In Other Words

THE CROSSING

I want to cross a small lake. It really is small, and yet the other shore seems too far away, beyond my abilities. I’m aware that the lake is very deep in the middle, and even though I know how to swim I’m afraid of being alone in the water, without any support.

The lake I’m talking about is in a secluded, isolated place. To get there you have to walk a short distance, through a silent wood. On the other side you can see a cottage, the only house on the shore. The lake was formed just after the last ice age, millennia ago. The water is clear but dark, heavier than salt water, with no current. Once you’re in, a few yards from the shore, you can no longer see the bottom.

In the morning I observe people coming to the lake, as I do. I watch them cross it in a confident, relaxed manner, stop for some minutes in front of the cottage, then return. I count their arm strokes. I envy them.

For a month I swim around the lake, never going too far out. This is a more significant distance — the circumference compared to the diameter. It takes me more than half an hour to make this circle. Yet I’m always close to the shore. I can stop, I can stand up if I’m tired. It’s good exercise, but not very exciting.

Then one morning, near the end of the summer, I meet two friends at the lake. I’ve decided to make the crossing with them, to finally get to the cottage on the other side. I’m tired of just going along the edge.

I count the strokes. I know that my companions are in the water with me, but I know that each of us is alone. After about a hundred and fifty strokes I’m in the middle, the deepest part. I keep going. After a hundred more I see the bottom again.

I arrive on the other side: I’ve made it with no trouble. I see the cottage, until now distant, just steps from me. I see the small, faraway silhouettes of my husband, my children. They seem unreachable, but I know they’re not. After a crossing, the known shore becomes the opposite side: here becomes there. Charged with energy, I cross the lake again. I’m elated.

For twenty years I studied Italian as if I were swimming along the edge of that lake. Always next to my dominant language, English. Always hugging that shore. It was good exercise. Beneficial for the muscles, for the brain, but not very exciting. If you study a foreign language that way, you won’t drown. The other language is always there to support you, to save you. But you can’t float without the possibility of drowning, of sinking. To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. Without a life vest. Without depending on solid ground.

A few weeks after crossing the small hidden lake, I make a second crossing, much longer but not at all difficult. It will be the first true departure of my life. On a ship this time, I cross the Atlantic Ocean, to live in Italy.

THE DICTIONARY

The first Italian book I buy is a pocket dictionary, with the definitions in English. It’s 1994, and I’m about to go to Florence for the first time, with my sister. I go to a bookshop in Boston with an Italian name: Rizzoli. A stylish, refined bookshop, which is no longer there.

I don’t buy a guidebook, even though it’s my first trip to Italy, even though I know nothing about Florence. Thanks to a friend of mine, I already have the address of a hotel. I’m a student, I don’t have much money. I think a dictionary is more important.

The one I choose has a green plastic cover, indestructible, impermeable. It’s light, smaller than my hand. It has more or less the dimensions of a bar of soap. The back cover says that it contains around forty thousand Italian words.

As we’re wandering through the Uffizi, amid galleries that are almost deserted, my sister realizes that she’s lost her hat. I open the dictionary. I go to the English-Italian part, to find out how to say “hat” in Italian. In some way, certainly incorrect, I tell a guard that we’ve lost a hat. Miraculously, he understands what I’m saying, and in a short time the hat is recovered.

Every time I’ve been to Italy in the many years since, I’ve brought this dictionary with me. I always put it in my purse. I look up words when I’m in the street, when I return to the hotel after an outing, when I try to read an article in the newspaper. It guides me, protects me, explains everything.

It becomes both a map and a compass, and without it I know I’d be lost. It becomes a kind of authoritative parent, without whom I can’t go out. I consider it a sacred text, full of secrets, of revelations.

On the first page, at a certain point, I write: “provare a = cercare di” (try to = seek to).

That random fragment, that lexical equation, might be a metaphor for the love I feel for Italian. Something that, in the end, is really a stubborn attempt, a continuous trial.

Nearly twenty years after buying my first dictionary, I decide to move to Rome for an extended stay. Before leaving, I ask a friend of mine, who lived in Rome for many years, if an electronic Italian dictionary, like a cell phone app, would be useful, for looking up a word at any moment.

He laughs. He says, “Soon you’ll be living inside an Italian dictionary.”

He’s right. Slowly, after a couple of months in Rome, I realize that I don’t check the dictionary so often. When I go out, it tends to stay in my purse, closed. As a result I start leaving it at home. I’m aware of a turning point. A sense of freedom and, at the same time, of loss. Of having grown up, at least a little.

Today I have many other larger, more substantial dictionaries on my desk. Two of them are monolingual, without a word of English. The cover of the small one seems a little faded by now, a little dirty. The pages are yellowed. Some are coming loose from the binding.

It usually sits on the night table, so that I can easily look up an unknown word while I’m reading. This book allows me to read other books, to open the door of a new language. It accompanies me, even now, when I go on vacation, on trips. It has become a necessity. If, when I leave, I forget to take it with me, I feel slightly uneasy, as if I’d forgotten my toothbrush or a change of socks.

By now this small dictionary seems more like a brother than like a parent. And yet it’s still useful to me, it still guides me. It remains full of secrets. This little book will always be bigger than I am.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

In 1994, my sister and I decide to give ourselves a trip to Italy as a present, and we choose Florence. I’m in Boston, studying Renaissance architecture: Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel, the Laurentian Library of Michelangelo. We arrive in Florence at dusk, a few days before Christmas. My first walk is in the dark. I’m in an intimate, sober, joyful place. Shops decorated for the season. Narrow, crowded streets, some more like corridors than like streets. There are tourists like my sister and me, but not many. I see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping.

I’ve come for a week, to see the buildings, to admire the squares, the churches. But from the start my relationship with Italy is as auditory as it is visual. Although there aren’t many cars, the city is humming. I’m aware of a sound that I like, of conversations, phrases, words that I hear wherever I go. As if the whole city were a theater in which a slightly restless audience is chatting before the show begins.

I hear the excitement of children wishing each other buon Natale—merry Christmas — on the street. I hear the tenderness with which, one morning at the hotel, the woman who cleans the room asks me: Avete dormito bene? Did you sleep well? When a man behind me on the sidewalk wants to pass, I hear the slight impatience with which he asks: Permesso? May I?

I can’t answer. I’m not able to have a dialogue. I listen. What I hear, in the shops, in the restaurants, arouses an instantaneous, intense, paradoxical reaction. It’s as if Italian were already inside me and, at the same time, completely external. It doesn’t seem like a foreign language, although I know it is. It seems strangely familiar. I recognize something, in spite of the fact that I understand almost nothing.

What do I recognize? It’s beautiful, certainly, but beauty doesn’t enter into it. It seems like a language with which I have to have a relationship. It’s like a person met one day by chance, with whom I immediately feel a connection, of whom I feel fond. As if I had known it for years, even though there is still everything to discover. I would be unsatisfied, incomplete, if I didn’t learn it. I realize that there is a space inside me to welcome it.

I feel a connection and at the same time a detachment. A closeness and at the same time a distance. What I feel is something physical, inexplicable. It stirs an indiscreet, absurd longing. An exquisite tension. Love at first sight.

I spend the week in Florence very near Dante’s house. One day, I visit the small church of Santa Margherita dei Cerchi, where Beatrice’s tomb is. The beloved, the poet’s inspiration, forever unattainable. An unfulfilled love marked by distance, by silence.

I don’t have a real need to know this language. I don’t live in Italy, I don’t have Italian friends. I have only the desire. Yet ultimately a desire is nothing but a crazy need. As in many passionate relationships, my infatuation will become a devotion, an obsession. There will always be something unbalanced, unrequited. I’m in love, but what I love remains indifferent. The language will never need me.

At the end of the week, having seen many palazzi, many frescoes, I return to America. I bring with me postcards, little gifts, souvenirs of the trip. And yet the clearest, most vivid memory is something immaterial. When I think of Italy, I hear certain words again, certain phrases. I miss them. And missing them pushes me, slowly, to learn the language. I am impelled by desire and, at the same time, hesitant, timid. I ask of Italian, with a slight impatience: Permesso? May I?

EXILE

My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.

Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it.

I think of Dante, who waited nine years before speaking to Beatrice. I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.

I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her language.

In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don’t know Bengali perfectly. I don’t know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I’ve always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too.

As for Italian, the exile has a different aspect. Almost as soon as we met, Italian and I were separated. My yearning seems foolish. And yet I feel it.

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.

I buy a book. It’s called Teach Yourself Italian. An exhortatory title, full of hope and possibility. As if it were possible to learn on your own.

Having studied Latin for many years, I find the first chapters of this textbook fairly easy. I manage to memorize some conjugations, do some exercises. But I don’t like the silence, the isolation of the self-teaching process. It seems detached, wrong. As if I were studying a musical instrument without ever playing it.

At the university, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces. The thesis will discuss another schism between language and environment. The subject gives me a second reason to study Italian.

I attend elementary courses. My first teacher is a Milanese woman who lives in Boston. I do the homework, I pass the tests. But when, after two years of studying, I try to read Alberto Moravia’s novel La ciociara (Two Women), I barely understand it. I underline almost every word on every page. I am constantly looking in the dictionary.

In the spring of 2000, six years after my trip to Florence, I go to Venice. 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. I feel prepared. In reality, in Venice I’m barely able to ask for directions on the street, a wake-up call at the hotel. I manage to order in a restaurant and exchange a few words with a saleswoman. Nothing else. Even though I’ve returned to Italy, I still feel exiled from the language.

A few months later I receive an invitation to the Mantua literary festival. There I meet my first Italian publishers. One of them is also my translator. Their publishing house has a Spanish name, Marcos y Marcos. They are Italian. Their names are Marco and Claudia.

I have to do all my interviews and presentations in English. There is always an interpreter next to me. I can more or less follow the Italian, but I can’t express myself, explain myself, without English. I feel limited. What I learned in America, in the classroom, isn’t sufficient. My comprehension is so meager that, here in Italy, it doesn’t help me. The language still seems like a locked gate. I’m on the threshold, I can see inside, but the gate won’t open.

Marco and Claudia give me the key. When I mention that I’ve studied some Italian, and that I would like to improve it, they stop speaking to me in English. They switch to their language, although I’m able to respond only in a very simple way. In spite of all my mistakes, in spite of my not completely understanding what they say. In spite of the fact that they speak English much better than I speak Italian.

They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The way one learns one’s native language. I realize that I didn’t learn English in this fashion.

Claudia and Marco, who translated and published my first book in Italian, and who were my hosts the first time I went to Italy as a writer, give me this turning point. In Mantua, thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language. Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.

THE CONVERSATIONS

Returning to America, I want to go on speaking Italian. But with whom? I know some people in New York who speak it perfectly. I’m embarrassed to talk to them. I need someone with whom I can struggle, and fail.

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 am in an overcrowded room, where everyone but me speaks an impeccable Italian.

The director of the institute greets me. I tell him I would have liked to do the interview in Italian. That I studied the language years ago but I can’t speak well.

“Need practicing,” I say.

“You need practice,” he answers kindly.

In 2004 my husband gives me something. A piece of paper torn from a notice that he happened to see in our neighborhood, in Brooklyn. On it is written “Imparare l’italiano,” “Learn Italian.” I consider it a sign. I call the number, make an appointment. A likable, energetic woman, also from Milan, arrives at my house. She teaches in a private school, she lives in the suburbs. She asks me why I want to learn the language.

I explain that I’m going to Rome in the summer to take part in another literary festival. It seems like a reasonable motivation. I don’t reveal that Italian is a fancy of mine. That I nurture a hope — in fact a dream — of knowing it well. I don’t tell her that I’m looking for a way to keep alive a language that has nothing to do with my life. That I am tortured, that I feel incomplete. As if Italian were a book that, no matter how hard I work, I can’t write.

