As If the Italian Language Were Already Inside Me

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and was raised speaking Bengali at home and then later English while growing up in Rhode Island.

In 1999, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, about the immigrant experience, Indian American identity, and cultural dislocation. But years before that, as a college student, she fell passionately in love with a third language, Italian. And eventually she and her husband and children moved to Rome, and she threw herself into learning by immersion. And in 2015, she published a remarkable memoir about that process. The book is called In Other Words, and it’s not so much a travelogue through Italy so much as an account of her step-by-step journey into another language. She writes about the daily struggle of being reduced to simple vocabulary and grammar and about the unattainable goal of ever being fully at home in another language, making her something of a linguistic exile in three different languages. And she writes, I read slowly, painstakingly, with difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist.

She writes about how she constantly hunts for new words in the streets of Rome and in conversations and reading books. And she compares that process to going out in the woods each day with a basket and scooping up all the words she can. But then she writes, when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear.

They vanish into thin air. They flow like water between my fingers. And eventually, she did get to the point where she was speaking and writing only in Italian, and she went on to write this entire book in Italian. But interestingly, she was adamantly opposed to translating the book into English herself, because she felt that trying to render it in English would mess with the language that she was still working so hard to learn. She writes, so that book was translated, in fact, by Anne Goldstein, the translator of Elena Ferrante’s novels.

And the book is unusual in that the print version has Lahiri’s own writing in Italian on one side, the English translation on the facing page. Or for an auditory treat, you can listen to the audio book that’s read by Lahiri herself, the first half in English and the second half in Italian.

And Grant, even if you don’t know Italian, it’s kind of lovely to listen to.

Oh, I’m sure she’s a lovely writer at that base.

And surely anything from her has got to be a treat.

I love the image of her as a linguistic truffle hunter.

There in the woods.

Well, that’s exactly it.

And the idea of there being a mist over the page, you know?

Oh, it’s so true.

It’s so true.

Yeah.

How many times do you have to see a word when you’re an adult, you know?

Yeah.

For it to stick.

50, 100, it feels like a thousand.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you’re trying to learn another language, I think you can really relate to this book.

I will add that I’ve seen it criticized by some Italians who say that her Italian writing sounds too much like English.

And others who say the English translation lacks her usual grace and sophistication.

And I can sort of see that, but I think it’s still delightful, you know, especially if you’ve had any experience with Italian or trying to learn another language.

And I think those two quirks, even if they’re valid criticisms, are part of the explanation of who she is.

Exactly.

They’re part of her imprint on the world and on the language world.

Exactly. Exactly. It’s a very honest book in that way.

What is the book again?

It’s called In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri.

That’s L-A-H-I-R-I.

And we will link to that book, of course, from our website.

Martha and I are always delighted when you share your reading with us.

Tell us what’s on your bedside table.

What’s going on the Kindle right now?

Send it to words@waywordradio.org.

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