A love letter to Italy

Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed, your second is shortlisted for the Man Booker and your next collection of stories goes straight to No.1 in the New York Times bestseller list, while prizes and honours are showered on you. Might the words ‘rest’ and ‘laurels’ come to mind? Not for Jhumpa Lahiri.

The Bengali-American author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake chose instead to swap New York for Rome with her husband and two young children for what she calls ‘a trial by fire’ into a new life and a new language: for nearly three years she read and wrote exclusively in Italian. In Other Words is an account of that total immersion, published in dual-language format, the Italian translated into English by Ann Goldstein.

Some readers might see Lahiri’s experiment as a risky attempt at kicking away the ladder to her own success. Italian-savvy readers can flip between left and right hand pages and see how each language imposes its own stress and nuance. As with any translation, the reader is inevitably nagged by the question: how close is this to the original? Reading the English pages I often found myself checking Lahiri’s own words. A curious activity: attempting to touch the truth of something written in Italian by a writer whose first language is English.

The emphasis is on her linguistic odyssey, interspersed with two short fictions. Her novels and earlier stories addressed the outsider/immigrant experience with tenderness and distanced irony; her Italian writing is personal, inward-looking, exploring identity and alienation, anatomising the state of mind of a writer who has more than one ‘mother tongue’. Others have been here before her — Beckett, Nabokov, Conrad — writing in an adopted language, but life dictated their decision; Lahiri’s was a willed choice.