5/28/2023 0 Comments In other words lahiri‘I underline almost every word on every page’, she tells us, later becoming more selective yet equally fervent, underlining ‘like a lunatic every use of the verb essere in the past’. Often Lahiri’s engagement with language takes the form of a relationship with the material text in which she records or reads it. The book exudes a fascination with the materiality of words, from the ‘green plastic cover’ of her first dictionary to the notebooks in which she later inscribes phrases and underlines those she fails to remember. A translation by Ann Goldstein is provided alongside the original. It’s her first work of non-fiction, and it’s also her first book written in Italian. In Other Words is a memoir that meditates on – and attempts to make sense of – Lahiri’s process of absorbing her identity as person and writer into a new tongue. Her desire to shake off the languages tarnished by personal history leads her to move to Rome and commence writing only in Italian, a language with which she has always been enamoured. Born to Bengali immigrants but brought up in America, she feels ‘without a homeland, and without a true mother tongue’, caught between two worlds and cultures. Jhumpa Lahiri’s life has been marked by a sense of ‘suspension’.
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