![]() ![]() Here I’m not directly quoting the author, but more accurately, Ann Goldstein’s interpretation of her words into English. I’d like to explain the source of this impulse of mine.” “I know that my writing in Italian is something premature, reckless, always approximate,” she confesses. Reflecting on her childhood as the daughter of Indian emigrants to the United States, she recalls never feeling entirely at ease with either English or Bengali, having to constantly negotiate between the two. Lahiri has never been a writer with a readily defined mother tongue. ![]() She’s far more interested in contemplating the act of writing itself, and specifically, her artistic desire to abscond from one language and find refuge in another. This isn’t a traditional chronological account of her physical voyage. Lahiri sacrifices her precise, award winning skill with English to write entirely, fumblingly, in Italian. The memoir – a work of remarkable literary daring – loosely follows Lahiri’s quest to learn Italian and her relocation from Brooklyn to Rome. By her account, difference is something to neither to conceal nor circumvent it’s a source of ecstatic wonder. ![]() Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent memoir, In Other Words (2016), promotes an alternative response to the opacity of foreign tongues. In altre parole (In other words), Jhumpa Lahiri, 2015. ![]()
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