After only a few days, I was sure that I was fated to live there. The first time I was there, in 2003, I felt a sense of rapture, an affinity. A city that has fascinated me since I was a child, that conquered me immediately. I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed At a certain point, I decide to move to Italy. As I study with her, the next, inevitable step in this strange linguistic journey becomes clear. At a certain point, the lessons become my favourite activity. Awaiting me is a place where only Italian matters. I forget, for several hours, the other languages I know. I go out of the house, leaving behind the rest of my life. I ride the subway to the edge of Brooklyn, almost to the end of the line. She’s a widow and lives in a house surrounded by wisteria, near the Verrazano Bridge. A Venetian woman who moved to Brooklyn more than 30 years ago. In 2009, I start studying with my third private teacher. When I go to Milan, when I try to speak intelligently, fluently, I am always aware of the mistakes that hamper me, that confuse me, and I feel more discouraged than ever. The teacher is very encouraging, she says I speak the language well, she says I’ll do fine in Italy. We sit next to each other on the couch and talk. An enthusiastic, attentive young woman from Bergamo. After its publication, in 2008, I receive another invitation to Italy, to promote it. My daughter is born and four more years go by. I count the sentences, as if they were strokes in a tennis game, as if they were strokes when you’re learning to swim. After that I stop it’s impossible to do more. I can’t remember them.Īt the festival in Rome, I manage to exchange three, four, maybe five sentences with someone. At the end of every lesson, the teacher gives me a long list of words that I lacked during the conversation. I’m pregnant with my daughter, who will be born in November. Video: Jhumpa Lahiri on writing, family and the immigrant experience. As if Italian were a book that, no matter how hard I work, I can’t write. I don’t tell her that I am tortured, that I feel incomplete. That I cherish a hope – in fact a dream – of knowing it well. I don’t reveal that Italian is an infatuation. I explain that I’m going to Rome in the summer to take part in another literary festival. She asks me why I want to learn the language. She teaches in a private school, she lives in the suburbs. A likable, energetic woman, also from Milan, arrives at my house. On it is written “Imparare l’italiano”-“Learn Italian.” I consider it a sign. A piece of paper torn from a notice that he happened to see in our neighbourhood, in Brooklyn. That I studied the language years ago but I can’t speak well. I tell him I would have liked to do the interview in Italian. I am in an overcrowded room, where everyone but me speaks an impeccable Italian. One day, I go to the Casa Italiana at New York University to interview a famous Roman writer, a woman, who has won the Strega prize. I need someone with whom I can struggle and fail. But with whom? I know some people in New York who speak it perfectly. Returning to America, I want to go on speaking Italian. Thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They switch to their language, although I’m able to respond only in a very simple way. When I mention that I’ve studied some Italian, and that I would like to improve it, they stop speaking to me in English. There, I meet my first Italian publishers. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too.Ī few months later, I receive an invitation to the Mantua literary festival. I don’t know how to read it or even write it. In my case, there is another distance, another schism. An absence that creates a distance within you. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. In a sense, I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. Italian belongs mainly to Italy and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Every language belongs to a specific place. M y relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.
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