Jhumpa Lahiri: In Other Words

“In Other Words” (2015) by US writer Jhumpa Lahiri tells of her oft-unrequited love affair with the Italian language. Growing up in the US she spoke Bengali at home and English at school, but felt at home in neither – despite winning a Pulitzer Prize, the highest literary award in the US, for “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999). So in 2011 she set out for Italy to learn Italian. This book tells that story. She wrote it in Italian itself. The 2016 edition I read has an English translation by Ann Goldstein of the New Yorker. 

Bengali was her mother tongue, English her stepmother – and Italian her lover. Each one an ocean.

She spoke only Bengali for the first four years of her life. She was born in London when her father was going to the London School of Economics. When he got a job as a university librarian in the US, they thought they would live there for only a few years. A few turned into forty. She grew up in Rhode Island.

She started speaking English when she started school. Because it was the language she learned to read and write, the language she received her education in, it became her stronger language. But it was not the language she was loved in. So much so that when her son was born she spoke in Bengali because the words in English did not come. Yet family trips to India to see relatives made her feel inadequate in Bengali. She spoke with an accent, did not always understand.

She was a perpetual foreigner in India, and, like many Asian Americans, treated like one in the US. (My way of putting it, not hers).

Her experience growing up is most like that of Latinos in the US. For them there are four main outcomes according to psychologist Beverly Tatum (none of this appears in the book):

1. Withdrawal – into the Spanish-speaking world.
2. Assimilation – into the English-speaking world.
3. Bicultural – at home in both the Spanish and English-speaking worlds.
4. Marginalization – at home in neither.

She is marginalized, at home in neither. So she left to find a new home.

She fell in love with Italian by way of Latin on a trip to Italy with her sister in 1994. Her many attempts to learn Italian in the US ended in frustration. So in 2011 she resolved to only read, write and speak in Italian. Which meant moving to Italy. Her husband’s native Spanish allowed them to get by at first.

In time she felt more at home in Italian than either English or Bengali. But there is still a distance. First, because she does not know it like someone who has spoken it since childhood and feels she never will. Second, because of:

The wall: No matter how good her Italian – good enough to write a book after just two years! – there are always some people who cannot understand her, even though they can understand her Guatemalan husband’s markedly worse, Spanish-inflected Italian. Because he looks Italian, she does not. She came up against the same wall in the US, a big reason she could not feel at home in English.

– Abagond, 2023. 

See also:

• Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Stuff I Might Like
• growing up Latino
• Asian Americans
• The perpetual foreigner stereotype
• exiles
  • James Baldwin
  • Josephine Baker
  • W.E.B. Du Bois
• Bengali
• English

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