We meet once a week, for an hour. I’m pregnant with my daughter, who will be born in November. I try to have a conversation. At the end of every lesson, the teacher gives me a long list of words that I lacked during the conversation. I review it diligently. I put it in a folder. I can’t remember them.

At the festival in Rome I manage to exchange three, four, maybe five sentences with someone. After that I stop; it’s impossible to do more. I count the sentences, as if they were strokes in a tennis game, as if they were strokes when you’re learning to swim.

Let’s go back to the metaphor of the lake, the one I wanted to cross. Now I can walk into the water, up to my knees, up to my waist. But I still have to keep my feet on the bottom. That’s just it, I’m forced to act like someone who doesn’t know how to swim.

In spite of the conversations, the language remains elusive, evanescent. It appears only with the teacher. She brings it into my house for an hour, then takes it away. It seems concrete, palpable, only when I’m with her.

My daughter is born, and four more years go by. I finish another book. After its publication, in 2008, I receive another invitation to Italy, to promote it. In preparation I find a new teacher. An enthusiastic, attentive young woman from Bergamo. She, too, comes to my house once a week. We sit next to each other on the couch and talk. We become friends. My comprehension improves sporadically. The teacher is very encouraging, she says I speak the language well, she says I’ll do fine in Italy. But it’s not true. 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.

In 2009 I start studying with my third private teacher. A Venetian woman who moved to Brooklyn more than thirty years ago, who brought up her children in America. She’s a widow, and lives in a house surrounded by wisteria, near the Verrazano Bridge, with a gentle dog that’s always at her feet. It takes me nearly an hour to get there. I ride the subway to the edge of Brooklyn, almost to the end of the line.

I love this trip. I go out of the house, leaving behind the rest of my life. I don’t think about my writing. I forget, for several hours, the other languages I know. Each time, it seems like a small flight. Awaiting me is a place where only Italian matters. A shelter from which a new reality springs forth.

I am very fond of my teacher. Although for four years we use the formal lei, we have a close, informal relationship. We sit on a wooden bench at a small table in the kitchen. I see the books on her shelves, the photographs of her grandchildren. Magnificent brass pots hang on the walls. At her house, I start again, from the beginning: conditional clauses, indirect discourse, the use of the passive. With her my project seems more possible than impossible. With her my strange devotion to the language seems more a vocation than a folly.

We talk about our lives, about the state of the world. We do an avalanche of exercises, arid but necessary. The teacher corrects me constantly. As I listen to her, I take notes in a diary. After each lesson I feel both exhausted and ready for the next. After saying goodbye, after closing the gate behind me, I can’t wait to return.

At a certain point the lessons with the Venetian teacher become my favorite activity. As I study with her, the next, inevitable step in this strange linguistic journey becomes clear. At a certain point, I decide to move to Italy.

THE RENUNCIATION

I choose Rome. A city that has fascinated me since I was a child, that conquered me immediately. The first time I was there, in 2003, I felt a sense of rapture, an affinity. I seemed to know it already. After only a few days, I was sure that I was fated to live there.

I have no friends yet in Rome. But I’m not going there to visit someone. I’m going in order to change course, and to reach the Italian language. In Rome, Italian can be with me every day, every minute. It will always be present, relevant. It will stop being a light switch to turn on occasionally, and then turn off.

In preparation, I decide, six months before our departure, not to read in English anymore. From now on, I pledge to read only in Italian. It seems right, to detach myself from my principal language. I consider it an official renunciation. I’m about to become a linguistic pilgrim to Rome. I believe I have to leave behind something familiar, essential.

Suddenly none of my books are useful anymore. They seem like ordinary objects. The anchor of my creative life disappears, the stars that guided me recede. I see before me a new room, empty.

Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A kind of voluntary exile. Although I’m still in America, I already feel elsewhere. Reading, I feel like a guest, happy but disoriented. Reading, I no longer feel at home.

I read Moravia’s Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference) and La noia (The Empty Canvas). Pavese’s La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires). The poetry of Quasimodo, of Saba. I manage to understand and at the same time I don’t understand. I renounce expertise to challenge myself. I trade certainty for uncertainty.

I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel. Every unknown word a jewel.

I make a list of terms to look up, to learn. Imbambolato, sbilenco, incrinatura, capezzale. Sgangherato, scorbutico, barcollare, bisticciare (dazed, lopsided, crack, bedside or bolster. Unhinged, crabby, sway, bicker). After I finish a book, I’m thrilled. It seems like a feat. I find the process more demanding yet more satisfying, almost miraculous. I can’t take for granted my ability to accomplish it. I read as I did when I was a girl. Thus, as an adult, as a writer, I rediscover the pleasure of reading.

In this period I feel like a divided person. My writing is nothing but a reaction, a response to reading. In other words, a kind of dialogue. The two things are closely bound, interdependent.

Now, however, I write in one language and read exclusively in another. I am about to finish a novel, so I’m necessarily immersed in the text. It’s impossible to abandon English. Yet my stronger language already seems behind me.

I think of two-faced Janus. Two faces that look at the past and the future at once. The ancient god of the threshold, of beginnings and endings. He represents a moment of transition. He watches over gates, over doors, a god who is only Roman, who protects the city. A remarkable image that I am about to meet everywhere.

READING WITH A DICTIONARY

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 in the margin. I make a list in the notebook. At first, the definitions were in English. Now they’re in Italian. That way I create a kind of personal dictionary, a private vocabulary that traces the route of my reading. Occasionally I page through the notebook and review the words.

I find that reading in another language is more intimate, more intense than reading in English, because the language and I have been acquainted for only a short time. We don’t come from the same place, from the same family. We didn’t grow up with one another. This language is not in my blood, in my bones. I’m drawn to Italian and at the same time intimidated. It remains a mystery, beloved, impassive. Faced with my emotion it has no reaction.

The unknown words remind me that there’s a lot I don’t know in this world.

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.

I believe that what can change our life is always outside of us.

Should I dream of a day, in the future, when I’ll no longer need the dictionary, the notebook, the pen? A day when I can read in Italian without tools, the way I read in English? Shouldn’t that be the point of all this?

I don’t think so. When I read in Italian, I’m a more active reader, more involved, even if less skilled. I like the effort. I prefer the limitations. I know that in some way my ignorance is useful to me.

I realize that in spite of the limitations the horizon is boundless. Reading in another language implies a perpetual state of growth, of possibility. I know that, since I’m an apprentice, my work will never end.

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

Every day, when I read, I find new words. Something to underline, then transfer to the notebook. It makes me think of a gardener pulling weeds. I know that my work, just like the gardener’s, is ultimately folly. Something desperate. Almost, I would say, a Sisyphean task. It’s impossible for the gardener to control nature perfectly. In the same way it’s impossible for me, no matter how intense my desire, to know every Italian word.

But between the gardener and me there is a fundamental difference. The gardener doesn’t want the weeds. They are to be pulled up, thrown away. I, on the other hand, gather up the words. I want to hold them in my hand, I want to possess them.

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.

GATHERING WORDS

I’m constantly hunting for words.

I would describe the process like this: every day I go into the woods carrying a basket. I find words all around: on the trees, in the bushes, on the ground (in reality: on the street, during conversations, while I read). I gather as many as possible. But it’s never enough; I have an insatiable appetite.

I gather words that seem obscure (sciagura, spigliatezza: disaster, casualness) and ones that I can easily understand but would like to know better (inviperito, stralunato: incensed, out of one’s wits). I gather beautiful words that have no exact equivalents in English (formicolare, chiarore: to move in a confused fashion, like ants, and also to have pins and needles; shaft of light). I gather countless adjectives (malmesso, plumbeo, impiastricciate: shabby, leaden, smeared) to describe thousands of situations. I gather countless nouns and adverbs that I will never use.

At the end of the day the basket is heavy, overflowing. I feel loaded down, wealthy, in high spirits. My words seem more valuable than money. I am like a beggar who finds a pile of gold, a bag of jewels.

But when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the basket is memory, and memory betrays me, memory doesn’t hold up.

I feel a bond with every word I pick up. I feel affection, along with a sense of responsibility. When I can’t remember words, I fear I’ve abandoned them.

I feel emptied, depressed, the way you feel the morning after a fabulous dream. The woods seem like a paradise, a hallucination. Then I wake up.

Although defeated, I don’t feel too discouraged. If anything, I feel even more determined. The next day, I return to the woods. 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.

Yet it’s not sufficient, or even satisfying, merely to collect words in the notebook. I want to use them. I want to draw on them when I need them. I want to be in contact with them. I want them to become a part of me.

I review the words in order to learn them, memorize them. I think about them while I’m talking to someone. I know they’re there, written by hand in the notebook. If I were a genius, I would remember everything, and would be able to speak much more precisely, fluently. But when I need them the words are elusive, ungraspable. They exist on the page but don’t enter my brain, so they don’t come out of my mouth. They remain stuck, useless, in the notebook. I am aware only of the fact that I’ve recorded them.

Rereading the notebook, I notice certain words that I have to write more than once, that resist my memory. Simple but stubborn (fruscio, schianto, arguto, broncio: rustle, crash, sharp, sulk), maybe they don’t want to have any relationship with me.

All the words in the notebook are the sign of a physical, methodical growth. I think of my children’s first weeks of life, when I went to the pediatrician every week to have their weight checked. Every ounce was recorded, evaluated. Each was concrete proof of their presence on the earth, of their existence. My understanding of Italian grows in a similar way. I acquire my vocabulary day by day, word by word.

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.

The notebook contains all my enthusiasm for the language. All the effort. A space where I can wander, learn, forget, fail. Where I can hope.

THE DIARY

I arrive in Rome with my family a few days before the mid-August holiday. We aren’t familiar with this custom of leaving town en masse. The moment when nearly everyone is fleeing, when almost the entire city has come to a halt, we try to start a new chapter of our life.

We rent an apartment on Via Giulia. A very elegant street that is deserted in mid-August. The heat is fierce, unbearable. When we go out shopping, we look for the momentary relief of shade every few steps.

The second night, a Saturday, we come home and the door won’t open. Before, it opened without any problem. Now, no matter how I try, the key doesn’t turn in the lock.

There is no one in the building but us. We have no papers, are still without a functioning telephone, without any Roman friend or acquaintance. I ask for help at the hotel across the street from our building, but two hotel employees can’t open the door, either. Our landlords are on vacation in Calabria. My children, upset, hungry, are crying, saying that they want to go back to America immediately.

Finally a locksmith arrives and opens the door in a couple of minutes. We give him more than two hundred euros, without a receipt, for the job.

This trauma seems to me a trial by fire, a sort of baptism. But there are many other obstacles, small but annoying. We don’t know where to take the recycling, how to buy a subway and bus pass, where the bus stops are. Everything has to be learned from zero. When we ask for help from three Romans, each of the three gives a different answer. I feel unnerved, often crushed. In spite of my great enthusiasm for living in Rome, everything seems impossible, indecipherable, impenetrable.

A week after arriving, the Saturday after that unforgettable Saturday night, I open my diary to describe our misadventures. 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.

I write in a terrible, embarrassing Italian, full of mistakes. Without correcting, without a dictionary, by instinct alone. I grope my way, like a child, like a semiliterate. I am ashamed of writing like this. I don’t understand this mysterious impulse, which emerges out of nowhere. I can’t stop.

It’s as if I were writing with my left hand, my weak hand, the one I’m not supposed to write with. It seems a transgression, a rebellion, an act of stupidity.

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It’s an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows.

