Jhumpa Lahiri is one of literature’s linguistic nomads. Born in London to Indian immigrants, her first language was Bengali. She learned English while young (she was raised in Rhode Island) and in it has written four authoritative works of fiction, including “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.
“In Other Words” is Ms. Lahiri’s first nonfiction book. It’s a slim memoir that examines her long sense of lexical displacement. Bravely, it does so from an outpost of further exile. She has written it in a third and only recently mastered language, Italian, and has had it rendered back into English by Ann Goldstein, the gifted translator of Elena Ferrante and Primo Levi. For English-language readers, this book has taken the long way home.
Learning to read and write in Italian has clearly been an invigorating experience for Ms. Lahiri; she speaks of it as one speaks of an intense sexual affair. “When you’re in love, you want to live forever,” she writes. “You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.”
“In Other Words” is, sadly, a less ecstatic experience for you and me. It’s a soft, repetitive, self-dramatic and self-hobbled book, packed with watercolor observations like: “There is pain in every joy. In every violent passion a dark side.” That someone gets a lot out of writing something does not necessarily mean anyone else will get a similar amount from reading that thing. If only literature worked that way.
This book, which is presented in a dual-language format (Italian on the left-hand pages, English on the right), chronicles a long obsession. Ms. Lahiri first traveled to Italy in 1994, as a college student. She returned frequently over the years, often on trips to promote her books.
She began to study Italian and, living in Brooklyn, hired a series of language tutors. Eventually she moved with her husband and children to Rome for what she calls a “trial by fire.” She stopped reading and speaking in English almost entirely; she also stopped writing in it. She achieved near-total immersion.
“In Other Words” is an account of this process, and there are vivid things in it. Ms. Lahiri captures how, for example, the sounds other cultures make can tweak our synapses and linger in the mind.
“From the start my relationship with Italy is as auditory as it is visual,” she writes about an early trip to Florence. “Although there aren’t many cars, the city is humming. I’m aware of a sound that I like, of conversations, phrases, words that I hear wherever I go. As if the whole city were a theater in which a slightly restless audience is chatting before the show begins.”
She is incisive about being caught between Bengali and English when young, and not feeling entirely at ease in either. She considers, if only in passing, the work of writers who have composed successfully in a second language (Nabokov, Beckett, Conrad). She seems to agree with Beckett who, after he began writing in French, complained about his native English: “Horrible language, which I still know too well.” He spoke of his “need to be ill equipped.”
Beckett downshifted into a new language and achieved a brilliant sort of estrangement. Ms. Lahiri, writing in Italian, at this point seems only a lesser version of herself, a full orchestra reduced to tentative woodwinds.
Ms. Lahiri is humbly aware that she has turned homework exercises loose on the world. “I know that my writing in Italian is something premature, reckless, always approximate,” she says. She poses a question that has already formed in the reader’s mind: “What does it mean, for a writer, to write without her own authority?”
It can mean many things. In the case of “In Other Words” it means that Ms. Lahiri delivers sentences she never would in her mostly sure-footed fiction, clichés teased out at great length. Here she is, for example, on time’s passage:
“The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still.” This belongs in a book of anti-quotations.
The author’s writing about Venice is the windiest since the lesser moments in Erica Jong’s novel “Serenissima” (1987). Ms. Lahiri writes about this city: “Its devastating beauty pierces me, I’m overwhelmed by the fragility of life. I’m enveloped in a passionate dream that always seems about to dissolve.”
So many sentences in “In Other Words” are like these. They appear as if through a mist. Whatever sharpness and shrewdness Ms. Lahiri possesses seems to have been surgically removed.
In an author’s note at the front of this book, she remarks that Italian “is the sole language in which I continue to write.” I hope this is not permanently the case, and that her immersion in Italian will inform her English-language fiction and push it in new directions.
Let us also hope that this memorable line from her recent novel “The Lowland” (2013) is not prophecy: “With her own hand she’d painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”
In Other Words
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
233 pages. Knopf. $26.95.
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