exile. Although I’m still in America, I already feel elsewhere. Reading, I no longer feel at home.
I read Moravia’s Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference) and La noia (The Empty Canvas). Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires). The poetry of Quasimodo, of Saba. I manage to understand and at the same time I don’t understand.
I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel. Every unknown word a jewel.
I make a list of terms to look up, to learn. Imbambolato, sbilenco, incrinatura, capezzale, sgangherato, scorbutico, barcollare, bisticciare (dazed, lopsided, crack, bedside or bolster, unhinged, crabby, sway, bicker). After I finish a book, I’m thrilled. It seems like a feat. I find the process more demanding, yet more satisfying, almost miraculous.
In this period I feel like a divided person. I write in one language and read exclusively in another. It’s impossible to abandon English. Yet my stronger language already seems behind me.
I arrive in Rome with my family a few days before the mid-August holiday. We aren’t familiar with this custom of leaving town en masse. The moment when nearly everyone is fleeing, when almost the entire city has come to a halt, we try to start a new chapter of our life.
We rent an apartment in Via Giulia, a very elegant street that is deserted in mid August. The heat is fierce, unbearable. When we go out shopping, we look for the momentary relief of shade every few steps.
The second night, a Saturday, we come home and the door won’t open. Before, it opened without any problem. Now, no matter how I try, the key doesn’t turn in the lock. There is no one in the building but us. We have no papers, are still without a functioning telephone, without any Roman friend or acquaintance. I ask for help at the hotel across the street from our building, but two hotel employees can’t open the door, either. Our landlords are on vacation in Calabria. My children, upset, hungry, are crying, saying that they want to go back to America immediately.
Finally a locksmith arrives and gets the door open in a couple of minutes. We give him more than €200, without a receipt, for the job.
This trauma seems to me a trial by fire, a sort of baptism. And there are many other obstacles, small but annoying. We don’t know where to take the recycling, how to buy a subway and bus pass, where the bus stops are. Everything has to be learned from zero. In spite of my great enthusiasm for living in Rome, everything seems impossible, indecipherable, impenetrable.
A week after arriving, I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in.
I write in a terrible, embarrassing Italian, full of mistakes. Without correcting, without a dictionary, by instinct alone. I am ashamed of writing like this. I don’t understand this mysterious impulse, which emerges out of nowhere. I can’t stop.
During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It’s an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows.
I don’t recognise the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it’s the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me. I use up one notebook, I start another. It’s as if, poorly equipped, I were climbing a mountain. It’s a sort of literary act of survival. I don’t have many words to express myself – rather, the opposite. I’m aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.
Shortly before I began to write these reflections, I received an email from a friend in Rome, the writer Domenico Starnone. I had been in Rome for a year. Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he wrote: “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.” How much those words reassured me. They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language: to subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis.
Around the same time that I received this note, I was asked, during an interview, what my favourite book was. I was in London, on a stage with five other writers. It’s a question that I usually find annoying; no book has been definitive for me, so I never know how to answer. This time, though, I was able to respond without any hesitation that my favourite book was the Metamorphoses of Ovid. It’s a majestic work, a poem that concerns everything, that reflects everything. I read it for the first time 25 years ago, in Latin, as a university student. It was an unforgettable encounter, maybe the most satisfying reading of my life. To understand this poem I had to be persistent, translating every word. I had to devote myself to an ancient and demanding foreign language. And yet Ovid’s writing won me over; I was enchanted by it. I discovered a sublime work, a living, enthralling language. I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.
I remember vividly the moment when the nymph Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree. She is fleeing Apollo, the love-struck god who pursues her. She would like to remain alone, chaste, dedicated to the forest and the hunt, like the virgin Diana. Exhausted, the nymph, unable to outstrip the god, begs her father, Peneus, a river divinity, to help her. Ovid writes: “She has just ended this prayer when a heaviness pervades her limbs, her tender breast is bound in a thin bark, her hair grows into leaves, her arms into branches; her foot, a moment before so swift, remains fixed by sluggish roots, her face vanishes into a treetop.” When Apollo places his hand on the trunk of this tree “he feels the breast still trembling under the new bark”.
Until she is transformed, Daphne is running for her life. Now she is stopped; she can no longer move. Apollo can touch her, but he can’t possess her. Though cruel, the metamorphosis is her salvation. On the one hand, she loses her independence. On the other, as a tree, she remains forever in the wood, her place, where she has a different sort of freedom.