I don’t recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it’s the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me.

Before I moved to Rome I seldom wrote in Italian. I tried to compose some letters to an Italian friend of mine who lives in Madrid, some emails to my teacher. They were like formal, artificial exercises. The voice didn’t seem to be mine. In America it wasn’t.

In Rome, however, writing in Italian is the only way to feel myself present here — maybe to have a connection, especially as a writer, with Italy. The new diary, although imperfect, although riddled with mistakes, mirrors my disorientation clearly. It reflects a radical transition, a state of complete bewilderment.

In the months before coming to Italy, I was looking for another direction for my writing. I wanted a new approach. I didn’t know that the language I had studied slowly for many years in America would, finally, give me the direction.

I use up one notebook, I start another. A second metaphor comes to mind: it’s as if, poorly equipped, I were climbing a mountain. It’s a sort of literary act of survival. I don’t have many words to express myself — rather, the opposite. I’m aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need. I find again the pleasure I’ve felt since I was a child: putting words in a notebook that no one will read.

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.

THE STORY

The diary provides me with the discipline, the habit of writing in Italian. But writing only a diary is the equivalent of shutting myself in the house, talking to myself. What I express there remains a private, interior narration. At a certain point, in spite of the risk, I want to go out.

I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my students to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.

My short Italian pieces are mere trifles. And yet I work hard to try to perfect them. I give the first piece to my new Italian teacher in Rome. When he gives it back to me, I’m mortified. I see only mistakes, only problems. I see a catastrophe. Almost every sentence has to be changed. I correct the first version in red pen. At the end of the lesson the page contains as much red ink as black.

I’ve never tried to do anything this demanding as a writer. I find that my project is so arduous that it seems sadistic. I have to start again from the beginning, as if I had never written anything in my life. But, to be precise, I am not at the starting point: rather, I’m in another dimension, where I have no references, no armor. Where I’ve never felt so stupid.

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn’t help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I’m somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic.

In spite of the humiliation I continue. For the next lesson, I prepare something different. Because buried under all the mistakes, all the rough spots, is something precious. A new voice, crude but alive, to improve, to elaborate.

One day I find myself in a library where I never feel very comfortable, and where I usually can’t work well. There, at an anonymous desk, an entire story in Italian comes into my mind. It comes in a flash. I hear the sentences in my brain. I don’t know where they originate, I don’t know how I’m able to hear them. I write rapidly in the notebook; I’m afraid it will all disappear before I can get it down. Everything unfolds calmly. I don’t use the dictionary. It takes me about two hours to write the first half of the story. The next day I return to the same library for another couple of hours, to finish it.

I am aware of a break, along with a birth. I’m stunned by it.

I’ve never written a story in this fashion. In English I can consider what I write, I can stop after every sentence to look for the right words, to reorder them, change my mind a thousand times. My knowledge of English is both an advantage and a hindrance. I rewrite everything like a lunatic until it satisfies me, while in Italian, like a soldier in the desert, I have to simply keep going.

After finishing the story, I type it on the computer. For the first time I’m working on the screen in Italian. My fingers are tense. They don’t know how to move on the keyboard.

I know there will be many things to correct, to rewrite.

I know that my life as a writer will no longer be the same.

The story is entitled “The Exchange.”

What is it about? The protagonist is a translator who is restless, and moves to an unspecified city in search of a change. She arrives by herself, with almost nothing, except a black sweater.

I don’t know how to read the story, I don’t know what to think about it. I don’t know if it works. I don’t have the critical skills to judge it. Although it came from me, it doesn’t seem completely mine. I’m sure of only one thing: I would never have written it in English.

I hate analyzing what I write. But one morning a few months later, when I’m running in the park of Villa Doria Pamphili, the meaning of this strange story suddenly comes to me: the sweater is language.

THE EXCHANGE

There was a woman, a translator, who wanted to be another person. There was no precise reason. It had always been that way.

She had friends, a family, an apartment, a job. She had enough money, and good health. She had, in other words, a fortunate life, for which she was grateful. The only thing that troubled her was what distinguished her from others.

When she thought of what she possessed, she felt a mild revulsion, because every object, every thing that belonged to her, gave proof of her existence. Every time she remembered something of her past life, she was convinced that another version would have been better.

She considered herself imperfect, like the first draft of a book. She wanted to produce another version of herself, in the same way that she could transform a text from one language into another. At times she had the impulse to remove her presence from the earth, as if it were a thread on the hem of a nice dress, to be cut off with a pair of scissors.

And yet she didn’t want to kill herself. She loved the world too much, and people. She loved taking long walks in the late afternoon, and observing her surroundings. She loved the green of the sea, the light of dusk, the rocks scattered on the sand. She loved the taste of a red pear in autumn, the full, heavy winter moon that shone amid the clouds. She loved the warmth of her bed, a good book to read without being interrupted. To enjoy that, she would have lived forever.

Wishing to better understand the reason she felt the way she did, she decided one day to eliminate the signs of her existence. Apart from a small suitcase, she threw or gave everything away. She wanted to live in solitude, like a monk, in order to confront what she couldn’t bear. To her friends, her family, the man who loved her, she said that she had to go away for a while.

She chose a city where she knew no one, didn’t understand the language, where it wasn’t too hot or too cold. She brought clothes that were as simple as possible, all black: a dress, a pair of shoes, and a soft, light wool sweater, with five small buttons.

She arrived as the season was changing. It was warm in the sun, cool in the shade. She rented a room. She walked for hours, wandered aimlessly, without speaking. The city was small, pleasant but without personality, without tourists. She heard the sounds, observed the people: some hurried to work, some sat on benches, like her, with a book or a cell phone, taking the sun. When she was hungry, she ate something sitting on a bench. When she was tired, she went to the movies.

The days grew short, dark. Gradually the trees lost their colors, their leaves. The translator’s mind emptied. She began to feel light, anonymous. She imagined she was a falling leaf, like every other.

At night she slept well. In the morning she woke without worries. She didn’t think of the future or of the traces of her life. She was suspended in time, like a person without a shadow. And yet she was alive, she felt more alive than ever.

One rainy, windy day, she took shelter under the cornice of a stone building. The rain poured down. She didn’t have an umbrella, or even a hat. The rain beat on the sidewalk with an insistent, continuous sound. She thought of the water’s eternal journey, falling from the clouds, penetrating the earth, filling the rivers, arriving, finally, at the sea.

The street was pocked with puddles, the façade of the building opposite was covered with illegible signs. The translator noticed various women going in and out. Occasionally one alone or a small group would arrive, press a bell, then enter. Curious, she decided to follow.

Beyond the entranceway she had to cross a courtyard, where the rain was confined, as if it were falling in a room without a ceiling. She stopped for a moment to look at the sky, even though she got wet. Farther on there was a dark stairway, the steps slightly uneven, where some women were coming down, others going up.

On the landing stood a tall, thin woman, with a wrinkled yet still beautiful face. She had short fair hair, and was dressed in black. The dress was transparent, without a precise shape, and with long, diaphanous sleeves, like wings. This woman welcomed the others, with open arms.

Come in, come in, there are a lot of things to see.

Inside the apartment the translator left her purse in the hall, on a long table, as the others did. At the end of the hall was a large living room. A row of black dresses hung on a clothes rack next to the wall.

The dresses were like soldiers, at attention, but inanimate. In another part of the room there were couches, lighted candles, a table loaded with fruit, cheese, a rich chocolate cake. In a corner was a tall mirror divided into three, in which you could look at yourself from different angles.

The owner of the apartment, who had designed the black clothes, was sitting on a sofa, smoking and chatting. She spoke the language of the place perfectly, but with a slight accent. She was a foreigner, like the translator.

Welcome. Please, have something to eat, look around, make yourself comfortable.

Some women were already undressed, and were trying on clothes, asking the others for their opinions. They were a collection of arms, legs, hips, waists. Unceasing variations. They all seemed to know each other.

The translator took off her sweater, undressed. She began to try on all the garments in her size, one after the other, methodically, as if it were a task. There were pants, jackets, skirts, shirts, dresses. All black, made of soft light fabrics.

They are ideal for traveling, the owner said. They are comfortable, modern, versatile. You can wash them by hand in cold water. They don’t wrinkle.

The other women agreed. They said that now they wore only clothes designed by the owner. You could get them only by going to her house, only by private invitation. Only in this way, secret, hidden, festive.

The translator stood in front of the mirror. She studied her own image. But she was distracted by the presence of another woman behind the mirror, at the end of the hall. She was different from the others. She was working at a table, with an iron, a needle in her mouth. She had tired eyes, a sorrowful face.

The clothes were elegant, well made. Even though they suited her, the translator didn’t like them. After trying the last thing she decided to leave. She didn’t feel like herself in those clothes. She didn’t want to acquire or accumulate anything more.

There were piles of clothes everywhere, on the floor, on the couches, on the chairs, like so many dark puddles. After rummaging awhile, she found hers. But her black sweater was missing. She had looked in all the piles but hadn’t found it.

The room was almost empty. While the translator was looking for her sweater, most of the women had left. The owner was preparing a receipt for the next to last. Only the translator remained.

The owner looked at her, as if she had noticed her presence for the first time.

“And what did you decide on?”

“Nothing. I’m missing a sweater, my own.”

“What color?”

“Black.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

The owner called to the woman behind the mirror. She asked her to pick the clothes up off the floor, put everything in order.

“This lady is missing a black sweater,” she said. “I don’t know you,” she continued. “How did you find me?”

“I was outside. I followed the others. I didn’t know what was inside.”

“You don’t like the clothes?”

“I like them but I don’t need them.”

“Where are you from?”

“I’m not from here.”

“I’m not, either. Are you hungry? Would you like some wine? Fruit?”

“No, thank you.”

“Excuse me.”

It was the woman who worked for the owner. She showed something, a garment, to the translator.

“Here,” said the owner. “It was hidden, we found your sweater.”

The translator took it. But she knew immediately, without even putting it on, that it wasn’t hers. It was another one, unfamiliar. The wool was coarser, the black less intense, and it was a different size. When she put it on, when she looked in the mirror, the mistake seemed obvious to her.

“This isn’t mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mine is similar, but this isn’t it. I don’t recognize this sweater. It doesn’t fit.”

“But it must be yours. The maid has put everything in order. There’s nothing on the floor, nothing on the couches, look.”

The translator didn’t want to take the other sweater. She felt antipathy toward it, revulsion. “This isn’t mine. Mine has disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe another woman took it without realizing it. Maybe there was an exchange. Maybe there were other clients who were wearing a sweater like this?”

“I don’t remember. All right, I can check, wait.”

The owner sat down again on the couch. She lit a cigarette. Then she began to make a series of calls. She explained to one woman after another what had happened. She said a few words to each one.

The translator waited. She was convinced that one of them had taken her sweater and that the one left for her belonged to someone else.

The owner put down the phone. “I’m sorry. I’ve asked everyone. No one was wearing a black sweater here today. Only you.”

“But this isn’t mine.”

She was sure that it wasn’t hers. At the same time she felt a tremendous, consuming uncertainty that canceled out everything, that left her with nothing.

“Thank you for coming, goodbye,” said the owner. She said nothing more.

The translator felt disconcerted, empty. She had come to that city looking for another version of herself, a transfiguration. But she understood that her identity was insidious, a root that she would never be able to pull up, a prison in which she would be trapped.

In the hall she wanted to say goodbye to the woman who worked for the owner, behind the mirror, at a table. But she was no longer there.

The translator returned home, defeated. She was forced to wear the other sweater, because it was still raining. That night she fell asleep without eating, without dreaming.

