In Other Words

by Jhumpa Lahiri

I can’t take for granted my ability to accomplish it. I read as I did when I was a girl. Thus, as an adult, as a writer, I rediscover the pleasure of reading.

me. I think of two-faced Janus. Two faces that look at the past and the future at once. The ancient god of the threshold, of beginnings and endings. He represents a moment of transition. He watches over gates, over doors, a god who is only Roman, who protects the city. A remarkable image that I am about to meet everywhere.

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

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

They were like formal, artificial exercises. The voice didn’t seem to be mine.

In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I’m always uncertain. My sole intention, along with a blind but sincere faith, is to be understood, and to understand myself.

She loved the world too much, and people. She loved taking long walks in the late afternoon, and observing her surroundings. She loved the green of the sea, the light of dusk, the rocks scattered on the sand. She loved the taste of a red pear in autumn, the full, heavy winter moon that shone amid the clouds. She loved the warmth of her bed, a good book to read without being interrupted.

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 suspended in time, like a person without a shadow. And yet she was alive, she felt more alive than ever.

When I give up English, I give up my authority.

Maybe because from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.

I’m reminded of a passage in Verga, whom I recently discovered: ‘To think that this patch of ground, a sliver of sky, a vase of flowers might 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!’

Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on the earth.

Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It’s taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far.

If everything were possible, what would be the meaning, the point of life? If it were possible to bridge the distance between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.

Sometimes I hesitate when I compare two things, and so my notebook is full of sentences like Di questo romanzo mi piace più la prima parte della seconda. Parlo l’inglese meglio dell’italiano. Preferisco Roma a New York. Piove più a Londra che a Palermo

For good reason, what confuses me most in Italian is when to use the imperfect and when the simple past.

One says, la chiave era sul tavolo, the key was on the table. In this case a curving line, a situation. And yet to me it also seems a fact, the fact that the key was on the table. One says, siamo stati bene, we have been comfortable. Here we have the straight line, a condition that savours of conclusiveness. And yet to me it also seems a situation.

I know that sono stata in Greece for a week, but that ero in Greece when I got sick. I understand that the imperfect refers to a sort of introduction—an open-ended action, without boundaries, without beginning or end.

Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.

I think of Mantua thirteen years ago, and of the interpreter without whom I couldn’t express myself in Italian in public. I didn’t think I would ever reach this goal.

Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

There is pain in every joy. In every violent passion a dark side.

I explain that we live in Rome, that we moved to Italy last year from New York. At that point the saleswoman says: ‘But your husband must be Italian. He speaks perfectly, without any accent.’ Here is the border that I will never manage to cross.

Every so often, because of my name, and my appearance, someone asks me why I chose to write in English rather than in my native language.

I can’t avoid the wall even in India, in Calcutta, in the city of my so-called mother tongue. There, apart from my relatives who have known me forever, almost everyone thinks that, because I was born and grew up outside India, I speak only English, or that I scarcely understand Bengali.

My very first language was Bengali, handed down to me by my parents. For four years, until I went to school in America, it was my main language, and I felt comfortable in it, even though I was born and grew up in countries where I was surrounded by another language: English. My first encounter with English was harsh and unpleasant: when I was sent to nursery school I was traumatized.

My parents wanted me to speak only Bengali with them and all their friends. If I spoke English at home they scolded me. The part of me that spoke English, that went to school, that read and wrote, was another person. I couldn’t identify with either.

The more I read and learned in English, the more, as a girl, I identified with it. I tried to be like my friends, who didn’t speak any other language. Who, in my opinion, had a normal life. I was ashamed to have to speak Bengali in front of my American friends. I hated hearing my mother on the telephone if I happened to be at a friend’s house. I wanted to hide, as far as possible, my relationship with the language. I wanted to deny it.

And yet it annoyed me as well when my parents mispronounced an English word. I corrected them, impertinently. I didn’t want them to be vulnerable. I didn’t like my advantage, their disadvantage. I would have liked them to speak English as I did.

I am the child of those unhappy points, but the third does not come from them. It comes from my desire, my labour. It comes from me.

The more my comprehension of Italian increases, the more it reveals a weakness in English. The process deepens my understanding of both languages, and thus the flight is also a return.

What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren’t aware of before.

It often happened, he’s an absentminded man.

When he was young, untried, still looking forward to everything, the journey didn’t seem like an abyss.

Now he realizes the deeper meaning of the dream: the astonishment at having spent his life beside the same person.

Verisimilitude

‘I try to write true stories, but, at a certain point, the story becomes unbearable, precisely because of its truth, and so I’m forced to change it.’

‘in a book everything is true, nothing is true.’

Even if I remain half blind, I can see certain things more clearly. I feel more centred even if I’m adrift. I feel more at home, in spite of the discomfort.

Every book seems to me an unattainable goal until it is finished, but this one more than any other.