In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
At a certain point my husband comes in with our son. Unlike me, my husband, an American, looks as if he could be Italian. He and I exchange a few words, in Italian, in front of the saleswoman. I show him a jacket on sale that I’m considering for our son. He answers in monosyllables, Sure, I like it, yes, let’s see. Not even an entire sentence. My husband speaks perfect Spanish, so he tends to speak Italian with a Spanish accent. He says sessenta y uno instead of sessantuno (sixty-one), bellessa instead of bellezza (beauty), nunca instead of mai (never); our children tease him about it. My husband speaks Italian well, but he doesn’t speak it better than I do.
We decide to buy two pairs of pants plus the jacket. At the cash register, while I’m paying, the saleswoman asks me: “Where are you from?”
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. The wall that will remain forever between me and Italian, no matter how well I learn it. My physical appearance.
I feel like crying. I would like to shout: “I’m the one who desperately loves your language, not my husband. He speaks Italian only because he needs to, because he happens to live here. I’ve been studying your language for more than twenty years, he not even for two. I read only your literature. I can now speak Italian in public, do live radio interviews. I keep an Italian diary, I write stories.”
I don’t say anything to the saleswoman. I thank her, I say goodbye, then I go out. I understand that my attachment to Italian is worthless. That all my devotion, all the passion signify nothing. According to this saleswoman, my husband can speak Italian very well, he should be praised, not me. I feel humiliated, offended, envious. I’m speechless. Finally I say to my husband, in Italian, when we’re on the street, “Sono sbalordita” (I’m stunned).
And my husband asks me, in English, “What does sbalordita mean?”
The episode in Salerno is only one example of the wall I face repeatedly in Italy. Because of my physical appearance, I’m seen as a foreigner. It’s true, I am. But, being a foreigner who speaks Italian well, I have two linguistic experiences, remarkably different, in this country.
Those who know me speak to me in Italian. They appreciate that I understand their language, they gladly share it with me. When I speak Italian with my Italian friends I feel immersed in the language, welcomed, accepted. I take part in the language: in the theater of spoken Italian I think that I, too, have a role, a presence. With friends I can talk for hours, at times for days, without having to rely on any English word. I’m in the middle of the lake and I’m swimming with them, in my own way.
But when I go into a shop like the one in Salerno I find myself abruptly hurled back to shore. People who don’t know me assume, looking at me, that I don’t know Italian. When I speak to them in Italian, when I ask for something (a head of garlic, a stamp, the time), they say, puzzled, “I don’t understand.” It’s always the same response, the same scowl. As if my Italian were another language.
They don’t understand me because they don’t want to understand me; they don’t understand me because they don’t want to listen to me, accept me. That’s how the wall works. Someone who doesn’t understand me can ignore me, doesn’t have to take account of me. Such people look at me but don’t see me. They don’t appreciate that I am working hard to speak their language; rather, it irritates them. Sometimes when I speak Italian in Italy, I feel reprimanded, like a child who touches an object that shouldn’t be touched. “Don’t touch our language,” some Italians seem to say to me. “It doesn’t belong to you.”
Learning a foreign language is the fundamental way to fit in with new people in a new country. It makes a relationship possible. Without language you can’t feel that you have a legitimate, respected presence. You are without a voice, without power. No chink, no point of entrance can be found in the wall. I know that if I stayed in Italy for the rest of my life, even if I were able to speak a polished, impeccable Italian, that wall, for me, would remain. I think of people who were born and grew up in Italy, who consider Italy their homeland, who speak Italian perfectly, but who, in the eyes of certain Italians, seem “foreign.”
My husband’s name is Alberto. For him, it’s enough to extend his hand, to say, “A pleasure, I’m Alberto.” Because of his looks, because of his name, everyone thinks he’s Italian. When I do the same thing, the same people say, in English, “Nice to meet you.” When I continue to speak in Italian, they ask me: “How is it that you speak Italian so well?” and I have to provide an explanation, I have to say why. The fact that I speak Italian seems to them unusual. No one asks my husband that question.
One evening, I’m presenting my latest novel in a bookstore in the Flaminio neighborhood of Rome. I’ve prepared for a conversation with an Italian friend—also a writer—on various literary topics. Before the presentation begins, a man whom my husband and I have just met asks if I’m going to make the presentation in English. When I answer, in Italian, that I intend to do it in Italian, he asks if I learned the language from my husband.