The next day, when she woke, she saw a black sweater on a chair in the corner of the room. It was again familiar to her. She knew that it had always been hers, and that her reaction the day before, the little scene she had made in front of the two other women, had been completely irrational, absurd.

And yet this sweater was no longer the same, no longer the one she’d been looking for. When she saw it, she no longer felt revulsion. In fact, when she put it on, she preferred it. She didn’t want to find the one she had lost, she didn’t miss it. Now, when she put it on, she, too, was another.

THE FRAGILE SHELTER

When I read in Italian, I feel like a guest, a traveler. Nevertheless, what I’m doing seems a legitimate, acceptable task.

When I write in Italian, I feel like an intruder, an impostor. The work seems counterfeit, unnatural. I realize that I’ve crossed over a boundary, that I feel lost, in flight. I’m a complete foreigner.

When I give up English, I give up my authority. I’m shaky rather than secure. I’m weak.

What is the source of the impulse to distance myself from my dominant language, the language that I depend on, that I come from as a writer, to devote myself to Italian?

Before I became a writer, I lacked a clear, precise identity. It was through writing that I was able to feel fulfilled. But when I write in Italian I don’t feel that.

What does it mean, for a writer, to write without her own authority? Can I call myself an author, if I don’t feel authoritative?

How is it possible that when I write in Italian I feel both freer and confined, constricted? Maybe because in Italian I have the freedom to be imperfect.

Why does this imperfect, spare new voice attract me? Why does poverty satisfy me? What does it mean to give up a palace to live practically on the street, in a shelter so fragile?

Maybe because from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.

I wonder what the relationship is between freedom and limits. I wonder how a prison can resemble paradise.

I’m reminded of a passage in Verga, whom I recently discovered: “To think that this patch of ground, a sliver of sky, a vase of flowers might have been enough for me to enjoy all the happiness in the world if I hadn’t experienced freedom, if I didn’t feel in my heart a gnawing fever for all the joys that are outside these walls!”

The speaker is the protagonist of La storia di una capinera (Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird), a novice in an enclosed order of nuns who feels trapped in the convent, who longs for the countryside, light, air.

I, at the moment, prefer the enclosure. When I write in Italian, that sliver of sky is enough.

I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. I feel tormented, just like Verga’s songbird. Like her, I wish for something else — something that I probably shouldn’t wish for. But I think that the need to write always comes from desperation, along with hope.

I know that one should have a thorough knowledge of the language one writes in. I know that I lack true mastery. I know that my writing in Italian is something premature, reckless, always approximate. I’d like to apologize. I’d like to explain the source of this impulse of mine.

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

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.

Given that I try to decipher everything through writing, maybe writing in Italian is simply my way of learning the language in a more profound, more stimulating way.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on the earth.

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

IMPOSSIBILITY

Reading an interview with the novelist Carlos Fuentes in an issue of Nuovi Argomenti, I find this: “It’s extremely useful to know that there are certain heights one will never be able to reach.”

Fuentes is referring to literary masterpieces — works of genius like Don Quixote, for example — that remain untouchable. I think that these heights have a dual, and substantial, role for writers: they make us aim at perfection and remind us of our mediocrity.

As a writer, in whatever language, I have to take account of the presence of the greatest writers. I have to accept the nature of my contribution with respect to theirs. Although I know I’ll never write like Cervantes, like Dante, like Shakespeare, nevertheless I write. I have to manage the anxiety that those heights can stir up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t dare write.

Now that I’m writing in Italian, Fuentes’s observation seems even more pertinent. I have to accept the impossibility of reaching the height that inspires me but at the same time pushes me into a corner. Now the height is not the work of a writer more brilliant than I am but, rather, the heart of the language itself. Although I know that I will never be securely inside that heart, I try, through writing, to reach it.

I wonder if I’m going against the current. I live in an era in which almost anything seems possible, in which no one wants to accept any limits. We can send a message in an instant, we can go from one end of the world to the other in a day. We can plainly see a person who is not with us. Thanks to technology, no waiting, no distance. That’s why we can say with assurance that the world is smaller than it used to be. We are always connected, reachable. Technology refutes distance, today more than ever.

And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can’t accelerate the process, you can’t abbreviate it. The pace is slow, hesitant, there are no shortcuts. The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is. The closer I get, the farther away. Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It’s taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far.

In that sense the metaphor of the small lake that I wanted to cross, with which I began this series of reflections, is wrong. Because in fact a language isn’t a small lake but an ocean. A tremendous, mysterious element, a force of nature that I have to bow before.

In Italian I lack a complete perspective. I lack the distance that would help me. I have only the distance that hinders me.

It’s impossible to see the entire landscape. I rely on certain paths, certain ways to get through. Routes I trust and probably depend on too much. I recognize certain words, certain constructions, as if they were familiar trees during a daily walk. But ultimately when I write I’m in a trench.

I write on the margins, just as I’ve always lived on the margins of countries, of cultures. A peripheral zone where it’s impossible for me to feel rooted, but where I’m comfortable. The only zone where I think that, in some way, I belong.

I can skirt the boundary of Italian, but the interior of the language escapes me. I don’t see the secret pathways, the concealed layers. The hidden levels. The subterranean part.

At Hadrian’s Villa, in Tivoli, there is a gigantic network of streets, an impressive and imposing system that is entirely underground. This complex of passages was dug to transport goods, servants, slaves. To separate the emperor from the people. To hide the real and unruly life of the villa, just as the skin hides the unsightly but essential functions of the body.

At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow. That the true life of the language, the substance, is there.

To return to Fuentes: I agree, I think that an awareness of impossibility is central to the creative impulse. In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.

If everything were possible, what would be the meaning, the point of life?

If it were possible to bridge the distance between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.

VENICE

In this disquieting, almost dreamlike city, I discover a new way to understand my relationship with Italian. The fragmented, disorienting topography gives me another key.

It’s the dialogue between the bridges and the canals. A dialogue between water and land. A dialogue that expresses a state of both separation and connection.

In Venice I can’t go anywhere without crossing countless pedestrian bridges. At first, having to cross a bridge every few minutes is exhausting. Each journey seems abnormal and somewhat difficult. In a short time, though, I get used to it, and slowly this journey becomes habitual, enticing. I ascend, cross the canal, then descend on the other side. Walking through Venice means repeating this act an incalculable number of times. In the middle of every bridge I find myself suspended, neither here nor there. Writing in another language resembles a journey of this sort.

My writing in Italian is, just like a bridge, something constructed, fragile. It might collapse at any moment, leaving me in danger. English flows under my feet. I’m aware of it: an undeniable presence, even if I try to avoid it. Like the water in Venice, it remains the stronger, more natural element, the element that forever threatens to swallow me. Paradoxically, I could survive without any trouble in English; I wouldn’t drown. And yet, because I don’t want any contact with the water, I build bridges.

I notice that in Venice almost all the elements are inverted. It’s hard for me to distinguish between what exists and what seems an illusion, an apparition. Everything appears unstable, changeable. The streets aren’t solid. The houses seem to float. The fog can make the architecture invisible. The high water can flood a square. The canals reflect a version of the city that doesn’t exist.

The disorientation I feel in Venice is similar to what possesses me when I write in Italian. 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.

Over the years Venice has had an increasingly unsettling impact on me. Its devastating beauty pierces me, I’m overwhelmed by the fragility of life. I’m enveloped in a passionate dream that always seems about to dissolve. A dream that’s truer than life. Crossing the bridges again and again makes me think of the passage that we all make on the earth, between birth and death. Sometimes, crossing certain bridges, I fear I’ve already reached the beyond.

When I write in Italian, I feel the same disquiet, in spite of my love for the language. The step that I’m taking seems like a leap into the void, an inversion of myself. Like the reflections of the buildings that tremble on the surface of the Grand Canal, my writing in Italian is something impalpable. Nebulous, like the fog. I’m afraid that the bridge between me and Italian doesn’t, ultimately, exist. That it will remain, at best, a chimera.

Yet both in Venice and on the page, bridges are the only way to move into a new dimension, to get past English, to arrive somewhere else. Every sentence I write in Italian is a small bridge that has to be constructed, then crossed. I do it with hesitation mixed with a persistent, inexplicable impulse. Every sentence, like every bridge, carries me from one place to another. It’s an atypical, enticing path. A new rhythm. Now I’m almost used to it.

THE IMPERFECT

There are so many things that continue to confuse me in Italian. Prepositions, for example: alla parete, per terra, dal calzolaio, in edicola (on the wall, on the ground, at the shoemaker, at the newsstand). To review them, I could take notes nel quaderno or sul taccuino (in the exercise book or in the notebook). I have a grammar containing a series of exercises of this sort, to help foreign students: “Mettiti miei panni e prova vedere la situazione i miei occhi” (Put yourself my clothes and try see the situation my eyes). They are tedious, but I do them anyway; if I want to master the language, there’s no way out. And yet I never manage to fill in those blank spaces perfectly. Maybe this stupendous sentence from a story by Alberto Moravia would be sufficient to teach me the prepositions once and for all: “Sbucammo finalmente su una piazza al sole, in un venticello frizzante da neve, davanti un parapetto oltre il quale non c’era che la luce di un grande panorama che non si vedeva” (“We finally emerged onto a square in the sun, in a crisp breeze hinting at snow, in front of a parapet beyond which there was only the light of a grand panorama that couldn’t be seen”).

Another thorn in my side is the use of the article — it’s not clear to me when you use it and when it’s dropped. Why does one say c’è vento (it’s windy), but c’è il sole (it’s sunny)? I struggle to understand the difference between uno stato d’animo (a state of mind) and una busta della spesa (a shopping bag), giorni di scirocco (days of sirocco) and la linea dell’orizzonte (the line of the horizon). I tend to make mistakes, putting the article when there’s no need (as in “Parliamo del cinema,” instead of di cinema, or “Sono venuta in Italia per cambiare la strada,” instead of cambiare strada; “We’re talking about the movies” instead of “about movies”; “I came to Italy to change the course” instead of “to change course”), but reading Elio Vittorini I learn that you say queste sono fandonie (those are lies). Thanks to an advertising poster on the street, I learn that il piacere non ha limiti (pleasure has no limits).

By the way: I’m still not very sure about the difference between limite and limitazione, funzione and funzionamento, modifica and modificazione (limit, function, change). Certain words that resemble each other torment me: schiacciare (crush) and scacciare (expel), spiccare (stand out) and spicciare (get something done quickly), fioco (weak) and fiocco (bow), crocchio (small group) and crocicchio (crossroads). I still mix up già (already) and appena (just).

Sometimes I hesitate when I compare two things, and so my notebook is full of sentences like Di questo romanzo mi piace più la prima parte della seconda. Parlo l’inglese meglio dell’italiano. Preferisco Roma a New York. Piove più a Londra che a Palermo (I like the first part of this novel more than the second part. I speak English better than Italian. I prefer Rome to New York. It rains more in London than in Palermo).

I realize that it’s impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For good reason, what confuses me most in Italian is when to use the imperfect and when the simple past. It should be fairly straightforward, but somehow, for me, it isn’t. When I have to choose between them, I don’t know which is right. I see the fork in the road and I slow down, feeling that I am about to come to a halt. I am filled with doubt; I panic. I don’t understand the difference instinctively. It’s as if I had a kind of temporal myopia.

Only in Rome, when I start speaking Italian every day, do I become aware of this problem. Listening to my friends, telling my Italian teacher something, I notice it. I say c’è stato scritto (there has been written) when one should say c’era scritto (there was written). I say, era difficile (it was difficult) when one should say è stato difficile (it has been difficult). I am confused above all by era (it was) and è stato (it has been) — two faces of the verb essere (to be), a verb that is fundamental. In Rome, for almost a year, my confusion torments me.

To help, my teacher provides some images: the background with respect to the main action. The frame with respect to the picture. A curving line rather than a straight one. A situation rather than a fact.

One says, la chiave era sul tavolo, the key was on the table. In this case a curving line, a situation. And yet to me it also seems a fact, the fact that the key was on the table.

One says, siamo stati bene, we have been comfortable. Here we have the straight line, a condition that savors of conclusiveness. And yet to me it also seems a situation.

The confusion makes me think of a certain geometric motif, a kind of optical illusion, that is found in the floors of churches, or old palazzi. It’s a series of squares in three colors, a simple but complex design that is deceptive to the eye. The effect of this illusion is astounding, disconcerting — the perspective shifts, so that you see two versions of the same thing, two possibilities, at the same time.

Searching for clues, I note that with the adverbs sempre (always) and mai (never) one often uses the simple past: Sono stata sempre confusa (I’ve always been confused), for example. Or, Non sono mai stata capace di assorbire questa cosa (I’ve never been able to grasp this thing). I think I’ve discovered an important key, maybe a rule. Then, reading È stato così (It Has Been Like That [The Dry Heart]), by Natalia Ginzburg — a novel whose title provides another example of this theme — I read, “Non mi diceva mai che era innamorato di me.… Francesca aveva sempre tante cose da raccontare … Aspettavo sempre la posta” (He never told me he was in love with me.…Francesca always had lots of stories to tell.… I was always waiting for the mail”). No rule, only more confusion.

One day, after reading Niente, più niente al mondo (Nothing, Nothing More in the World), a novel by Massimo Carlotto, I underline, like a lunatic, every use of the verb essere in the past. I write all the sentences in a notebook: “Sei stato dolce.” “C’era ancora la lira.” “È stato così fin da quando era giovane.” “Ero certa che tutto sarebbe cambiato in meglio.” (“You were sweet.” “The lira was still in use.” “He’s been like that since he was young.” “I was sure that everything would change for the better.”) But this labor turns out to be useless. I learn only one thing, in the end: it depends on the context, on the intention.

By now the difference between the imperfect and the simple past troubles me a little less. By now I know that one says, at the end of a dinner, È stata una bella serata (It’s been a lovely evening), but that it was (era) a lovely evening until it rained. I know that sono stata in Greece for a week, but that ero in Greece when I got sick. I understand that the imperfect refers to a sort of introduction — an open-ended action, without boundaries, without beginning or end. An action suspended rather than contained, confined to the past. I understand that the relationship between the imperfect and the simple past is a precise, complex system, to make time gone by more tangible, more vivid. A way of recounting something abstract, of perceiving something that isn’t there.

Needless to say, this obstacle makes me feel, in fact, very imperfect. Although it’s frustrating, it seems fated. I identify with the imperfect because a sense of imperfection has marked my life. I’ve been trying to improve myself forever, correct myself, because I’ve always felt I was a flawed person.

Because of my divided identity, or perhaps by disposition, I consider myself an incomplete person, in some way deficient. Maybe there is a linguistic reason — the lack of a language to identify with. As a girl in America, I tried to speak Bengali perfectly, without a foreign accent, to satisfy my parents, and above all to feel that I was completely their daughter. But it was impossible. On the other hand, I wanted to be considered an American, yet, despite the fact that I speak English perfectly, that was impossible, too. I was suspended rather than rooted. I had two sides, neither well defined. The anxiety I felt, and still feel, comes from a sense of inadequacy, of being a disappointment.

Here in Italy, where I’m very comfortable, I feel more imperfect than ever. Every day, when I speak, when I write in Italian, I meet with imperfection. That curving line leaves a trail, it accompanies me everywhere. It betrays me; it reveals that I am not rooted in this language.

Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection? What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.

I’ve been writing since I was a child in order to forget my imperfections, in order to hide in the background of life. In a certain sense writing is an extended homage to imperfection. A book, like a person, remains imperfect, incomplete, during its entire creation. At the end of the gestation the person is born, then grows, but I consider a book alive only during the writing. Afterward, at least for me, it dies.

THE HAIRY ADOLESCENT

I receive an invitation to go to Capri, to a literary festival. It consists of a series of conversations between Anglophone and Italian writers, and takes place in a small piazza overlooking the sea, with a view of the rock formations known as the Faraglioni. Every year the festival is devoted to a subject that the writers will discuss with one another. This year, it is “Winners and Losers.” Before the festival, the participants are asked to write a piece on this subject, to be printed in a bilingual catalog. Since I’m an Anglophone writer, the assumption is that I will write this piece in English, and it will then be translated into Italian. But, having been in Italy for almost a year, I am now so gripped by the language that I try to avoid English as much as possible. I write the piece in Italian, and so an English translation is needed.

I would be the natural translator, but I don’t have the least desire to do it. I’m not interested, at the moment, in going back. In fact, it frightens me. When I express my reluctance to my husband, he says, “You should do the translation yourself. Better you than someone else, otherwise it won’t be under your control.” Following this advice, and having a sense of duty, I decide, in the end, to translate myself.

I imagined that it would be an easy job. A descent rather than an ascent. Instead, I’m astonished at how demanding I find it. When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don’t like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I’d run into a boyfriend I’d tired of, someone I’d left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.

On the one hand, the translation doesn’t sound good. It seems insipid, dull, incapable of expressing my new thoughts. On the other, I’m overwhelmed by the richness, the power, the suppleness of my English. Suddenly thousands of words, nuances, come to me. A solid grammar, no hesitations. I don’t need a dictionary; in English I don’t have to clamber uphill. This old knowledge, this skill, depresses me. Who is this writer, so well equipped? I don’t recognize her.

I feel unfaithful. I fear that, against my will, reluctantly, I have betrayed Italian.

Compared with Italian, English seems overbearing, domineering, full of itself. I have the impression that English has been in captivity and, having just been released, is furious. Probably, feeling neglected for almost a year, it’s angry at me. The two languages confront each other on the desk, but the winner is already more than obvious. The translation is devouring, dismantling the original text. I’m struck by how this bloody struggle exemplifies the theme of the festival, the very subject of the piece.

I want to protect my Italian, which I hold in my arms like a newborn. I want to coddle it. It has to sleep, eat, grow. Compared with Italian, my English is like a hairy, smelly teenager. Go away, I want to say to it. Don’t bother your little brother, he’s sleeping. He’s not a creature who can run around and play. He’s not a carefree, strong, independent kid like you.

Now I realize that I’m describing my relationship with Italian in another way, that I’ve introduced a new metaphor. Until now the analogy had always been romantic: a falling in love. Now, as I translate myself, I feel like the mother of two children. I notice that I’ve changed my relation to the language, but maybe this change reflects a development, a natural journey. One type of love follows the other; from a passionate coupling, ideally, a new generation is born. I feel an emotion even more intense, more pure, more transcendent for my children. Maternity is a visceral bond, an unconditional love, a devotion that goes beyond attraction and compatibility.

As I translate this short piece into English, I feel split in two. I can’t deal with the tension; I’m incapable of moving like an acrobat between the languages. I’m conscious of the unpleasant sensation of having to be two different people at the same time — an existential condition that has marked my life. I know that Beckett translated himself from French into English. That would be impossible for me, because my Italian remains much weaker. They aren’t equal, these two brothers, and the little one is my favorite. Toward Italian, I’m not neutral.

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.

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.

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. I used to love translating from Latin, from ancient Greek, from Bengali. It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time. Translating myself, from a language in which I am still a novice, isn’t the same thing. I’ve struggled to complete the text in Italian, and I feel I’ve just arrived, tired but thrilled. I want to stop, orient myself. The reentry is too soon, it hurts. It seems like a defeat, a regression. It seems destructive rather than creative, almost a suicide.

In Capri, I make my presentation in Italian. I read aloud my piece on winners and losers. I see the English text in blue on the left-hand side of the page, the Italian, in black, on the right. The English is mute, fairly tranquil. Printed and bound, the brothers tolerate each other. They are, at least for the moment, at peace.

After the reading I have a conversation with two Italian writers. 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. I think of Mantua thirteen years ago, and of the interpreter without whom I couldn’t express myself in Italian in public. I didn’t think I would ever reach this goal.

Listening to my interpreter, I trust my Italian for the first time. Although he’ll remain forever the younger brother, the little guy pulls through. Thanks to the firstborn, I can see the second — listen to him, even admire him a little.

THE SECOND EXILE

After spending a year in Rome I return to America for a month. Immediately, I miss Italian. Not to be able to speak it and hear it every day distresses me. When I go to restaurants, to shops, to the beach, I’m irritated: Why aren’t people speaking Italian? I don’t want to interact with anyone. I have an aching sense of homesickness.

Everything I absorbed in Rome seems absent. Returning to the maternal metaphor, I think of the first times I had to leave my children at home, just after they were born. At the time, I felt a tremendous anxiety. I felt guilty, even though those brief moments of separation were normal, important both for me and for them. It was important to establish that our bodies, until then connected, were independent. And yet now, as then, I am acutely conscious of a painful physical detachment. As if a part of me were missing.

I’m aware of the distance. Of an oppressive, intolerable silence.

The absence of Italian assails me more forcefully every day. I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten everything I learned. I’m afraid of being annihilated. I imagine a devouring vortex, all the words disappearing into the darkness. In my notebook I make a list of Italian verbs that signify the act of going away: scomparire, svanire, sbiadire, sfumare, finire. Evaporare, svaporare, svampire. Perdersi, dileguarsi, dissolversi. I know that some are synonyms of morire, to die.

I suffer until, one afternoon on Cape Cod, a journalist from Milan calls, to interview me. I can’t wait for the phone to ring, but as I’m talking to her I’m worried that my Italian already sounds awkward, that my language is already out of practice. A foreign language is a delicate, finicky muscle. If you don’t use it, it gets weak. In America, my Italian sounds jarring, transplanted. The manner of speaking, the sounds, the rhythms, the cadences seem uprooted, out of place. The words seem irrelevant, without a meaningful presence. They seem like castaways, nomads.

In America, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language. Forty years ago it wasn’t easy for them to talk to their families on the phone. They looked forward to the mail. They couldn’t wait for a letter to arrive from Calcutta, written in Bengali. They read it a hundred times, they saved it. Those letters evoked their language and conjured a life that had disappeared. When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the light, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

After living in Italy for only a year, I feel a little like that in America. And yet something doesn’t add up. I’m not Italian, I’m not even bilingual. Italian remains for me a language learned as an adult, cultivated, nurtured.

One day on Cape Cod I happen on a secondhand book sale, outside, in a small square. On the grass are a lot of folding tables piled with all types of books. They’re very cheap. Usually I like rummaging for an hour or so and buying a bunch of things. This time, however, I don’t want to buy anything, because all the books are in English. Feeling desperate, I look for a book in Italian. There are a few boxes devoted to foreign languages. I see a beat-up German dictionary, some tattered French novels, but nothing in Italian. The only thing that attracts me is a tourist guide to Italy written in English; it’s the only thing I buy, and only because it makes me think of returning to Rome at the end of August. All the other books, even a copy of one of my own novels, leave me indifferent. As if they were written in a foreign language.

Now I feel a double crisis. On the one hand I’m aware of the ocean, in every sense, between me and Italian. On the other, of the separation between me and English. I’d already noticed it in Italy, translating myself. But I think that emotional distance is always more pronounced, more piercing, when, in spite of proximity, there remains an abyss.

Why don’t I feel more at home in English? How is it that the language I learned to read and write in doesn’t comfort me? What happened, and what does it mean? The estrangement, the disenchantment confuses, disturbs me. I feel more than ever that I am a writer without a definitive language, without origin, without definition. Whether it’s an advantage or a disadvantage I wouldn’t know.

Midway through the month I go to see my Venetian Italian teacher, in Brooklyn. This time we don’t have a lesson, just a long chat. We talk about Rome, about her family and mine. I bring her a box of biscottini, I show her photographs of my new life. She gives me some of her books, paperbacks, taken down from the shelves: stories by Calvino, Pavese, Silvio d’Arzo. Poems of Ungaretti. It’s the last time I’ll come here. My teacher is about to move, she’s leaving Brooklyn. She’s already sold the house where she lived for many years, where we had our lessons. She is preparing to pack everything for the move. From now on, when I return to America, to Brooklyn, I won’t see her.

I come home carrying a small pile of Italian books, and with these, in spite of a pervasive melancholy, I am able to calm myself. In this period of silence, of linguistic isolation, only a book can reassure me. Books are the best means — private, discreet, reliable — of overcoming reality.

I read in Italian every day, but I don’t write. In America I become passive. Even though I’ve brought the dictionaries, the exercise books, the notebooks, I can’t write even a word in Italian. I describe nothing in the diary, I don’t feel like it. As far as writing is concerned, I remain inactive. As if I were in a creative waiting room, all I do is wait.

Finally, at the end of August, at the airport, at the gate, I am surrounded by Italian again. I see all the Italians who are going home after their vacations in New York. I hear their chatter. At first I feel relief, joy. Immediately afterward I realize that I’m not like them. I’m different, just as I was different from my parents when we went on vacation to Calcutta. I’m not returning to Rome to rejoin my language. I’m returning to continue my courtship of another.

Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

THE WALL

There is pain in every joy. In every violent passion a dark side.

The second year in Rome, after Christmas, I go with my family to see the temples at Paestum, and afterward we spend a couple of days in Salerno. There, in the center, in a shop window, I notice some nice children’s clothes. I go in with my daughter. I turn to the saleswoman. I tell her I’m looking for pants for my daughter. I describe what I have in mind, suggest colors that would suit, and add that my daughter doesn’t like styles that are too tight, that she would prefer something comfortable. In other words, I speak for quite a long time with this saleswoman, in an Italian that is fluent but not completely natural.

At a certain point my husband comes in with our son. Unlike me, my husband, an American, looks as if he could be Italian. He and I exchange a few words, in Italian, in front of the saleswoman. I show him a jacket on sale that I’m considering for our son. He answers in monosyllables, Sure, I like it, yes, let’s see. Not even an entire sentence. My husband speaks perfect Spanish, so he tends to speak Italian with a Spanish accent. He says sessenta y uno instead of sessantuno (sixty-one), bellessa instead of bellezza (beauty), nunca instead of mai (never); our children tease him about it. My husband speaks Italian well, but he doesn’t speak it better than I do.

We decide to buy two pairs of pants plus the jacket. At the cash register, while I’m paying, the saleswoman asks me: “Where are you from?”

I explain that we live in Rome, that we moved to Italy last year from New York. At that point the saleswoman says: “But your husband must be Italian. He speaks perfectly, without any accent.”

Here is the border that I will never manage to cross. The wall that will remain forever between me and Italian, no matter how well I learn it. My physical appearance.

I feel like crying. I would like to shout: “I’m the one who desperately loves your language, not my husband. He speaks Italian only because he needs to, because he happens to live here. I’ve been studying your language for more than twenty years, he not even for two. I read only your literature. I can now speak Italian in public, do live radio interviews. I keep an Italian diary, I write stories.”

I don’t say anything to the saleswoman. I thank her, I say goodbye, then I go out. I understand that my attachment to Italian is worthless. That all my devotion, all the passion signify nothing. According to this saleswoman, my husband can speak Italian very well, he should be praised, not me. I feel humiliated, offended, envious. I’m speechless. Finally I say to my husband, in Italian, when we’re on the street, “Sono sbalordita” (I’m stunned).

And my husband asks me, in English, “What does sbalordita mean?”

The episode in Salerno is only one example of the wall I face repeatedly in Italy. Because of my physical appearance, I’m seen as a foreigner. It’s true, I am. But, being a foreigner who speaks Italian well, I have two linguistic experiences, remarkably different, in this country.

Those who know me speak to me in Italian. They appreciate that I understand their language, they gladly share it with me. When I speak Italian with my Italian friends I feel immersed in the language, welcomed, accepted. I take part in the language: in the theater of spoken Italian I think that I, too, have a role, a presence. With friends I can talk for hours, at times for days, without having to rely on any English word. I’m in the middle of the lake and I’m swimming with them, in my own way.

But when I go into a shop like the one in Salerno I find myself abruptly hurled back to shore. People who don’t know me assume, looking at me, that I don’t know Italian. When I speak to them in Italian, when I ask for something (a head of garlic, a stamp, the time), they say, puzzled, “I don’t understand.” It’s always the same response, the same scowl. As if my Italian were another language.

They don’t understand me because they don’t want to understand me; they don’t understand me because they don’t want to listen to me, accept me. That’s how the wall works. Someone who doesn’t understand me can ignore me, doesn’t have to take account of me. Such people look at me but don’t see me. They don’t appreciate that I am working hard to speak their language; rather, it irritates them. Sometimes when I speak Italian in Italy, I feel reprimanded, like a child who touches an object that shouldn’t be touched. “Don’t touch our language,” some Italians seem to say to me. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

Learning a foreign language is the fundamental way to fit in with new people in a new country. It makes a relationship possible. Without language you can’t feel that you have a legitimate, respected presence. You are without a voice, without power. No chink, no point of entrance can be found in the wall. I know that if I stayed in Italy for the rest of my life, even if I were able to speak a polished, impeccable Italian, that wall, for me, would remain. I think of people who were born and grew up in Italy, who consider Italy their homeland, who speak Italian perfectly, but who, in the eyes of certain Italians, seem “foreign.”

My husband’s name is Alberto. For him, it’s enough to extend his hand, to say, “A pleasure, I’m Alberto.” Because of his looks, because of his name, everyone thinks he’s Italian. When I do the same thing, the same people say, in English, “Nice to meet you.” When I continue to speak in Italian, they ask me: “How is it that you speak Italian so well?” and I have to provide an explanation, I have to say why. The fact that I speak Italian seems to them unusual. No one asks my husband that question.

One evening, I’m presenting my latest novel in a bookstore in the Flaminio neighborhood of Rome. I’ve prepared for a conversation with an Italian friend — also a writer — on various literary topics. Before the presentation begins, a man whom my husband and I have just met asks if I’m going to make the presentation in English. When I answer, in Italian, that I intend to do it in Italian, he asks if I learned the language from my husband.

In America, although I speak English like a native, although I’m considered an American writer, I meet the same wall but for different reasons. Every so often, because of my name, and my appearance, someone asks me why I chose to write in English rather than in my native language. Those who meet me for the first time — when they see me, then learn my name, then hear the way I speak English — ask me where I’m from. I have to justify the language I speak in, even though I know it perfectly. If I don’t speak, even many Americans think I’m a foreigner. I remember running into a man on the street one day who wanted to give me an advertising flyer. I was returning from a library in Boston; at the time I was writing my doctoral thesis, on English literature in the seventeenth century. When I refused to take the flyer, the man yelled: “What the fuck is your problem, can’t speak English?”

I can’t avoid the wall even in India, in Calcutta, in the city of my so-called mother tongue. There, apart from my relatives who have known me forever, almost everyone thinks that, because I was born and grew up outside India, I speak only English, or that I scarcely understand Bengali. In spite of my appearance and my Indian name, they speak to me in English. When I answer in Bengali, they express the same surprise as certain Italians, certain Americans. No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are a part of me.

I’m a writer: I identify myself completely with language, I work with it. And yet the wall keeps me at a distance, separates me. The wall is inevitable. It surrounds me wherever I go, so that I wonder if perhaps the wall is me.

I write in order to break down the wall, to express myself in a pure way. When I write, my appearance, my name have nothing to do with it. I am heard without being seen, without prejudices, without a filter. I am invisible. I become my words, and the words become me.

When I write in Italian I have to accept a second wall, which is very high and even more impermeable: the wall of language itself. But from the creative point of view that linguistic wall, however exasperating, interests me, inspires me.

A last example: one day in Rome I go to have lunch with my Italian publisher and his wife at the Hotel d’Inghilterra. We talk about the publication of my latest book in Italy, and about what I’m writing now, about my desire to write something about my relationship with the Italian language. We talk about Anna Maria Ortese and other Italian writers I’d like to translate. My publisher seems enthusiastic about these new projects I have in mind. He says that what I’d like to do — write, for the moment, in Italian — seems to him a good idea.

After lunch, something catches my eye in the window of a shop selling shoes and purses on Via del Corso. I go into the shop. This time I say nothing. I’m silent. But the saleswoman, seeing me, says immediately, in English, “May I help you?”—four polite words that every so often in Italy break my heart.

THE TRIANGLE

I would like to pause for a moment on the three languages I know. At this point a summary of my relationship with each one, and of the links between them, would be helpful.

My very first language was Bengali, handed down to me by my parents. For four years, until I went to school in America, it was my main language, and I felt comfortable in it, even though I was born and grew up in countries where I was surrounded by another language: English. My first encounter with English was harsh and unpleasant: when I was sent to nursery school I was traumatized. It was hard for me to trust the teachers and make friends, because I had to express myself in a language that I didn’t speak, that I barely knew, that seemed to me foreign. I just wanted to go home, to the language in which I was known, and loved.

A few years later, however, Bengali took a step backward, when I began to read. I was six or seven. From then on my mother tongue was no longer capable, by itself, of rearing me. In a certain sense it died. English arrived, a stepmother.

I became a passionate reader by getting to know my stepmother, deciphering her, satisfying her. And yet my mother tongue remained a demanding phantom, still present. My parents wanted me to speak only Bengali with them and all their friends. If I spoke English at home they scolded me. The part of me that spoke English, that went to school, that read and wrote, was another person.

I couldn’t identify with either. One was always concealed behind the other, but never completely, just as the full moon can hide almost all night behind a mass of clouds and then suddenly emerge, dazzling. Even though I spoke only Bengali with my family, there was always English in the air, on the street, in the pages of books. On the other hand, after speaking English for hours in the classroom, I came home every day to a place where there was no English. I realized that I had to speak both languages extremely well: the one to please my parents, the other to survive in America. I remained suspended, torn between the two. The linguistic coming and going confused me; it seemed a contradiction that I couldn’t resolve.

Those two languages of mine didn’t get along. They were incompatible adversaries, intolerant of each other. I thought they had nothing in common except me, so that I felt like a contradiction in terms myself.

For my family English represented a foreign culture that they didn’t want to give in to. Bengali represented the part of me that belonged to my parents, that didn’t belong to America. None of my teachers, none of my friends were ever curious about the fact that I spoke another language. They attached no importance to it, didn’t ask about it. It didn’t interest them, as if that part of me, that capacity, weren’t there. Just as English did for my parents, Bengali represented for the Americans I knew as a child a remote culture, unknown, suspect. Or maybe in reality it represented nothing. Unlike my parents, who knew English well, the Americans were completely oblivious of the language that we spoke at home. Bengali was something they could easily ignore.

The more I read and learned in English, the more, as a girl, I identified with it. I tried to be like my friends, who didn’t speak any other language. Who, in my opinion, had a normal life. I was ashamed to have to speak Bengali in front of my American friends. I hated hearing my mother on the telephone if I happened to be at a friend’s house. I wanted to hide, as far as possible, my relationship with the language. I wanted to deny it.

