Adventures in language …

… How Jhumpa Lahiri Learned to Write Again - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What truly marks this book as a departure for Lahiri is that she wrote it not in English (which isn’t her mother tongue; Bengali was spoken exclusively at home for the first four years of her life) but in Italian, a language she decided to teach herself as an adult. Such was her obsession with Italian that she moved her family (her husband, Alberto, and her two children, Octavio and Noor) to Rome for three years and essentially gave up reading or writing English. Open In Other Words anywhere and you will find Italian on one page and its English counterpart (rendered here by Ann Goldstein, whose other translations include the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante) on the opposite. It is a dichotomy that turns out, in the course of this brave meditation, to be a love story and a mystery all in one. In that story lies the beginning of all the books that the author has not yet written. As Lahiri describes it, “In learning Italian I learned, again, to write.”