Lahiri, Jhumpa, and Ann Goldstein. In Other Words. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
A couple times I got caught reading on the left side of the page and there was a moment of confusion, maybe of horror (I am lifting myself here). And then of new discovery, comparing the Italian.
Perfectly useless. I am reminded of a criticism I read of Buttigieg, the perfect elite uselessness of learning Norwegian. And how this is perfectly useless. She knows it’s a luxury only bestowed on a Pulitzer prize winner. At times grates on me but ultimately concluded it’s more gracious, to acknowledge rather than pretend.
“Usually when I read Italian I don’t use a dictionary. Only a pen to underline the words I don’t know, the sentences that strike me.
When I come upon a new word, I have to make a decision. I could stop for a moment to learn the word immediately; I could mark it and go on; or I could ignore it. Like certain faces among the people I see on the street every day, certain words, for some reason, stand out, and leave an impression on me. Others remain in the background, negligible.
After I finish a book I return to the text and diligently check the words. I sit on the sofa, with the book, the notebook, some dictionaries, a pen strewn around me. This task of mine, which is both obsessive and relaxing, takes time. I don’t write the definitions int eh margin. I make a list in the notebook. At first, the definitions were in English. Now they’re in Italian. That was O create a load personal dictionary, a private vocabulary that traces the route of my reading.” (41)
“Sometimes a word can provoke an odd response. One day, for example, I discover the word claustrale (cloistered). I can guess at the meaning, but I would like to be certain. I’m on a train. I check the pocket dictionary. The word isn’t there. Suddenly I’m enthralled, bewitched by this word. I want to know it immediately. Until I understand it I’ll feel vaguely restless. However irrational the idea, I’m convinced that finding out what this word means could change my life.” (43)
“When I discover a different way to express something, I feel a kind of ecstasy. Unknown words present a dizzying yet fertile abyss. An abyss containing everything that escapes me, everything possible.” (45)
“I don’t think my project is a waste of time. I know that its beauty lies in the act of gathering, not in the result.” (49)
“And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me.” (51)
“That Saturday, I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand, I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in. I begin to relate, in the most exacting way, everything that is testing me.” (55)
“Because buried under all the mistakes, all the rough spots, is something precious. A new voice, crude but alive, to improve, to elaborate.” (63)
“I am aware of a break, along with a birth. I’m stunned by it.” (63)
“The only thing that troubled her was what distinguished her from others.” (67)
“ If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words. Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too much.
What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.” (87)
“If it were possible to bridge the distance between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.” (95)
“In spite of the map of the sestieri, I get lost. The Venetian maze transcends its own map the way a language transcends its own grammar. Walking in Venice, like writing in Italian, is an experience that throws me off balance. I have to give in. Writing, I come up against so many dead ends, so many tight corners to get myself out of. I have to abandon certain streets. I continually have to correct myself. There are moments in Italian, just as in Venice, when I feel suffocated, distraught. Then I turn and, when I least expect it, find myself in an isolated, silent shining place.” (99)
“As for the translation into English, I consider it an obligation, nothing more. I find it a centripetal process. No mystery, no discovery, no encounter with something outside myself.” (119)
“I have to admit, though, that traveling between the two versions turns out to be useful. In the end, the effort of translation makes the Italian version clearer, more articulate. It serves the writing, even if it upsets the writer.” (121)
“I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal.” (121)
“Sitting next to us is an interpreter who is to translate what we’re saying into English. After a few sentences I stop, and she speaks. This echo in English is incredible, fantastic: both a circle completed and a total reversal. I’m astonished, moved.” (121)
“I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren’t aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid’s masterwork transformed me.” (171)
“While I was writing no one was with me. My only companion was a volume of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, the solitary poet who spent her entire life in Massachusetts, not far from where I grew up. A beautiful red book, an Italian translation, that among all the others on the library shelves happened to draw my attention. Often, before starting a new piece, I would read one of the poems or letters. It became a kind of ritual. One day I found these lines: ‘I feel that I am sailing upon the brink of an awful precipice, from which I cannot escape & over which I fear my tiny boat will soon glide if I do not receive help from above.” I was amazed. Writing these chapters, I felt exactly like that.” (187)
(This sounds a little to be like depression, or even suicide…?)
“Last year, as I was finishing In The Other Words, I saw a show, in London, devoted to Matisse’s final creative stage. I encountered a series of lyrical, bold, wide-ranging images. I observed a surprising dialogue between negative and positive space. I understood how white space, like silence, can have a meaning.” (205)
“At the same time, starting on the last page and proceeding backward, I began to take notes of another type, not on the technical aspects of the language but on the experience of diving into the depths of Italian. These notes were made fleetingly, a series of comments tucked at the end of the notebook, which I almost hid from myself.” (209)
“The effort of making the language mine, of possessing it, has a strong resemblance to a creative process—mysterious, illogical. But the possession is not authentic: it, too, is a sort of fiction. The language is true, but the manner in which I absorb and use it seems false. A vocabulary that is sought after, acquired, remains forever anomalous, as if it were counterfeit, even though it’s not.” (213)
Natalia Ginzburg, in Family Sayings: “I don’t know if it’s the best of my books, but certainly it’s the only book that I wrote in a state of absolute freedom.” (215)
“In this book language is not only the tool but the subject. Italian remains the mask, the filter, the outlet, the means.” (221)
“I have an ambivalent relationship with this book, and probably always will. On the one hand I’m proud of it. I traveled far to get here. I earned every word: nothing about it was handed down. Everything derives fro my determination. It was a risky procedure. That I was able to conceive, draft, prepare the pages for publican seems a miracle. I consider it an authentic book, because it’s sincere, honest.
On the other hand, I fear that it’s a false book. I’m insecure about it, a little embarrassed. Although it now has a cover, a binding, a physical presence, I’m afraid it’s frivolous, even presumptuous. I don’t know if continuing to write in Italian is the right path.My Italian remains a work in progress, and I remain a foreigner. I came to Italy partly to know my characters better, my parents. I didn’t expect to become a foreigner as a writer, too.” (223)
(Parents—interesting.)