I was ashamed of speaking Bengali and at the same time I was ashamed of feeling ashamed. It was impossible to speak English without feeling detached from my parents, without an unsettling sense of separation. Speaking English, I found myself in a space where I felt isolated, where I was no longer under their protection.

I saw the consequences of not speaking English perfectly, of speaking with a foreign accent. I saw the wall that my parents faced in America almost every day. It was a persistent insecurity for them. Sometimes I had to explain the meaning of certain terms, as if I were the parent. Sometimes I spoke for them. In shops the salespeople tended to address me, simply because my English didn’t have a foreign accent. As if my father and mother, with their accent, couldn’t understand. I hated the attitude of these salespeople toward my parents. I wanted to defend them. I would have liked to protest: “They understand everything you say, while you can’t understand even a word of Bengali or any other language in the world.” And yet it annoyed me as well when my parents mispronounced an English word. I corrected them, impertinently. I didn’t want them to be vulnerable. I didn’t like my advantage, their disadvantage. I would have liked them to speak English as I did.

I had to joust between those two languages until, at around the age of twenty-five, I discovered Italian. There was no need to learn that language. No family, cultural, social pressure. No necessity.

The arrival of Italian, the third point on my linguistic journey, creates a triangle. It creates a shape rather than a straight line. A triangle is a complex structure, a dynamic figure. The third point changes the dynamic of that quarrelsome old couple. I am the child of those unhappy points, but the third does not come from them. It comes from my desire, my labor. It comes from me.

I think that studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and Bengali. A rejection of both the mother and the stepmother. An independent path.

Where is this new path leading me? Where does the flight end, and when? After fleeing, what will I do? It’s not really a flight in the strict sense of the word. Although I’m fleeing, I realize that both English and Bengali are beside me. Just as in a triangle, one point leads inevitably to another.

English and Italian seem to be the two closest points. Having in common many words of Latin origin, they share a certain territory. Needless to say, I often come across a word in Italian that I already know thanks to the English equivalent. I can’t deny that my comprehension of English helps. But it can also mislead me. Every so often, I think I know the meaning of a word in Italian because of the Latin root, but when I have to define it I’m wrong, and I realize that I haven’t learned the proper meaning in English, either. The more my comprehension of Italian increases, the more it reveals a weakness in English. The process deepens my understanding of both languages, and thus the flight is also a return.

The distance between Bengali and Italian, apart from their shared Indo-European roots, seems much greater than that between Italian and English. As far as I know, they have only one word with a meaning in common: gola (throat). In Bengali one says chi (who) for che (that), and che to mean chi. These are trifles. And yet Bengali helps me in another way. Because I grew up speaking Bengali, I don’t speak Italian with an Anglophone accent. My tongue is already adapted, conditioned for the pronunciation of Italian. I recognize all the Italian consonants, the vowels, the diphthongs; I find them natural. From the phonetic point of view, I find Bengali much closer to Italian than to English. I have to admit, therefore, that in certain ways Bengali, too, accompanies me, helps me in this flight.

Where does the impulse to introduce a third language into my life, to create this triangle, come from? What does the triangle look like? Is it equilateral or not?

If I were drawing it I would use a pen to draw the English side, a pencil for the other two. English remains the base, the most stable, fixed side. Bengali and Italian are both weaker, indistinct. One inherited, the other adopted, desired. Bengali is my past, Italian, maybe, a new road into the future. My first language is my origin, the last the goal. In both I feel like a child, a little clumsy.

I’m scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It’s a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.

Italian remains an external language. It, too, might disappear, especially when I have to leave Italy, if I don’t continue to pursue it.

English remains the present: permanent, indelible. My stepmother won’t abandon me. Even though the language was imposed on me, it has given me a clear, correct voice, forever.

I think that this triangle is a kind of frame. And that the frame contains my self-portrait. The frame defines me, but what does it contain?

All my life I wanted to see, in the frame, something specific. I wanted a mirror to exist inside the frame that would reflect a precise, sharp image. I wanted to see a whole person, not a fragmented one. But that person wasn’t there. Because of my double identity I saw only fluctuation, distortion, dissimulation. I saw something hybrid, out of focus, always jumbled.

I think that not being able to see a specific image in the frame is the torment of my life. The absence of the image I was seeking distresses me. I’m afraid that the mirror reflects only a void, that it reflects nothing.

I come from that void, from that uncertainty. I think that the void is my origin and also my destiny. From that void, from all that uncertainty, comes the creative impulse. The impulse to fill the frame.

THE METAMORPHOSIS

Shortly before I began to write these reflections, I received an email from a friend of mine in Rome, the writer Domenico Starnone. Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he wrote, “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.” How much those words reassured me. They seemed to echo my state of mind after I came to Rome and started to write in Italian. They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language: to subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis.

Around the same time that I received this note, I was asked, during an interview, what my favorite book was. I was in London, on a stage with five other writers. It’s a question that I usually find annoying; no book has been definitive for me, so I never know how to answer. This time, though, I was able to respond without any hesitation that my favorite book was the Metamorphoses of Ovid. It’s a majestic work, a poem that concerns everything, that reflects everything. I read it for the first time twenty-five years ago, in Latin, as a university student in the United States. It was an unforgettable encounter, maybe the most satisfying reading of my life. To understand this poem I had to be persistent, translating every word. I had to devote myself to an ancient and demanding foreign language. And yet Ovid’s writing won me over: I was enchanted by it. I discovered a sublime work, a living, enthralling language. As I said, I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.

I remember vividly the moment when the nymph Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree. She is fleeing Apollo, the love-struck god who pursues her. She would like to remain alone, chaste, dedicated to the forest and the hunt, like the virgin Diana. Exhausted, the nymph, unable to outstrip the god, begs her father, Peneus, a river divinity, to help her. Ovid writes, “She has just ended this prayer when a heaviness pervades her limbs, her tender breast is bound in a thin bark, her hair grows into leaves, her arms into branches; her foot, a moment before so swift, remains fixed by sluggish roots, her face vanishes into a treetop.” When Apollo places his hand on the trunk of this tree “he feels the breast still trembling under the new bark.”

Metamorphosis is a process that is both violent and regenerative, a death and a birth. It’s not clear where the nymph ends and the tree begins; the beauty of this scene is that it portrays the fusion of two elements, of both beings. The words that describe both Daphne and the tree are right next to each other (in the Latin text, frondem/crines, ramos/bracchia, cortice/pectus; leaves/hair, branches/arms, bark/breast). The contiguity of these words, their literal juxtaposition, reinforces the state of contradiction, of entanglement. It gives us a double impression, throwing us off. It expresses in the mythical, I would say primordial, sense the meaning of being two things at the same time. Of being something undefined, ambiguous. Of having a dual identity.

Until she is transformed, Daphne is running for her life. Now she is stopped; she can no longer move. Apollo can touch her but he can’t possess her. Though cruel, the metamorphosis is her salvation. On the one hand, she loses her independence. On the other, as a tree, she remains forever in the wood, her place, where she has another sort of freedom.

As I said before, I think that my writing in Italian is a flight. Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I’m trying to get away from something, to free myself. I’ve been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I’ve been transformed, almost reborn. But the change, this new opening, is costly; like Daphne, I, too, find myself confined. I can’t move as I did before, the way I was used to moving in English. Now a new language, Italian, covers me like a kind of bark. I remain inside: renewed, trapped, relieved, uncomfortable.

Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me?

The most obvious answer is the English language. But I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.

And yet I was in love with it. I became a writer in English. And then, rather precipitously, I became a famous writer. I received a prize that I was sure I did not deserve, that seemed to me a mistake. Although it was an honor, I remained suspicious of it. I couldn’t connect myself to that recognition, and yet it changed my life. Since then I’ve been considered a successful author, so I’ve stopped feeling like an unknown, almost anonymous apprentice. All my writing comes from a place where I feel invisible, inaccessible. But a year after my first book was published I lost my anonymity.

By writing in Italian, I think I am escaping both my failures with regard to English and my success. Italian offers me a very different literary path. As a writer I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself. I can join words together and work on sentences without ever being considered an expert. I’m bound to fail when I write in Italian, but, unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn’t torment or grieve me.

If I mention that I’m writing in a new language these days, many people react negatively. In the United States, some advise me not to do it. They say they don’t want to read me translated from a foreign tongue. They don’t want me to change. In Italy, even though many have encouraged me to take this step, many support me, I’m still asked why I have a desire to write in a language that is much less widely read in the world than English. Some say that my renunciation of English could be disastrous, that my escape could lead me into a trap. They don’t understand why I want to take such a risk.

These reactions don’t surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening. I am the daughter of a mother who would never change. In the United States, she continued, as far as possible, to dress, behave, eat, think, live as if she had never left India, Calcutta. The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was her strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity. Becoming or even resembling an American would have meant total defeat. When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.

I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother’s rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine. “There was a woman … who wanted to be another person”: it’s no accident that “The Exchange,” the first story I wrote in Italian, begins with that sentence. All my life I’ve tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing. That’s why I was never happy with myself. Change seemed the only solution. Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another.

One could say that the mechanism of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.

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.

In the animal world metamorphosis is expected, natural. It means a biological passage, including various specific phases that lead, ultimately, to complete development. When a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly it’s no longer a caterpillar but a butterfly. The effect of the metamorphosis is radical, permanent. The creature has lost its old form and gained a new, almost unrecognizable one. It has new physical features, a new beauty, new capacities.

A total metamorphosis isn’t possible in my case. I can write in Italian, but I can’t become an Italian writer. Despite the fact that I’m writing this sentence in Italian, the part of me conditioned to write in English endures. I think of Fernando Pessoa, a writer who invented four versions of himself: four separate, distinct writers, thanks to which he was able to go beyond the confines of himself. Maybe what I’m doing, by means of Italian, resembles his tactic. It’s not possible to become another writer, but it might be possible to become two.

Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I’m also more exposed. It’s true that a new language covers me, but unlike Daphne I have a permeable covering, I’m almost without a skin. And although I don’t have a thick bark, I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS

Between 1948 and 1950, the last two years of his life, Cesare Pavese, as a consultant for the publishing house Einaudi, writes a series of letters to Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, today famous for her innovative translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Through a dense and lively correspondence between Turin and Cesena, Pavese, who didn’t know the translator in person, pushes her to translate Homer into a faithful but modern Italian, aiming at a less archaic, plainer language. Reading with close attention, meticulously comparing the translation with the original text, examining all of it with care, Pavese reacts to every book, every line, every image, every word. His letters are full of suggestions, amendments, opinions. He intervenes frankly but always in a respectful, cordial way. Among the proposals in a long list: “I would insist on bellissima [very beautiful] rather than eletta per bellezza [outstanding in beauty] which gives a needlessly ‘sublime’ tone”; “Assassino [murderer] seems to me better than uccisore d’uomini [killer of men]”; “Del mare [of the sea] I would make marino [marine].” Sometimes he fully approves a decision that Calzecchi Onesti has made; regarding the classic Homeric epithet “wine-dark sea,” he writes, “I agree with dark sea. Out with the wine.”

Pavese and Calzecchi Onesti are doing what all the writers in the world do, along with those who are involved with writing: they are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It’s a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can’t avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there.

Pavese’s letters reveal a powerful, intimate knowledge of his own language. As a writer I aim at doing what he does, but I can do it only in English. I can’t dive into Italian to the same depths. I can hope to write correctly, choose an alternative word. But I don’t have a vocabulary that has been experienced, seasoned since childhood. I can’t examine Italian with the same precision. I can’t evaluate an Italian text, not even one written by me, from the same perspective.

