In Other Words

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Other authorsAnn Goldstein (Translator)
Hardcover, 2016

Status

Checked out

Publication

Knopf (2016), 256 pages

Description

Biography & Autobiography. Foreign Language Study. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML:From the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful nonfiction debutā??an "honest, engaging, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words." ā??Kirkus Reviews (starred) In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love storyā??of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for "a trial by fire, a sort of baptism" into a new language and world. There, she begins to read, and to writeā??initially in her journalā??solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention. Read by the Author, in both English and the original Italian From the Compact Dis… (more)

Media reviews

Nothing reminds you how far you are from home more than trying to speak in someone elseā€™s tongue. As Jhumpa Lahiri writes in her gorgeous new memoir, ā€œIn Other Words,ā€ a language is as vast as an ocean; the most a foreigner can ever hope to make of it is the size of a lake. ā€œIn Other
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Wordsā€ presents the same author with a different voice. The English we read is not hers, but belongs to her translator, Ann Goldstein, who has garnered well-deserved praise for her translations of Elena Ferranteā€™s recent Neapolitan novels. Lahiri wrote ā€œIn Other Wordsā€ in Italian, refusing ā€” wisely, I think ā€” to translate her own work because she wished to maintain the discipline that has enabled her to write exclusively in Italian the past few years.
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Her unusual, personalised and relentless new book, which she describes as ā€œa projectā€, is an impressionistic and unexpectedly painful, clinical and at times strained, account of her struggle to master Italian. Perhaps Lahiri in time will find in Italian the passion and irony absent from her
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graciously melancholic fiction. She would do well to heed Makineā€™s opinion: ā€œLanguage is just grammar. The real language of literature is created in the heart, not a grammar book.ā€ It is difficult to detect any warmth within In Other Words only an aspiration to excel and, after all, ambition can prove a distancing motivation, as it does here. There is no celebration, only struggle; no humour merely frustration.
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Lahiriā€™s book feels starved of actual experiences of Italy, or reflections on how that language gives form to its different world. Monkishly, all her contemplation is turned inwards on to her own processes of learning, not outwards on the messy imperfect matter the language works to express. Very
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likely this period of withdrawal and purgation will turn out to have been necessary to finding her next step as a writer. But if we want our babies to live, we need to reconcile ourselves to their hairy adolescence, and then their necessarily fraught and compromised maturity. I was relieved when at the end of the book Lahiri was packing to return to America ā€“ and, presumably, however reluctantly, to English, which is her language, because she uses it with grownup mastery.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Clara53
A very unusual book, to say the least! The title is so suitable - a perfect allusion to what's inside, even though at first look it's just a common phrase. It's a bilingual book! Ms. Lahiri writes in Italian for the first time. Translation into English (page by page) is by somebody else - and her
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explanation, in Author's Note, as to why she didn't translate it herself is quite understandable. It's clearly no easy task - writing a book in a foreign language. Especially, when the author is so passionately in love with the language and doesn't permit herself any shortcuts.

It astonished me to what extent I can relate to the author in learning a new language. Her love for Italian sounds exactly like my love of English, the difference being that she is a writer and I am not. But the imagery she invokes in describing the process of learning Italian is absolutely stunning and so relatable (to me at least) that I thought I were reading my own thoughts (!), but expressed with so much more finesse.

The way she describes "constantly hunting for words" while living in Italy: "... every day I go into the woods carrying a basket. I find words all around: on the trees, in the bushes, on the ground (in reality: on the street, during conversations, while I read). I gather as many as possible. But it's never enough; I have an insatiable appetite..... At the end of the day, the basket is heavy, overflowing. I feel loaded down, wealthy, in high spirits. My words seem more valuable than money. I am like a beggar who finds a pile of gold, a bag of jewels." The book overflows with such passionate descriptions, her metaphor of the "Lake" and "Scaffolding" being some of the best examples (those reading the book would appreciate the meaning she seeks to convey...).

This is also Ms.Lahiri's first attempt at autobiographical writing. She describes herself in complicated relationship with Bengali - English - Italian. Each language means different things to her. She opens up a lot about her inner life, and that in itself is a compelling read.

