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My admiration for the writer Jhumpa Lahiri went up a thousandfold after reading an excerpt from her new book, titled “Teach Yourself Italian,” in this week’s New Yorker. Having been trying to teach myself Italian for the past 18 months, I thought I would find a fellow voyager in Lahiri’s essay. As it turns out, Lahiri became so obsessed with the language that she moved to Italy with her family, something I’ve never contemplated doing. Wow, I thought. Then she began reading solely in Italian, to improve her literacy. Good for her, I thought, looking wistfully at my shelf of Elena Ferrante novels translated into English by the redoubtable Ann Goldstein. Then she began keeping a journal — in Italian. Finally, at the end of the essay, she allows that she is currently writing in Italian. In her journal, I assumed. Then I read the little italic explanation at the end of the final column: Translated, from the Italian, by Ann Goldstein.
Holy crap. She wrote that whole essay — as it turns out, she’s written a whole book, now — in a language she decided to learn as an adult. Along the way, people have told her that she’s out of her mind, spending so much time mastering a language when she already writes quite successfully in a language that, unlike Italian, is read around the world. But as she walks us through the process of starting to express herself in this foreign tongue, I get where she’s coming from:
In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I’m always uncertain. My sole intention, along with a blind but sincere faith, is to be understood, and to understand myself.
Using the metaphor of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she adds, “I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.”
Lahiri follows a distinguished line of writers who have elected to compose their work in a nonnative tongue. Many of these — Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Ha Jin — have chosen to write in English. But since, as my colleague Geoffrey Pullum recently pointed out, English is the lingua franca of the globe, I’m not focused on them so much as on those who chose a different, less widespread vernacular. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote in French because it allowed him to write “without style.” Ágota Kristóf, who also chose French when she immigrated to Switzerland from her native Hungary, said toward the end of her life that “a book takes five times longer when I’m writing in French, even now. But I did a lot of theatre in my youth, and there, there’s not too much description, there’s dialogue, sentences. I began writing little plays as a game.” Ana-Kazumi Stahl, whose heritage is Japanese, German, and American, writes in Spanish. She says of her adopted literary language:
I learn a great deal about how I make stories by writing in a language that prompts me always to remember the value in choosing a word, in listening to a phrase, and in remembering the main structural elements in a text. The limitation was generous — the style was removed. What was important was the characters, the conflict — the love.
What these comments share is an appreciation for what’s left out of the writing when composing in a second language: style, or description, or sophistication — all things we tend to strive for when we try to write eloquently in our native tongue. I do think we tend to lose sight, in a language that has shaped our world since we were born, of language’s central task: to make meaning. We take for granted the multiple choices we have; we ramp up the prose; we lose sight of the roots of the words we’re making flowers with.
Though I speak French fluently and read it passably, I am not yet prepared to try writing in French. I tell myself I’m too old. I remind myself how much I love English, and I do: I love the mongrel quality of it, the ridiculous wealth of vocabulary, the many ways a verb can be jiggered to convey different senses of the past, the inflections of syntax that convey a speaker’s region or accent. But really, I’m daunted. Partly it’s the steep climb that scares me — the passé simple! — but even more, it’s the rawness, the self-revelation that beginning to express oneself in a new tongue seems to bring on. As Lahiri puts it in her Daphne metaphor, “It’s true that a new language covers me, but unlike Daphne I have a permeable covering — I’m almost without a skin.” How dangerous, and how thrilling.