In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

In Other Words

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

Genre: Nonfiction / Memoir

Date: 29 September 2021

Rating: 4 stars

Review: At its heart, this collection of reflective essays or fragmented memoir is a love story. It chronicles the at times difficult at times charming courtship of Lahiri with the stubborn, flitting and melodic Italian language. A love that compelled her to move halfway across the world, hoping to be closer to it and immerse herself in it. A love that is all encompassing and both heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. 

Whenever I read translated books I feel this urge to pick my ass up and learn the original language the book was written in just to see for myself all that was lost in the process. The biggest example of this has to be another book translated by Ann Goldstein, the translator of this book, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. But never has this feeling been more pertinent than while reading this book.

I wish I had both the courage and the privilege to leave everything, the country I know, the language I know, the safety of a very successful job doing what I love and chase a language that is elusive. That is what Lahiri does. Her decision to drop English as the language she writes in and adopt Italian, even though in her own words she is still a novice, writing simple sentences without the flourishes she can include while writing in English to me sounds crazy. She talks about how she didn’t make the conscious decision to start writing in Italian, it just happened because she felt so close to a language that she was not forced to learn but rather chose to. 

But that is the decision she has made and it is a courageous one. In In Other Words, Lahiri describes the journey that she embarked on after she made the decision to learn Italian. Armed with beautiful language, I read the translation so it could be just Goldstein’s prowess but I doubt it, and beautiful metaphors she talks about her thought process during the entire thing. Learning a new language as an adult is not easy. Our minds block out the possibility of new vocabulary, forget new rules of grammar and conjugation. She describes these processes in a manner that makes reading about someone else’s journey with a new language interesting. 

My favourite essay would have to be the one in which she talks about the biggest block she meets while talking in Italian in Italy. Lahiri is an Indian and due to the colour of her skin the people she meet immediately assume she does not know the language, going so far as to not understand it when she speaks it perfectly well because they refuse to listen to her. The judgments of their eyes make them deaf to the words she says. Meanwhile, her husband is white and called Alberto, so people around her, shopkeepers and people they meet on the streets assume he is either Italian or knows the language better than her, when the contrary is true. It speaks a lot to the stereotypes that people attach to a language. 

I, especially, loved her exploration of her relationship to the different languages she speaks. There is the feeling of duty and loyalty she feels towards Bengali because she speaks to her parents in it. English is her crutch, her strongest language, and yet she feels like that it was forced on her. And the intense passion and later motherly love she has towards Italian. As a writer, Lahiri’s world revolves around language and she expresses that really well in this book. 

The first story that Lahiri wrote completely in Italian, The Exchange, is also included in this book and I really enjoyed it. Again, I wish I could have read it in the language it was originally written in but the idea behind it is wonderful. I haven’t read anything by Lahiri other than The Namesake and this one. I think that is a mistake I must rectify as soon as possible. 

By the way, this was the second book I borrowed from my library. I just couldn’t pick up two frivolous books in a row so I acceded and decided to pick books alternately. I am a snob!