As I said before, I think that my writing in Italian is a flight. Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realise that I’m trying to get away from something, to free myself. I’ve been writing in Italian for almost two years and I feel that I’ve been transformed, almost reborn. But the change, this new opening, is costly; like Daphne, I, too, find myself confined. I can’t move as I did before, the way I was used to moving in English. A new language, Italian, covers me like a kind of bark. I remain inside: renewed, trapped, relieved, uncomfortable.
Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me?
The most obvious answer is the English language. But I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolised for me. For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.
And yet I was in love with it. I became a writer in English. And then, rather precipitously, I became a famous writer. I received a prize that I was sure I did not deserve, that seemed to me a mistake. Although it was an honour, I remained suspicious of it. I couldn’t connect myself to that recognition and yet it changed my life.
By writing in Italian, I think I am escaping both my failures with regard to English and my success. Italian offers me a very different literary path. As a writer, I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself. I’m bound to fail when I write in Italian, but, unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn’t torment or grieve me.
If I mention that I’m writing in a new language these days, many people react negatively. These reactions don’t surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening. I am the daughter of a mother who would never change. In the United States, she continued, as far as possible, to dress, behave, eat, think, live as if she had never left India, Calcutta. The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was her strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity. When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost 50 years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.
I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother’s rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine. “There was a woman, a translator, who wanted to be another person”: it’s no accident that The Exchange, the first story I wrote in Italian, begins with that sentence.
In the animal world, metamorphosis is expected, natural. When a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly it’s no longer a caterpillar but a butterfly. A total metamorphosis isn’t possible in my case. I can write in Italian, but I can’t become an Italian writer. Despite the fact that I’m writing this sentence in Italian, the part of me conditioned to write in English endures.
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I’m also more exposed. It’s true that a new language covers me, but unlike Daphne I have a permeable covering – I’m almost without a skin. And although I don’t have a thick bark, I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.
Extracted from In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99
Jhumpa Lahiri Q&A
Globally, Italian isn’t very useful – it is spoken almost exclusively in Italy. Why did you choose to dedicate yourself to this language in particular?
As I describe in the book, I fell in love with Italian. It was a calling, a desire. Desires, generally speaking, are seldom motivated by utility. Their origins are not rational. But Italian is useful to me, in that it is the language in which I feel absolutely happy, inspired, free.
How did your family react to the idea of moving to Italy?
My husband and children have been very supportive. They understand how much this new life in Italy, in Italian, means to me. And now, as a result, we feel at home in two parts of the world.
How did you find living in Italy compared with the States?
I prefer living in Italy, I am more relaxed and centred there. I find that the pace is more human, that there is a less frenzied relationship to time and that life is more spontaneous. People are not defined by their work, their careers, in the same way.
Is it mainly the language you’re interested in or other aspects of Italy as well?
The language is the key that opens the door to the rest of the culture, to people, to the particulars of another reality and way of thinking and being. Without the language, you cannot enter, cannot comprehend or participate fully.
As a writer, how was it to give up your main language? How did the limitations of your Italian influence your writing?
My break with English stunned me at first but it also intrigued me. I wanted to understand the impulse, the source of it. Expressing myself in Italian was, and remains, a continuous challenge. I find that my writing is more essential and that my thoughts are less inhibited.
When was the moment you felt proudest of your Italian?
The moment I describe in the book, in Capri, when I heard my spoken Italian translated back into English. At that moment, I realised I had crossed over to the other side.
In the book, you compare your passion for Italian to a romantic relationship. If it were a marriage at what stage would it be now?
It is still a very passionate affair. There is always something transgressive about it.
Did you publish the book with an Italian-speaking or an anglophone market in mind? If someone only speaks English how can they use the Italian parts in the dual language book?
The book was born as a series of notes to myself. I never thought they would be read by anyone else. But then the pieces were published in an Italian weekly magazine, Internazionale, so I had to make sure they were comprehensible and coherent for an Italian reader. Italian and English are closely related languages in the scheme of things. The alphabet is the same and they share many words with Latin roots. So the Italian text is a way to better appreciate the connection between the two languages and also to respect their differences.
Do you think you’ll continue to write in Italian? Or are there other languages you’d like to learn?
I returned to America four months ago to teach at Princeton University. I continue to write in Italian but I am about to begin a translation of Domenico Starnone’s novel Lacci from Italian into English. It would be wonderful to know and speak other languages. I was recently in India and I wished I spoke Hindi.
Interview by Kathryn Bromwich
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