In Other Words

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words is a memoir, originally written entirely in Italian and translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Part linguistic autobiography and part meditation on identity, the book traces Lahiri's decades-long passion for the Italian language, her decision to move to Rome and immerse herself completely, and her radical choice to abandon English and begin writing exclusively in Italian.

In an author's note, Lahiri explains why she did not translate the book herself. Returning to English was disorienting, making her acutely aware of how limited her Italian remained. She had written exclusively in Italian for more than two years and feared that self-translating would break that discipline and tempt her to improve the text with her stronger language, betraying the honesty of the original.

The book opens with an extended metaphor. Lahiri describes wanting to cross a small but deep lake, watching others do so with ease. For a month she swam only along the circumference, close to shore. Then one morning she crossed with two friends, arrived on the other side charged with energy, and crossed back, elated. She connects this image to twenty years of studying Italian while remaining safely tethered to English. A few weeks after crossing the lake, she made a far greater crossing, by ship across the Atlantic, to live in Italy.

Lahiri traces her relationship with Italian to a 1994 trip to Florence with her sister. While studying Renaissance architecture in Boston, she bought a small green pocket dictionary at a Rizzoli bookstore, valuing it more than a guidebook. In Florence, she used it to tell a museum guard they had lost a hat. The dictionary became her constant companion on every Italian trip, a sacred text and parental authority figure. Nearly twenty years later, after moving to Rome, she gradually stopped carrying it, recognizing a turning point, a sense of both freedom and loss.

That first week in Florence also produced a visceral connection to the sound of Italian. Lahiri describes the language as seeming already inside her yet entirely external, foreign yet strangely familiar. She compares the feeling to meeting someone by chance with whom one senses an immediate bond. She visited the tomb of Beatrice, Dante's unattainable beloved, and drew a parallel to her own situation: She was passionately in love with a language that would never need her.

Back in America, Lahiri's attempts to learn Italian unfolded in what she calls exile. She reflects on her existing sense of linguistic displacement: Bengali, her mother tongue, was foreign in America, and she could not read or write it, making it paradoxically a foreign language to her as well. She bought a self-teaching textbook, took elementary courses, wrote a doctoral thesis on Italian architecture's influence on English playwrights, and read Moravia with great difficulty. On trips to Venice and Mantua, she managed only the most basic interactions and had to rely on interpreters at literary events. A turning point came at Mantua, where her first Italian publishers, Marco and Claudia of Marcos y Marcos, switched to speaking Italian with her despite her halting ability, correcting her gently and patiently.

Over the following years, Lahiri studied with three private teachers in the New York area, progressing slowly. The third, a Venetian widow living near the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn, became especially important. Lahiri loved the hour-long subway ride to her house, which felt like an escape to a place where only Italian mattered. After four years of lessons, the next step became clear: She decided to move to Italy.

She chose Rome, a city that had fascinated her since her first visit in 2003. Six months before departure, she renounced reading in English entirely and immersed herself in Moravia, Pavese, Quasimodo, and Saba, reading slowly and finding every unknown word a jewel. She felt divided, finishing a novel in English while reading exclusively in Italian, her stronger tongue already seeming behind her.

The family arrived in Rome just before the mid-August holiday. On their second night, the apartment door jammed, and with no phone, no contacts, and no documents, they were stranded until a locksmith came. One week later, Lahiri opened her diary and, almost automatically, began writing in Italian, no longer hearing English in her brain. The clandestine diary became her sole consolation during the first months. She describes the act as writing with her left hand, a transgression and rebellion, and recognizes the resulting voice as the most genuine part of herself.

From the diary, she moved to short descriptive pieces, then to fiction. One day in a Roman library, an entire story in Italian came to her in a flash. She wrote it rapidly in a notebook over two sessions, without a dictionary. The story, "The Exchange," concerns a translator who moves to an unfamiliar city with almost nothing except a black sweater. Months later, while running in a park, the meaning struck her: The sweater is language. Presented in full within the book, the story explores identity as something inescapable yet ends with the protagonist accepting transformation, preferring the unfamiliar sweater to the lost one, recognizing that she, too, has become another.

Throughout the book, Lahiri develops metaphors for writing in a new language. Venice's pedestrian bridges, constructed and fragile over canals of English flowing beneath, represent sentences that might collapse at any moment. The underground passages at Hadrian's Villa, an ancient imperial retreat near Rome, stand for the subterranean depths of Italian she cannot access. She concludes that impossibility itself sustains her: If she could bridge the distance, she would stop writing in Italian.

Lahiri examines the grammatical difficulties that plague her, particularly the distinction between the imperfect and simple past tenses, and identifies personally with the imperfect: A sense of imperfection has marked her entire life. As a girl in America, she tried to speak Bengali perfectly for her parents while wanting to be considered fully American, yet succeeded at neither. Italian's arrival at around age twenty-five created a triangle, a third point born not from her parents but from her own desire, a flight from the long clash between English and Bengali.

Drawing on Ovid's Metamorphoses, which she identifies as her favorite book, Lahiri connects her experience to the myth of Daphne, who transforms into a laurel tree while fleeing Apollo. She recognizes herself in that fusion of two natures and identifies what she is fleeing: not English itself but the consuming struggle with identity it has always represented, and even the literary success she felt she did not deserve. A total metamorphosis is impossible, yet she feels both more protected and more exposed in Italian, a tougher, freer writer growing differently.

A chapter on physical appearance reveals a persistent barrier. In a Salerno shop, after Lahiri spoke fluent Italian at length, a saleswoman assumed her American husband was the Italian speaker because he looked the part. Lahiri confronts the fact that her appearance means she is perpetually perceived as foreign, a wall she also faces in America and in Calcutta. She concludes that writing is the only way to break this wall: On the page, her appearance has no bearing.

In an afterword, Lahiri draws a sustained parallel to Henri Matisse's late paper cutouts, a technique born from physical limitations that produced a more abstract style. She describes finding notes she had scribbled backward in a notebook during her first months in Rome, glimpsing a narrative arc, and writing the chapters in order, one per week for six months. She calls the book a linguistic autobiography and self-portrait, her most intimate work. She cites notable Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg's declaration, "I have invented nothing" (213), yet argues she has also invented everything, since writing in a new language means starting from zero. Facing the prospect of leaving Rome, she acknowledges deep ambivalence but expresses hope that the book, born and raised in Italy though its author was not, will have an identity of its own.