In Other Words: A Memoir (Italian Edition)

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing in Italian is a choice on my part, a risk that I feel inspired to take.

…I needed a different language: a language that was a place of affection and reflection. —ANTONIO TABUCCHI

After a crossing, the known shore becomes the opposite side: here becomes there.

To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore.

becomes both a map and a compass, and without it I know I’d be lost.

a sacred text, full of secrets, of revelations.

“provare a = cercare di” (try to = seek to).

It seems strangely familiar. I recognize something, in spite of the fact that I understand almost nothing.

I realize that there is a space inside me to welcome it.

I feel a connection and at the same time a detachment.

There will always be something unbalanced, unrequited. I’m in love, but what I love remains indifferent.

missing them pushes me, slowly, to learn the language.

Permesso? May I?

I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language.

I nurture a hope—in fact a dream—of knowing it well.

Awaiting me is a place where only Italian matters.

The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel. Every unknown word a jewel.

I believe that what can change our life is always outside of us.

I’m an apprentice, my work will never end.

When I discover a different way to express something, I feel a kind of ecstasy.

Although defeated, I don’t feel too discouraged. If anything, I feel even more determined.

I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.

My sole intention, along with a blind but sincere faith, is to be understood, and to understand myself.

The diary provides me with the discipline, the habit of writing in Italian.

a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.

I’m afraid it will all disappear before I can get it down.

Everything unfolds calmly. I don’t use the dictionary.

The translator’s mind emptied. She began to feel light, anonymous.

At night she slept well. In the morning she woke without worries.

She didn’t think of the future or of the traces of her life.

she was alive, she felt more aliv...

Before I became a writer, I lacked a clear, precise identity. It was through writing that I was able to feel fulfilled.

have been enough for me to enjoy all the happiness in the world if I hadn’t experienced freedom, if I didn’t feel in my heart a gnawing fever for all the joys that are outside these walls!”

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words.

Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life.

Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor.

“It’s extremely useful to know that there are certain heights one will never be able to reach.”

I know that I will never be securely inside that heart, I try, through writing, to reach it.

I wonder if I’m going against the current.

Thanks to technology, no waiting, no distance.

We are always connected, reachable.

A foreign language can signify a total separation.

Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.

If everything were possible, what would be the meaning, the point of life?

In the middle of every bridge I find myself suspended, neither here nor there. Writing in another language resembles a journey of this sort.

Walking in Venice, like writing in Italian, is an experience that throws me off balance. I have to give in. Writing, I

passionate dream that always seems about to dissolve. A dream that’s truer than life.

Every sentence, like every bridge, carries me from one place to another. It’s an atypical, enticing path. A new rhythm. Now I’m almost used to it.

The effect of this illusion is astounding, disconcerting—the perspective shifts, so that you see two versions of the same thing, two possibilities, at the same time.

I had two sides, neither well defined. The anxiety I felt, and still feel, comes from a sense of inadequacy, of being a disappointment.