![]() 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. Photograph: AlamyĪ few months later, I receive an invitation to the Mantua literary festival. Rome is now the second home of Jhumpa Lahiri and her family. Even though I’ve returned to Italy, I still feel exiled from the language. I manage to order in a restaurant and exchange a few words with a saleswoman. In reality, in Venice I’m barely able to ask for directions on the street, a wake-up call at the hotel. In addition to the dictionary, I take a notebook and on the last page I write down phrases that might be useful: Saprebbe dirmi? Dove si trova? Come si fa per andare? – Could you tell me? Where is? How does one get to? I recall the difference between buono and bello. ![]() In the spring of 2000, six years after my trip to Florence, I go to Venice. I am constantly looking in the dictionary. I underline almost every word on every page. But when, after two years of studying, I try to read Alberto Moravia’s novel La ciociara ( Two Women), I barely understand it. The first teacher is a Milanese woman who lives in Boston. As if I were studying a musical instrument without ever playing it. But I don’t like the silence, the isolation of the self-teaching process. I manage to memorise some conjugations, do some exercises. Having studied Latin for many years, I find the first chapters of this textbook fairly easy. As if it were possible to learn on your own. An exhortatory title, full of hope and possibility. ![]() How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine? That I don’t know? Maybe because I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language. Almost as soon as we met (on a trip to Florence with my sister in 1994), Italian and I were separated. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too.Īs for Italian, the exile has a different aspect. I don’t know how to read it or even write it. In my case, there is another distance, another schism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |