Jhumpa Lahiri's showy 'In Other Words'
Other Wonders
first appeared in a different form in The New Indian Express
Sometime after finishing The Lowland—her last novel, Booker-shortlisted—Jhumpa Lahiri set about nursing a twenty-odd year infatuation with the Italian language. She moved to Rome. In the one year she lived there, she published a series of articles in Italian, about her own journey from being an acclaimed writer in English (with a rare commercial clout, no less) to being a novice in Italian. A compilation of these essays is Lahiri’s latest book In Other Words, also released in English translation. It charts, in first-person, the progression of a writer pushing herself out of a comfort zone, rediscovering joy in the ambiguous meanings contained in words, grappling with grammar, dealing with the disdain of native speakers, and finally, trying to attempt a cogent communication using the new language.
In Other Words is a personal book, one where the writer talks of her own sensitivity with great nuance. Although it gives a sense of Lahiri’s hard, and at times desperate, push for learning Italian to a degree where she could write in it, one also cannot take away the feeling that it is a book of indulgence. An essay of 5000 words would have sufficed.
Lahiri leaves the comfort zone of English, but she doesn’t leave the comfort zone that is the very name, Jhumpa Lahiri. Perhaps it is too much to ask, although the criticism is sort of invited in the book. She mentions Fernando Pessoa, the Portugese writer who wrote through multiple pseudonyms, presumably to always become another. Lahiri, too, confessedly took to the Italian project because of the same desire.
One wonders the extent to which she was successful. The text here was first sent to an Italian tutor for corrections, then to two Italian writers for suggestions, then to the editors of the magazine who published them in series. Jhumpa Lahiri can either afford all this or is afforded all this. In Italian, she was never just a novice—she was a superstar novice, with every step and misstep of hers being celebrated. It is all earned privilege, true, but it is also a locked room.
Knots in Lahiri’s self are always being resolved by the experience of learning and writing in the new language. With Italian, she constructs a triangle of meaning in her life, which was earlier only the two dainty lines of Bengali and English, unable to combine to provide any closure of identity. Paradoxically, Lahiri’s identity problem is a distinctly American one, and is in that sense somewhat rooted. In an era when migration into Europe is an idea fraught with all the problems of the world, bringing up ghastly images of humans in great strife, of Exile with a capital E, is it not grotesque that Lahiri moves from America to Italy in a single sentence? She may present herself as someone always in linguistic exile, but she is as an American, with an open passport to the world’s many corners. And that is not a bad thing to be born with.
first appeared in a different form in The New Indian Express
Sometime after finishing The Lowland—her last novel, Booker-shortlisted—Jhumpa Lahiri set about nursing a twenty-odd year infatuation with the Italian language. She moved to Rome. In the one year she lived there, she published a series of articles in Italian, about her own journey from being an acclaimed writer in English (with a rare commercial clout, no less) to being a novice in Italian. A compilation of these essays is Lahiri’s latest book In Other Words, also released in English translation. It charts, in first-person, the progression of a writer pushing herself out of a comfort zone, rediscovering joy in the ambiguous meanings contained in words, grappling with grammar, dealing with the disdain of native speakers, and finally, trying to attempt a cogent communication using the new language.
In Other Words is a personal book, one where the writer talks of her own sensitivity with great nuance. Although it gives a sense of Lahiri’s hard, and at times desperate, push for learning Italian to a degree where she could write in it, one also cannot take away the feeling that it is a book of indulgence. An essay of 5000 words would have sufficed.
Lahiri leaves the comfort zone of English, but she doesn’t leave the comfort zone that is the very name, Jhumpa Lahiri. Perhaps it is too much to ask, although the criticism is sort of invited in the book. She mentions Fernando Pessoa, the Portugese writer who wrote through multiple pseudonyms, presumably to always become another. Lahiri, too, confessedly took to the Italian project because of the same desire.
One wonders the extent to which she was successful. The text here was first sent to an Italian tutor for corrections, then to two Italian writers for suggestions, then to the editors of the magazine who published them in series. Jhumpa Lahiri can either afford all this or is afforded all this. In Italian, she was never just a novice—she was a superstar novice, with every step and misstep of hers being celebrated. It is all earned privilege, true, but it is also a locked room.
Knots in Lahiri’s self are always being resolved by the experience of learning and writing in the new language. With Italian, she constructs a triangle of meaning in her life, which was earlier only the two dainty lines of Bengali and English, unable to combine to provide any closure of identity. Paradoxically, Lahiri’s identity problem is a distinctly American one, and is in that sense somewhat rooted. In an era when migration into Europe is an idea fraught with all the problems of the world, bringing up ghastly images of humans in great strife, of Exile with a capital E, is it not grotesque that Lahiri moves from America to Italy in a single sentence? She may present herself as someone always in linguistic exile, but she is as an American, with an open passport to the world’s many corners. And that is not a bad thing to be born with.
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