She was warned by many about the incredible challenge of writing in a foreign language, but she embraced this challenge wholeheartedly, her passion for Italian being that great. She encounters endless frustrations, but they don't stop her, they just prompt her to go on - to someday to be totally fluent not just in speaking but in writing (as in literary writing) in Italian, even though she admits that she might be a lifelong apprentice to perfect her skills. But she seems to enjoy every minute of it.

She mentions several writers who write/wrote in a foreign language. And I might add another excellent writer to that list - Andei Makine... She herself is not sure if she will continue writing in Italian. But to me it felt it was an incredibly crucial quest for her - to write such a book. And even if it's the only one she writes in Italian, it doesn't matter. A huge deal is accomplished here.

In the end, she frankly alludes to her insecurity about this project, calling her writing "frivolous" and "presumptuous". But for some reason both this confession and the writing itself are that much more appealing. A very inspirational book!
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LibraryThing member amillion
I'm a devoted fan of Jhumpa Lahiri and have truly enjoyed and shared everything she's written... until this one. This is non-fiction, which I enjoy, but the story is her own self-indulgent story of forcing herself to learn and write in Italian. Ok, I get it, I'm trying to learn Spanish now and am
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amazed at the difference between learning vocabulary/phrases and actually being able to carry on a conversation, much less be fluent. Some of the experiences she describes, I definitely relate to. However, it seems like a wealthy, successful writer's complaints as she uproots her family and moves to Italy, complains about speaking/writing in English, complains about the nuances between languages, refuses to translate her own work into English (the book is opposing pages English/Italian - but she hired a translator), and is annoyed at returning to the U.S. and needing to speak English again. I'll look forward to Lahiri's next novel, but would not indulge a second book of this nature.
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LibraryThing member Writermala
"In Other Words" is like Lahiri's other books and yet it is not. The theme is that Lahiri falls in love with the Italian language and sets out not only to learn the language but to write in it! This is her achievement and what we are reading is her English translation - translated by another
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translator not Lahiri herself. I tried keeping up with the Italian version but failed miserably, needless to say, since my knowledge of Italian or lack thereof prevented me from appreciating it! The book is fraught with metaphors and Lahiri's analogies too are great. All in all a great read.
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LibraryThing member SamSattler
Jhumpa Lahiri, it seems, has always been suspended between very different cultures. The daughter of Indians from West Bengal who had migrated to England, Lahiri moved with her family to the United States at the age of two and grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island. Although the family spoke Bengali at
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home and her mother made sure that she understood her cultural heritage, Lahiri could not help but consider herself to be American. English may not have been her first language, but even as a little girl she often found herself asked by strangers to ensure that her parents understood the finer points of any conversation they were engaged in because her parents spoke with heavy Indian accents and her English was flawlessly spoken (a presumption that still irritates Lahiri to this day).

Lahiriā€™s debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was published in 1999 and has been followed by a second story collection and two well-received novels. In Other Words may be only her fifth book, but Lahiriā€™s writing awards are already numerous, including an O. Henry Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Humanities Medal.

And then she fell hopelessly in love with the Italian language she had before only flirted with from afar. So taken with the sound and construction of Italian that she and her family relocated to Rome so that she could completely immerse herself in it, Lahiri decided even to write in no other language. In Other Words is the result of that decision. The author, understanding the limitations of writing in a language as foreign to her as Italian is, did not even trust herself to interpret the work back into English for fear of being tempted into ā€œimprovingā€ the English version (the book was translated instead by Ann Golstein, an experienced translator who has worked with, among others, Primo Levi and Elena Ferrante). As she puts it, Lahiri is ā€œa writer who doesnā€™t belong completely to any language.ā€

In Other Words ā€“ which is part autobiography, part memoir ā€“ includes both the original Italian version (the left-hand pages) and the translated English version (the right-hand pages) of Lahiriā€™s manuscript. The 233-page book is comprised of an ā€œauthorā€™s note,ā€ twenty-three short reflections on her relationship to language and self-identity, and an ā€œafterword.ā€ Lahiri tells the reader that because she wrote In Other Words in Italian it is inherently different from her earlier work. ā€œThe themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured,ā€ she tells us.

