Reading in another language is more intimate, more intense . . .. We didn’t grow up with one another. Writing in a different language means starting from zero. . .. It comes from a void, and so every sentence seems to have emerged from nothingness.
I have just finished a most remarkable book by Jhumpa Lahiri, the American-raised daughter of Indian immigrants and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She grew up speaking Bengali, was educated in English, and fell in love with Italian as an adult. Then with four works books to her credit, she moved to Italy in a quest for fluency. In Other Words (Penguin Random House 2016, at 231 pages), is a reflective journal written in Italian, chronicling her progress and sense of otherness while also defining the language acquisition process in imagery so rich even a xenophobe can understand.
Having lived abroad and wrestled with three Romance languages myself, I was with her all the way in this journey she compares to swimming across a vast lake. I could visualize the “basket” of words she gathers each day like berries, only to feel them slip through her fingers like water. Her frustrations are palpable, but so too the victories. For those who have not endured the immigrant experience, this book is as close as you can get to the real thing. Unique for its bilingual layout; each spread is in Italian on one side and English on the other—the translation not her work but that of another, as she insisted on maintaining the separateness of her two worlds, her two brains so to speak.
To hear her read from the work and discuss what it means to her, watch this “State of the Arts” feature interview.