In America, although I speak English like a native, although I’m considered an American writer, I meet the same wall but for different reasons. 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. Those who meet me for the first time—when they see me, then learn my name, then hear the way I speak English—ask me where I’m from. I have to justify the language I speak in, even though I know it perfectly. If I don’t speak, even many Americans think I’m a foreigner. I remember running into a man on the street one day who wanted to give me an advertising flyer. I was returning from a library in Boston; at the time I was writing my doctoral thesis, on English literature in the seventeenth century. When I refused to take the flyer, the man yelled: “What the fuck is your problem, can’t speak English?”
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. In spite of my appearance and my Indian name, they speak to me in English. When I answer in Bengali, they express the same surprise as certain Italians, certain Americans. No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are a part of me.
I’m a writer: I identify myself completely with language, I work with it. And yet the wall keeps me at a distance, separates me. The wall is inevitable. It surrounds me wherever I go, so that I wonder if perhaps the wall is me.
I write in order to break down the wall, to express myself in a pure way. When I write, my appearance, my name have nothing to do with it. I am heard without being seen, without prejudices, without a filter. I am invisible. I become my words, and the words become me.
When I write in Italian I have to accept a second wall, which is very high and even more impermeable: the wall of language itself. But from the creative point of view that linguistic wall, however exasperating, interests me, inspires me.
A last example: one day in Rome I go to have lunch with my Italian publisher and his wife at the Hotel d’Inghilterra. We talk about the publication of my latest book in Italy, and about what I’m writing now, about my desire to write something about my relationship with the Italian language. We talk about Anna Maria Ortese and other Italian writers I’d like to translate. My publisher seems enthusiastic about these new projects I have in mind. He says that what I’d like to do—write, for the moment, in Italian—seems to him a good idea.
After lunch, something catches my eye in the window of a shop selling shoes and purses on Via del Corso. I go into the shop. This time I say nothing. I’m silent. But the saleswoman, seeing me, says immediately, in English, “May I help you?”—four polite words that every so often in Italy break my he
THE TRIANGLE
I would like to pause for a moment on the three languages I know. At this point a summary of my relationship with each one, and of the links between them, would be helpful.
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. It was hard for me to trust the teachers and make friends, because I had to express myself in a language that I didn’t speak, that I barely knew, that seemed to me foreign. I just wanted to go home, to the language in which I was known, and loved.
A few years later, however, Bengali took a step backward, when I began to read. I was six or seven. From then on my mother tongue was no longer capable, by itself, of rearing me. In a certain sense it died. English arrived, a stepmother.
I became a passionate reader by getting to know my stepmother, deciphering her, satisfying her. And yet my mother tongue remained a demanding phantom, still present. 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. One was always concealed behind the other, but never completely, just as the full moon can hide almost all night behind a mass of clouds and then suddenly emerge, dazzling. Even though I spoke only Bengali with my family, there was always English in the air, on the street, in the pages of books. On the other hand, after speaking English for hours in the classroom, I came home every day to a place where there was no English. I realized that I had to speak both languages extremely well: the one to please my parents, the other to survive in America. I remained suspended, torn between the two. The linguistic coming and going confused me; it seemed a contradiction that I couldn’t resolve.
Those two languages of mine didn’t get along. They were incompatible adversaries, intolerant of each other. I thought they had nothing in common except me, so that I felt like a contradiction in terms myself.
For my family English represented a foreign culture that they didn’t want to give in to. Bengali represented the part of me that belonged to my parents, that didn’t belong to America. None of my teachers, none of my friends were ever curious about the fact that I spoke another language. They attached no importance to it, didn’t ask about it. It didn’t interest them, as if that part of me, that capacity, weren’t there. Just as English did for my parents, Bengali represented for the Americans I knew as a child a remote culture, unknown, suspect. Or maybe in reality it represented nothing. Unlike my parents, who knew English well, the Americans were completely oblivious of the language that we spoke at home. Bengali was something they could easily ignore.
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.
I was ashamed of speaking Bengali and at the same time I was ashamed of feeling ashamed. It was impossible to speak English without feeling detached from my parents, without an unsettling sense of separation. Speaking English, I found myself in a space where I felt isolated, where I was no longer under their protection.
I saw the consequences of not speaking English perfectly, of speaking with a foreign accent. I saw the wall that my parents faced in America almost every day. It was a persistent insecurity for them. Sometimes I had to explain the meaning of certain terms, as if I were the parent. Sometimes I spoke for them. In shops the salespeople tended to address me, simply because my English didn’t have a foreign accent. As if my father and mother, with their accent, couldn’t understand. I hated the attitude of these salespeople toward my parents. I wanted to defend them. I would have liked to protest: “They understand everything you say, while you can’t understand even a word of Bengali or any other language in the world.” 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 had to joust between those two languages until, at around the age of twenty-five, I discovered Italian. There was no need to learn that language. No family, cultural, social pressure. No necessity.