In the end, though, despite all that she has achieved in her study of Italian, Lahiri feels a little ā€œinsecureā€ and ā€œembarrassedā€ by what her efforts have produced. She realizes now that for her, Italian will always be a work-in-progress and that she will always remain a foreigner to the language. But it has been three years since she has read or written much in any language other than Italian, and Lahiri believes that this has led her to a new ā€œcreative pathā€ that she would have otherwise never have found.

All in all, not bad for ā€œa writer who doesnā€™t belong completely to any language.ā€
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LibraryThing member nivramkoorb
This book was not what I expected. I saw that Jhumpa Lahiri was writing in Italian and this book was coming out. I thought it was going to be fiction. I have read 3 of her previous works and liked them very much. As it turns this book is a memoir written in Italian on the left side of the page and
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the English translation on the right. She did not do the English translation. The book was about her immersion in Italian going so far as to move with her family(husband, 2 kids) to Rome for 2 years and basically only speak, read, and write in Italian. The book describes the process through the eyes of a very talented writer of the English language. Normally, I would not read a non-fiction book like this but I was glad that I did. As one who reads a lot, it was great to get into the head of a great writer. It was interesting to read about her struggles to use her Italian toolbox to write and realize that it is not as robust as her English toolbox. I do hope that she goes back to writing in English because from what I read in this book, I doubt if she will ever be able to express herself in Italian like she does in English.
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LibraryThing member SaschaD
I wasnā€™t intending to read this tonight. In fact, Iā€™m immersed in a mystery novel by a Swedish writer, which will be reviewed here in the next day or soā€“or so because I visited my library account and saw that this book was about to expire and that there were 55 people waiting for the other
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copies. I shrugged, signed up for renewal, and thought that I might just scan the first chapter to see what I would be missing.

Now itā€™s two hours and 11 minutes later (thanks nifty counter in Overdrive) and I have read Jhumpa Lahiriā€™s collection of essays and two fictional, albeit semi-autobiographical, stories chronicling her immersion into the Italian language. This book was the outcome. It was translated by Ann Goldstein.

51wnsrzeh6l-_ac_us160_As I began reading, the first word that came to mind was: courage. Anyone who goes to another country barely knowing the language and becomes completely immersed, speaking the language, even if it is faltering, is courageous. To have as a goal to write a complete book in that language seems to go way beyond courageous.

Lahiri offers many reasons as to why she has done this. Some of the reasons arise from alienation, others from the need to express oneself artistically. She writes: ā€œMaybe because from a creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.ā€ She talks about metamorphosis and exploration and discovery in regard to learning and expressing oneself in another language. How it allows one to be vulnerable and how she felt that while writing in Italian she was writing from her true place.

As I was reading, I was struck by the poetry of the language and images. But here I have to stop. First, I have never read any of Lahiriā€™s novels (not yet, anyway; the adage so many books, so little time is alive and well in my world) so I canā€™t make a blanket statement about her writing style in English. Second, my year of college Italian will not permit me to read Lahiriā€™s actual text in anything close to 2 hours, nor the actual 17 hours I have before the book expires, so I wrestle with the idea of what is Lahiriā€™s and what is Goldsteinā€™s before I comment on lyricism. Iā€™m probably not going to wrestle. Iā€™m just going to say that what I read was beautifully written, so beautifully written and so well-considered that it gripped me enough to sit on this uncomfortable chair at my computer and read the entire memoir on this computer screen.

A recent review talked about the spate of memoirs hitting the market and how the more interesting ones were those in which the writer described an activity they were involved in rather than the typical celebrity name-dropping or tell-all. Here you have such a memoir. While it is a book about a famous writer leaning a new language, a love affair, if you will, it is also a discussion of the writerā€™s past, the first language she learned, the second, how those languages ultimately formed her. There is a great deal of introspection here and philosophizing, which I rather enjoy, but realize that they might not be everyoneā€™s cup of tea. I guess it could come across as self-indulgent, but it is a memoir and that strikes me as redundant.

Who would enjoy this book? Anyone who is a fan of Lahiriā€™s would probably find it well worth reading and perhaps a little distressing, wondering if she would ever write in English again. Also, writers and aspiring writers would probably find a lot of what she has to say interesting as she writes about the place where writers write from.

