Jhumpa Lahiri pens love affair with Italian in new book ‘In Other Words’

An inexplicable craving for Italian language compelled Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri to go live in Rome, moving home to Italy from Rhode Island in the US. 

The Pulitzer-winning writer who shot to fame with her simple yet pathos ridden style of storytelling in English has in fact put her authority as an accomplished author at stake with her latest autobiographical account, In Other Words(In altre parole) that she penned originally in Italian. The barely 200-page-long book translated by Ann Goldstein, that bears a picture of the bemused author most likely in “a library in the ghetto in Rome” on the cover is the first book that she has written in the “adopted, desired” language. “My Italian is still limited compared to my English. And yet it is the sole language in which I continue to write. Writing in Italian is a choice on my part, a risk that I feel inspired to take,” says Lahiri. She is impatient in revealing her secret crush on Italian and confesses her desperate love for the language even before she barely reaches the twentieth page. 

She says, “It (Italian) seems like a language with which I have to have a relationship. It’s like a person met one day by chance, with whom I immediately feel a connection, of whom I feel fond of...What I feel is something physical, inexplicable. It stirs an indiscreet, absurd longing. An exquisite tension. Love at first sight.” 

It is only much later in the book, when she is assigned the reluctant task of translating one of her own Italian pieces into English to be presented at a literary festival in Capri, does her initial infatuation transform into a motherly affection seeking to protect her newborn from his dominating and stronger elder brother, English. 

“Now, as I translate myself, I feel like the mother of two children...I feel split in two...I know that Beckett translated himself from French to English. That would be impossible for me, because my Italian remains much weaker. They aren’t equal, these two brothers, and the little one is my favourite,” she explains. 

But why would a writer as affluent as Lahiri not translate the book herself? She answers, “Returning to English was disorienting, frustrating, also discouraging. It made me question the value of the experiment I had undertaken.”