Found in translation

This weekend I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words , her maiden book in Italian (originally In Altre Parole ), translated into English by Ann Goldstein, who has also translated Elena Ferrante’s wildly successful Neapolitan Quartet. Actually, ‘read’ is not correct; ‘devoured hungrily, in one sitting’ is more like it.

It’s a short book, a collection of essays, tracing Lahiri’s fascination with Italian, her struggles with learning it, her move to Rome, her writing exclusively in Italian, and finally turning out this memoir of sorts.

Lahiri started learning Italian 20 years ago, after her first trip to Florence. She explains her love for the language in the book; “What I feel is something physical, inexplicable. It stirs an indiscreet, absurd longing. An exquisite tension.”

Inexplicable — I understand that. Five years ago, while on a sabbatical, I started studying the language at the Indo-Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Mumbai. I don’t know why I chose to study Italian. I had learnt French in school, but I was hardly fluent. It might have been smarter to brush up French, or learn Spanish or German, or even Mandarin — languages that have a larger ‘application’ in the global scheme of things.

My teacher Valentino insisted, from the very beginning, that we eschew English when we speak in class. It was a difficult process; the grammar and sentence formation is quite different from English. Little by little, short sentences became possible, yet I’d shy away from speaking them. As my confidence grew, Valentino and I were able to have short bursts of conversations, without my cringing mentally at my atrocious pronunciation.

Still, English is my dominant language (as Lahiri calls it), the language I think in, the language I use as a crutch. Lahiri likens this to swimming along the edge of a lake. “To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. Without a life vest.”

Lahiri ‘left the shore’ in 2012 and moved to Rome, along with her husband and two young children, to plunge headlong into Italian. “Rome — the first time I was there, in 2003, I felt a sense of rapture, an affinity. I seemed to know it already.”

Affinity — I understand that too. In a way, I have always felt this connection with Italy, with Italian. The first time I visited in 2013, everything seemed new, yet familiar. Not because you have already seen countless pictures of the Colosseum in Rome or Brunelleschi’s engineering masterpiece crowning Florence’s cathedral, or Venice’s Grand Canal.

No, it was deeper than that. Reading the street signs, shop names and menus in Italian (a language I now understood), or hearing the harried permesso (excuse me) on the metro. Or the perplexing allora — that catch-all word that can mean anything from ‘so’ and ‘well then’ to ‘hey’ or ‘at that time’, a filler that Italians use so often, a word that I took to using during the month I travelled around the country. Just the fact that I knew the language made the country seem like home.

In 2014 I went back to Italy for another month, this time also making it further south to Sicily, into small towns where people hardly speak English. In fact, they speak Sicilian, not Italian. In the tiny, medieval-era town of Piazza Armerina, where my B&B hostess literally spoke one word of English (okay), I got by with my halting Italian. Yet, like Lahiri, I can feel the foreign-ness of the language on my tongue. As she says, “We didn’t grow up with one another. This language is not in my blood, in my bones.”

As I read In Other Words , I am struck by how Lahiri’s growing confidence in Italian shows up on the pages. In the beginning, the sentences are shorter, quicker. By all accounts, Goldstein’s translation has remained faithful to Lahiri’s writing, so you can quite clearly see the vocabulary improving, the syntax getting more complex, as Lahiri progresses through the book. There are a couple of short stories in there too, and though they are written quite simply, there’s no doubt that there’s a skilled writer behind the prose.

“In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I’m always uncertain.” This very anxiety and basic style renders Lahiri’s writing more personal than her previous books. The ‘I’ is more obvious here, the struggle is more real, and for all to see. It must have not been an easy book for Lahiri to write. For someone who seems so private, putting so much of herself on paper must have been an arduous task. I remember standing in a mile-long queue on the lawns of Diggi Palace at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2014, waiting for a chance to get my copy of The Lowland signed by Lahiri. Even then, I could see her obvious discomfort at being in the spotlight.

After three years in Rome, Lahiri has now returned to the US with a prestigious tenure at Princeton. Will she continue writing in Italian? Will she return to English for her next book? Only Lahiri knows (or perhaps she doesn’t).

As for me, I’m still waiting to jump into the lake without a life vest. Though I admit that the idea of living in Italy for an extended period has crossed my mind more than once. In Other Words has certainly given me some food for thought.

Prachi Joshi is a Mumbai-based writer

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