DISCLAIMER: ITā€™S LATE AND I LIKE TO WRITE THESE REVIEWS WHEN Iā€™M A BIT MORE ON MY GAME, BUT THOUGHT IF I DIDNā€™T WRITE IT WHILE IT WAS FRESH, IT WOULDNā€™T GET WRITTEN UNTIL I COULD REVISIT THE BOOK, WHICH Iā€™LL PROBABLY DO ANYWAY. SO, I APOLOGIZE FOR ANY VERBOSITY AND INCOHERENCE.
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LibraryThing member rmckeown
Jhumba Lahiri is a Bengali-American writer with four widely admired works of fiction to her name. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her works are sensitive portrayals of the struggles we all go through in our daily lives. In addition, she
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has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank Oā€™Connor International Short Story Award, among several others. In 2014, she won a National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. Jhumpa won a major Italian Literature Award for In Other Words.

The book has an interesting premise and structure. The left hand pages are all in Italian with the right side in English. Years before I ever heard of ā€œbucket lists,ā€ I made a note to myself that I would love to learn Italian well enough to read Dante in the original language. I tried a few self-study books and tapes, but I made little to no progress. I shelved the idea for my retirement. Jhumpa has taken a risky and bold step by moving to Italy and immersing herself in the language and culture of Italy.

In her ā€œAuthorā€™s Note,ā€ she explains this strange decision and why she did not translate the book herself. She writes, ā€œWriting in Italian is a choice on my part, a risk that I feel inspired to take. It requires a strict discipline that I am compelled, at the moment, to maintain. Translating the book myself would have broken that discipline; it would have meant reengaging intimately with English, wrestling with it, rather than with Italian. // In addition, had I translated this book, the temptation would have been to improve it, to make it stronger by means of my stronger language. But I wanted the translation of In alter parole to render my Italian honestly, without smoothing out its rough edges, without neutralizing its oddness, without manipulating its character (xiii-xiv).

Jhumpa also speaks Bengali when interacting with her parents. She mentions that they refused to change to English. She writes, ā€œI am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my motherā€™s rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine. ā€˜There was a woman ā€¦ who wanted to be another personā€™: itā€™s no accident that ā€˜The Exchange,ā€™ the first story I wrote in Italian, begins with that sentence. All my life Iā€™ve tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing. Thatā€™s why I was never happy with myself. Change seemed the only solution. Writing, I discovered a way of hiding my characters, or escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after anotherā€ (169).

I found her struggles with finding the correct word inspiring. I have profound admiration for her goals in this memoir. She explains why she writes, ā€œI write to feel alone. Ever since I was a child it has been a way of withdrawing, of finding myself. I need silence and solitude. When I write in English I take for granted that I can do without help. Someone may give a suggestion, point out a problem. But in terms of the linguistic journey I am self-sufficientā€ (185). With the exception of her last sentence, this explains exactly my feelings and emotional state when I write, alone, in a closed room.

In Other Words is a marvelous story of the struggles writers face. Follow Jhumpa Lahiri on her journey through -- and struggle with ā€“ the beautiful Italian Language. 5 stars.

--Chiron, 7-26-16
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LibraryThing member ursula
Jhumpa Lahiri has always felt a little detached from her "native" languages, thanks to being raised speaking Bengali with her immigrant parents, and speaking English in the rest of her daily life in the US. She never felt as if she fully had a place in either. And from there, she found a love for
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the Italian language and decided to do something totally crazy - immerse herself in it. She read exclusively in Italian to prep herself for a (temporary) move to Italy, and started writing exclusively in it as well.

The book talks about her journey in learning Italian, her thoughts about her own sense of displacement, her struggles with fame that came from winning the Pulitzer. The book also contains a couple of stories she wrote in Italian. The English edition features the Italian and English versions of the book on facing pages, which is an interesting choice, and fortuitous for me because it meant it was a rare case where I was able to find a book in Italian in the US. :) I enjoyed most of the book, although I think that her sense of searching comes through clearly and because it doesn't seem like something she has resolved, the book doesn't end with any sort of conclusion either. It's the log of an experiment, perhaps an ongoing one. But wow, could I relate to a lot of her thoughts on learning a language and the importance of abandoning the feeling of safety to just throw yourself into it.
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LibraryThing member stef7sa
I very much liked Jhumpa Lahiri's stories but this report about her attempts to learn Italian just bores me. She repeats herself often and the metaphors she constantly looks for to describe the situation of a writer in a foreign language surroundings are superficial, do not provide real insight.
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The best parts are where she talks about the reason for writing in general, regardless of the language, Italian or not.
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LibraryThing member pegmcdaniel
I won a copy of this book from the publisher, Knopf, via Read It Forward.