The arrival of Italian, the third point on my linguistic journey, creates a triangle. It creates a shape rather than a straight line. A triangle is a complex structure, a dynamic figure. The third point changes the dynamic of that quarrelsome old couple. I am the child of those unhappy points, but the third does not come from them. It comes from my desire, my labor. It comes from me.
I think that studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and Bengali. A rejection of both the mother and the stepmother. An independent path.
Where is this new path leading me? Where does the flight end, and when? After fleeing, what will I do? It’s not really a flight in the strict sense of the word. Although I’m fleeing, I realize that both English and Bengali are beside me. Just as in a triangle, one point leads inevitably to another.
English and Italian seem to be the two closest points. Having in common many words of Latin origin, they share a certain territory. Needless to say, I often come across a word in Italian that I already know thanks to the English equivalent. I can’t deny that my comprehension of English helps. But it can also mislead me. Every so often, I think I know the meaning of a word in Italian because of the Latin root, but when I have to define it I’m wrong, and I realize that I haven’t learned the proper meaning in English, either. 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.
The distance between Bengali and Italian, apart from their shared Indo-European roots, seems much greater than that between Italian and English. As far as I know, they have only one word with a meaning in common: gola (throat). In Bengali one says chi (who) for che (that), and che to mean chi. These are trifles. And yet Bengali helps me in another way. Because I grew up speaking Bengali, I don’t speak Italian with an Anglophone accent. My tongue is already adapted, conditioned for the pronunciation of Italian. I recognize all the Italian consonants, the vowels, the diphthongs; I find them natural. From the phonetic point of view, I find Bengali much closer to Italian than to English. I have to admit, therefore, that in certain ways Bengali, too, accompanies me, helps me in this flight.
Where does the impulse to introduce a third language into my life, to create this triangle, come from? What does the triangle look like? Is it equilateral or not?
If I were drawing it I would use a pen to draw the English side, a pencil for the other two. English remains the base, the most stable, fixed side. Bengali and Italian are both weaker, indistinct. One inherited, the other adopted, desired. Bengali is my past, Italian, maybe, a new road into the future. My first language is my origin, the last the goal. In both I feel like a child, a little clumsy.
I’m scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It’s a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.
Italian remains an external language. It, too, might disappear, especially when I have to leave Italy, if I don’t continue to pursue it.
English remains the present: permanent, indelible. My stepmother won’t abandon me. Even though the
I think that this triangle is a kind of frame. And that the frame contains my self-portrait. The frame defines me, but what does it contain?
All my life I wanted to see, in the frame, something specific. I wanted a mirror to exist inside the frame that would reflect a precise, sharp image. I wanted to see a whole person, not a fragmented one. But that person wasn’t there. Because of my double identity I saw only fluctuation, distortion, dissimulation. I saw something hybrid, out of focus, always jumbled.
I think that not being able to see a specific image in the frame is the torment of my life. The absence of the image I was seeking distresses me. I’m afraid that the mirror reflects only a void, that it reflects nothing.
I come from that void, from that uncertainty. I think that the void is my origin and also my destiny. From that void, from all that uncertainty, comes the creative impulse. The impulse to fill the frame.
THE METAMORPHOSIS
Shortly before I began to write these reflections, I received an email from a friend of mine in Rome, the writer Domenico Starnone. Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he wrote, “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.” How much those words reassured me. They seemed to echo my state of mind after I came to Rome and started to write in Italian. They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language: to subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis.
Around the same time that I received this note, I was asked, during an interview, what my favorite book was. I was in London, on a stage with five other writers. It’s a question that I usually find annoying; no book has been definitive for me, so I never know how to answer. This time, though, I was able to respond without any hesitation that my favorite book was the Metamorphoses of Ovid. It’s a majestic work, a poem that concerns everything, that reflects everything. I read it for the first time twenty-five years ago, in Latin, as a university student in the United States. It was an unforgettable encounter, maybe the most satisfying reading of my life. To understand this poem I had to be persistent, translating every word. I had to devote myself to an ancient and demanding foreign language. And yet Ovid’s writing won me over: I was enchanted by it. I discovered a sublime work, a living, enthralling language. As I said, I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.