I wish I would have enjoyed this book reading it in English as much as Jhumpa Lahiri seemed to enjoy writing it in Italian. Maybe something was lost in translation. Too bad I wasn't able to read it in Italian just to be
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sure.

The talented Ms. Lahiri had studied Italian for about 20 years, loved the language and culture so much, she decided to move her family to Italy for total immersion so she could write in Italian. This is an autobiographical book telling us about her determination and frustrations in becoming affluent enough in Italian in order to write it.

While I found the premise to be interesting, I found the writing to be repetitive. There are only so many way to use different words to say the same thing. 3 Stars.
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LibraryThing member catnips13
I wanted the reading experience to be as authentic as possible, so I stumbled through the Italian. I read it out loud, slowly, carefully sounding out the syllables, but my mouth kept forming the words with English phonetics, French sounds, wanting to keep to the languages I knew. Every time I came
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across a familiar-looking word - "leggere", "curiosa" - my jaw muscles relaxed. It also helped that English was just across the binding. I glanced at it after every line. It was like the edge of the pool, something safe, like the shore of Lahiri's pond.

This struggle to sound out foreign letters left me astounded at Lahiri's perseverance. It must have been a Herculean effort, to completely cut out something that she knew she knew, to embrace something that she knew she would never know completely. And yet, despite of her imperfection, because of her imperfection, I could feel the lightness of her words, the loveliness of her metaphors.

I have read reviews where readers found this book self-indulgent. Perhaps it is. But one could argue that all books are self-indulgent, to satisfy a whim of the author. I found In Other Words wonderfully relatable. Living on the margins myself, I know what it feels like to feel exiled, to feel suspended, and yet I never knew how to express these feelings in words. Lahiri wrote them out for me. For this, I feel grateful.
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LibraryThing member MugsyNoir
This seemed like something between a public diary entry and a lamentation. Lahiri delves deeply into her feelings about first learning Italian, and then learning to write in Italian. She wrote this book in Italian, then had someone else translate it, then narrated the translation for the audio.
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Strange.
It was mostly very interesting, but at times she came across as whiny. Still, worth the read. Lahiri is a good writer and knows how to engage her reader.
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LibraryThing member Jessika.C
I feel awful for this butā€¦
Have you ever heard of a weeaboo? Someone who is obsessed with Japanese culture and language often lumped together with the crazed anime fans. Thereā€™s also koreaboo an obsessive fan of korean everything ranging from kdramas to kpop. Now I would like to know if
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thereā€™s one for Italian. Italiboo? Milaniboo? Romaboo? I donā€™t know. But there was quite a bit of cringe when I read this.

This book is about Lahiriā€™s journey in learning the Italian language. She details her struggles with fluency, immersion, and doubts of cultural identity. Perhaps itā€™s because I personally have never gone through a cultural identity crisis, I couldnā€™t relate. Like the author, I grew up with one language only to learn another because the country I lived in required it of me. Then I dabbled in another language for fun and community service of sorts. I was never ashamed of knowing another language other than English. When my parents spoke broken English I didnā€™t even blink. Even though I have a thick accent in my third language I just brush it off and keep trying to improve towards fluency but being accepted as a native speaker is not my goal.

As for the content of the autobiography, itā€™s very simple writing because Lahiri wrote it originally in Italian. In twenty years she has managed to get to fluency but in her writing, it didnā€™t feel very personal. Donā€™t get me wrong, itā€™s her story but it wasnā€™t very inspiring. Like cool you learned the language but why get offended at people asking where you learned it? I donā€™t know it just rubbed me the wrong way. To this day I still get people asking me why I donā€™t have an accent in my English.
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LibraryThing member adrianburke
Great book.
LibraryThing member CassandraT
This story is an epic. It is a tale of hard work and determination. Stories built on the reality of hard, discouraging work are rare and beautiful and encouraging to me. Jhumpa succeeds in writing in Italian, but will never speak it as well as English. I started the book at the perfect time, myself
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struggling to achieve difficult and pehaps unattainable goals. I'm learning Finnish to connect with my partner and his family. Reading this journey of Jhumpa's shows me that it's ok to struggle and wiggle and that we can get help and encouragement from our friends.
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LibraryThing member asxz
Probably for completists only. I have read all of Ms Lahiri's books and loved them for their dispassionate, detached prose and universalization of the the feeling of being an alien.

Here she takes it to the next level by writing in a new language. Originally published in Italian, this is an
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autobiographical account of self-alienation layered on top of a lifetime's experience of being 'other'.

No one writes about being an outsider quite like Jhumpa Lahiri.
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LibraryThing member lgaikwad
Iā€™ve read Lahiriā€™s The Lowland, Namesake, and Interpreter of Maladies. In Other Words is her memoir of choosing to inhabit the Italian language, leaving both English and Bengali behind.

Often an author describes a particular experience, and the reader says, ā€œOh! Thatā€™s me!ā€ Even though it
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would appear they have never had an experience remotely like the one described. For me, this book describes the emotions of cross-cultural identities and boundary-crossing in relationships. It describes the struggle toward something extremely difficult rather than resting in the security of where mastery has been achieved.

Time and space are collapsed today. We can barely evade constant connection and presence. Lahiri writes of languages as places where distances still exist. There are no shortcuts from one language to another, and few can truly make the journey. There is no true knowing or belonging without common language.

She is an American who grew up with English and Bengali as her mother tongues. She fell in love with Italian on a visit to Florence in 1994, and writes:

ā€¦ What I hear, in the shops, in the restaurants, arouses an instantaneous, intense, paradoxical reaction. Itā€™s as if Italian were already inside me and, at the same time, completely external. It doesnā€™t seem like a foreign language, although I know it is. It seems strangely familiar. I recognized something, in spite of the fact that I understand almost nothing.

What do I recognize? Itā€™s beautiful, certainly, but beauty doesnā€™t enter into it. It seems like a language with which I have to have a relationship. Itā€™s like a person met one day by chance, with whom I immediately feel a connection, of whom I feel fond. As if I had known it for years, even though there is still everything to discover. I would be unsatisfied, incomplete, if I didnā€™t learn it. ā€¦

Lahiri describes her journey into Italian. From ā€œexileā€ in her home in the U.S. to moving her family to Italy for total immersion. From sharing space with her other languages to complete commitment to Italian only.

She writes only in Italian now. This book has Italian on the right side, translated into English on the left by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri did not translate for herself, as to do so would drag her back to where she no longer wanted to be. It would sap creativity from her new ventures ā€“ her discoveries and struggle ā€“ by an overlay of her English mastery. She would too naturally bring her former ways of saying.

I like her thoughts about not translating backwards to a former way of being. It confines, allowing prior ways to conquer the present.

I appreciate hearing her experience of intentionally becoming a novice after achieving status, proficiency, and authority.

I like her thoughts on a passionate devotion to something ā€œmeaningless,ā€ never validated or allowed. But go there anyway.
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LibraryThing member CarrieWuj
I have really enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's other books, so was very intrigued when this came out. She herself describes it as a "travel book, more interior . . . than geographic" (211) And while I have loved her fiction, she sees this as having the same themes: "identity, alienation, belonging. But the
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wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured." Here she is exploring in a very intelligent, reflective way her relationship with language, specifically the Italian she has challenged herself to learn as an adult. She has been extremely thorough in her exploration: taking classes, working with private tutors, moving to Rome to be immersed, and rigorous self-study. Lahiri set herself the goal of being fluent enough to write in Italian and this book is the culmination. It actually appears in both Italian (left side) and English (right side -- which was translated by someone else). Using metaphors of swimming, clothing, metamorphosis, she explores the challenges of trying to become an author (authoritative) in a second language. It is admirable for her study alone -- to undertake such a feat as an adult without the necessity of immigration, but also for her reflection on how language shapes life and the complications of cultural heritage and assumptions and the contradictory nature of straddling 2 identities at once. Her east Indian roots, so familiar to her fiction are also incorporated with her fluency in Bengali completing a self-described triangle of literacy. To be so intelligent! This is an inspiring endeavor that succeeds nicely.
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LibraryThing member DrFuriosa
An interesting and challenging memoir about language. I admire Lahiri's ambition, though this writing was a bit disorienting. Her English prose is so different that at first this book, translated from Italian, felt like another writer's work. But isn't that the process with language, transforming
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us into other selves?
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LibraryThing member steve02476
Strange memoir. I really liked parts, and it was all good, but maybe not all likeable, at least by me. As a monolinguist Iā€™m fascinated by people knowing multiple languages, and her struggles with, and love for Italian were amazing to read about. I really loved her first 4 books (two novels, two
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short story collections) and part of me feels betrayed that sheā€™s shifting gears so entirely. Certainly thatā€™s her right, but it grieves me, like when a favorite musician goes on some new path that I donā€™t like.
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LibraryThing member Calavari
I love the concept of this memoir. It's not a memoir of Lahiri's life, just her obsession with learning and speaking Italian. I can relate, having lived in Italy a while and falling in love with the language, but my desire to learn it is nowhere near Lahiri's. Finding out that it's actually a
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memoir of learning another language really made me love the title too.

She also read the audiobook herself, which is something I always love. Don't get me wrong, I get the point between needing a separate narrator for books, but I especially love a memoir read by the author. It's not common, but I have run across those who don't. I enjoyed the audiobook and her manner of speaking throughout it. Lahiri has a beautiful voice.

As far as her obsession itself and the many methods by which she went through the process of learning Italian, I am pretty inspired. I've been struggling with Spanish my whole life. I'm Cuban on my mother's side but also first generation American born there too, so Spanish had been her first language and that of most of her side of the family. I could talk to them with limited ability to speak but a lot of understanding what they were saying as a child but I couldn't speak Spanish. Most of them know English by now too but inevitably return to their first language when they're together. I catch snippets, but that's about it these days. I just haven't been in a Spanish language environment enough to sustain what I knew since I moved out.

BUT Lahiri's idea to start a journal or diary in that language is genius. Even if it's all wrong, there is this safe space for trying pull the language out of your own brain, for trying to put together sentences when there is time to do so. One of the things that has driven me crazy about learning Spanish is the way people are always like "Just go out there and talk to people" and "immersion is the best method!" Somewhere along the way, these people missed that I am an introverted nerd who is uncomfortable and awkward enough speaking my first language in a group of strangers let alone a language that I am still trying to learn.

Given my experiences attempting Spanish, particularly since leaving Miami, I find all of Lahiri's methods inspired and brave. She moved to Italy to help herself learn Italian after she had tutoring and already knew two other languages. That's some dedication. I also love her stories about living in Italy and the comments she got. I was more like her husband, getting confused for locals all the time, but I witnessed plenty of interactions like she talks about when out with friends. Of course, I'm terrible with language and added this other awkward layer to the situation because I looked like a local but couldn't speak it and many of my more Caucasian or non-Hispanic friends stood out like a sore thumb but spoke beautiful Italian. It happens in Miami too with some fluent friends. It's always fairly entertaining, especially with my father who is blond with blue eyes and very fair skin. People will be speaking Spanish around him like he's not even there and sometimes talking about him and he'll smile and ask a question in poorly accented but good Spanish and everyone freezes.

Getting back to Lahiri, the book is quite short though. I listened to the audiobook which is almost 7 hours but is read in both English and Italian. The content ends up being about half that, and you could listen to both languages but I didn't. I also loved her note that she originally wrote the book in Italian and specifically did not do the translation into English on her own. I can't get over that she wrote it in Italian in the first place.

This is a great book about Italian and language and obsession. I loved every minuted of listening to it and plan to employ some of her strategies.
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LibraryThing member franoscar
A very nice book about language and this author's position in the world.

Language

Original language

English

Physical description

256 p.; 5.5 inches

ISBN

1101875550 / 9781101875551
Page: 1.0743 seconds