Yet the impulse to track down the right word remains irrepressible, so even in Italian I try. I check the thesaurus, I leaf through my notebook. I put in a new word, just read that morning in the newspaper. But my first readers often shake their heads, saying simply, “It doesn’t sound right.” They say that the word I’d like to use is now considered dated, that it belongs to a register too low or too refined, that it sounds either precious or too colloquial (thus I learned the adjective aulico, lofty). They say that the word order isn’t natural, that the punctuation doesn’t work. Correctness doesn’t necessarily enter into it. They say that an Italian would not express himself like that.

I have to listen to those readers, I have to follow their advice. I have to remove the incorrect or wrong word and look for another. I can’t defend my choice: one can’t contradict a native speaker. I have to accept that in Italian I am partly deaf and blind, and so I’m afraid of being a spurious writer.

I now have quite an extensive vocabulary, but it’s an eccentric one. I feel as if I were dressed in an outlandish manner, wearing a long, elegant skirt of another era, a T-shirt, a straw hat, and slippers. That graceless effect, those muddled tones might be the consequence of the distance, from the beginning, between me and Italian: of my having absorbed the language for years from afar, from a variety of sources, before I lived in Italy. For two years I’ve been learning the language in a comfortable, daily way. But now that I read in Italian my vocabulary is also molded by an amalgam of writers, of various historical epochs, who write in diverse styles. In my notebooks I list words of Manganelli, Verga, Elena Ferrante, Leopardi, without making any distinction. Beckett said that writing in French allowed him to write without style. On the one hand I agree: one could say that my writing in Italian is a type of unsalted bread. It works, but the usual flavor is missing.

On the other hand, I think that it does have a style, or at least a character. The language seems like a waterfall. I don’t need every drop, and yet I’m still thirsty. I suspect, therefore, that the problem isn’t the absence of style but perhaps an excess, by which I feel overwhelmed. What I lack in Italian is a sharp vision, and so I can’t hone a specific style. Furthermore I can’t grasp it. If I happen to formulate a good sentence in Italian, I can’t understand exactly why it’s good.

I remain, in Italian, an ignorant writer, aware only that I’m in disguise. In fact I feel like a child who sneaks into her mother’s closet to try on the high-heeled shoes, an evening dress, some jewelry, a fur coat.

I’m afraid of being caught in the act, of being rebuked, sent to my room. “You have to wait,” my mother would say. “These things are too big for you.” She’s right. I can’t walk in the shoes. The necklace feels heavy, I stumble on the hem of the dress. Although the fur coat is stylish, I’m sweating inside it.

Like the tide, my vocabulary rises and falls, comes and goes. The words added every day in the notebook are transient. I spend an hour choosing the right one, but then, often, I forget it. Now when I encounter an unfamiliar word in Italian I already know several terms, also in Italian, to express the same thing. For example I recently learned accantonare (set aside), already knowing rinviare and sospendere. I discovered travalicare (cross over), already knowing oltrepassare and superare. I underlined tracotante (arrogant), already knowing arrogante and prepotente. A little while ago I acquired azzeccato (well aimed, exact) and ficcante (incisive); before, I would have used adatto, appropriato.

I do my best to hit the target, but when I take aim I never know where the arrow will land. At least a hundred times while I was writing the chapters of this book I felt so demoralized, so disheartened, that I would have liked to stop. In those dark moments my Italian writing seemed to me a mad undertaking, a slope too steep. Yet if I want to go on writing in Italian I have to withstand those stormy moments when the sky darkens, when I despair, when I fear I’m at the end of my rope.

I envy Pavese, and his capacity to plumb Italian to the depths. But I think that I, too, have taken a sounding by way of these reflections. Investigating my discovery of the language, I think I have investigated myself. The verb sondare means “to explore, to examine.” It means, literally, to measure the depth of something. According to my dictionary the verb means “seek to know, to understand something, in particular the thoughts and intentions of others.” It implies detachment, uncertainty; it implies a state of immersion. It means methodical, stubborn research, into something that remains forever out of reach. A well-aimed verb that perfectly explains my project.

THE SCAFFOLDING

I conceived and wrote this book in a library in the ghetto in Rome. When I came to the city for the first time, more than ten years ago, it was the first neighborhood I discovered. It remains my favorite. I’ll never forget the emotion of seeing the Portico di Ottavia, a short distance from the apartment we had rented for a week. It made such an impression that after returning to New York I wrote, in English, a story set in the ghetto, in which I described the ruins of the portico: “its chewed-up columns girded with scaffolding, its massive pediment with significant chunks missing.” At the time, this ancient complex, ravaged, in pieces, rebuilt many times, yet still standing, for me embodied the sense of the city. And now it gives me the metaphor with which I would like to end this series of reflections.

I write to feel alone. Ever since I was a child it has been a way of withdrawing, of finding myself. I need silence and solitude. When I write in English I take for granted that I can do it without help. Someone may give me a suggestion, point out a problem. But in terms of the linguistic journey I am self-sufficient.

In Italian I’ve taken a different path. I was alone in the library, it’s true. 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.

I wrote them in order, one after the other, as if they were homework for my Italian lessons. For six months, I drafted one more or less every week. I’d never undertaken a writing project in such a methodical way. I sent the first draft to my teacher, who was the first reader. During our lessons we worked together. It was a rigorous process, both for me and for him. He saw all the gross mistakes, all the mortal sins: gli penso rather than ci penso, sono chiesta rather than mi viene chiesto (I think about him, I’m asked). At first he gave me a series of copious, punctilious notes. (“Be careful not to use too many verbs as nouns”; “Mica”—at all, it’s not like—“is too colloquial”; “Lasciarsi alle spalle”—leave behind. “Lasciare isn’t wrong but it’s less natural.”) For the first story, which was less than five hundred words long, he made thirty-two notes at the bottom of the page. He gave me alternative words, he corrected (and rebuked) me when for the hundredth time I made a mistake in the subjunctive, a gerund, a conditional clause. He explained how English stalked me. He pointed out, always patiently, how many times a wrong preposition screwed things up.

After preparing a more or less clean text with my teacher, I showed every piece to two readers, both writers. They suggested more subtle modifications. With them I analyzed the text from a thematic rather than a grammatical point of view, in such a way as to really understand what I was doing. They explained what sort of impact my reflections had on them, and they always said the most important thing I needed to hear: keep going.

The third and last stage consisted of the editors at Internazionale, the magazine where the essays first appeared, who provided an invaluable opportunity. They understood my desire to express myself in a new language, they respected the oddness of my Italian, they accepted the experimental, somewhat halting nature of the writing. Working together, we made the final fixes before publication, examining every sentence, every word. Thanks to them I was able to make this creative linguistic leap. I was able to reach new Italian readers and, ultimately, a new part of myself.

The day the first article came out, I was so excited that, even though I’m fairly shy by nature, I would have liked to stand in the middle of the piazza and shout out the news. I’d only ever felt that way when my first story was published in English, more than twenty years ago. At the time, I imagined I would feel that sort of joy only once in my life.

All my first readers provided a critical mirror. As I said before, I’m unable to evaluate what I write in Italian. But, more than anything, those readers supported me, the way scaffolding supports so many buildings in Rome, both ruins and new construction.

Although this project has been a kind of collaboration, writing in Italian leaves me more isolated than writing in English does. I feel estranged now from the Anglophone writers I am linguistically related to, and I’m necessarily different from Italian writers. When I think of authors who decided, for one reason or another, to work in a foreign language, I don’t feel I’m a legitimate member of that group, either. Beckett lived in France for decades before writing in French, Nabokov had learned English as a child, Conrad spent a long time at sea, absorbing English, before becoming an Anglophone rather than a Polish writer. What I’m doing — daring to write in Italian after living in Italy for barely a year — is different, out of the ordinary, and so I feel an even more intense solitude, almost another dimension of solitude. I wonder if there are others like me.

Scaffolding is not considered beautiful. It usually represents a kind of blight. It interferes, it spoils the look of something. Ideally it shouldn’t be there. If I have to walk under scaffolding, I prefer to cross the street. I’m always afraid it’s going to collapse.

In the case of the Portico di Ottavia, however, I make an exception. I’ve never seen the portico without scaffolding, so I now consider it permanent, natural. Although it’s an obstruction, the scaffolding adds an element of emotion to the ruin. It seems a miracle to see the columns, the pediment, restored and dedicated in the Augustan age. I’m amazed that one can walk calmly through the complex, which is in pieces and yet still present. It recounts the passing of time but also its annulment.

When my Italian writing is published, the scaffolding disappears. Apart from certain words, certain choices that betray the fact that Italian isn’t my language, one can’t see what props me up, protects me. What hides the vulnerable part remains invisible. But that absence is only an illusion. I am always aware of my scaffolding, without which I, too, would collapse.

Unlike the Portico di Ottavia, my Italian writing, just begun, is not yet worn down. I doubt that it will last for centuries. But the scaffolding serves the same purpose: to hold up a work that might fall. I don’t find it ugly. Maybe one day there will be no need for it. If I could get rid of it and write on my own, I would feel more independent. But I would miss my scaffolding, a group of dear friends who guided and girded me, to whom I connect one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

HALF-LIGHT

He wakes beside his wife, disoriented, agitated by a dream.

In the dream, too, he was beside his wife. Also disoriented, agitated. They were driving on a country road flanked by trees and bushes. There was an uncertain light. It might have been dawn or sunset. The sky was pale but had a trace of pink.

The landscape evoked an old oil painting: a rural scene, unpeopled, shadowy. The tops of the trees seemed a mass of clouds that obscured the sky, and the trunks cast thin shadows that accompanied them along one side of the road.

His wife was at the wheel. And as she drove he was filled with anxiety, because although the car was running the entire body was missing. Apart from the steering wheel, the pedals, the gearbox, there was nothing between them and the road.

His wife drove as if she were unaware of this, or as if there were no danger, while the absence of the car’s body and the proximity of the road frightened him.

He cried to his wife to stop. But, as usual in dreams, he had no voice. They went on like that, without speaking, without any problems, always alongside the thin shadows of the trees. There were no obstacles along the road. They didn’t have an accident, although he expected it. Maybe that was the most disturbing detail of the dream.

Now it’s the middle of the night and his wife is sleeping, but he has just returned from a couple of months abroad, and for him it’s already morning. He has an impulse to get up and start the day. He belongs now to the daily rhythm of another country, where the sky is already blue, where he no longer is.

He can’t sleep, and yet the effect of the dream stuns him. He’s afraid that there are other absences, other things missing. He wants to make sure that there is still a floor under the bed, that the room still has four walls.

His wife is there, on his left, just as in the dream. He sees her bare arms, her features illuminated by the full moon.

The table, at dinner, which ended a few hours ago, was full, too. His wife had organized a big dinner to celebrate his return. He had no appetite, the festive clamor around the table annoyed him. At that hour, after traveling a long way, he wanted only to go to bed.

Instead he remained sitting at the table, telling the guests, their close friends, about his experiences abroad: the country where he had been, the apartment he had rented, the appearance of the city. He talked about the people and their character. He explained the work he had done. At one point, to satisfy the curiosity of one of the guests, he had said a couple of things in the foreign language he had learned, feeling, at that moment, a stranger in his own house.

He goes into the kitchen. There’s no need to turn on the light, the glow of the moon is enough. He sees the spectacular wake of the dinner: all the dirty plates and glasses, greasy pots and pans, a giant ceramic tray on which his wife had served a wonderful dish. They had left it all like that and gone to bed, he because he was tired, she because she had drunk a little too much.

He begins to wash the pots, to scrape away the leftovers now encrusted on the plates, to rinse the silverware. He loads the dishwasher and turns it on. He puts things in order, removing every trace of the celebration.

In the cleaned-up kitchen he makes coffee, looks for some bread. He would like to have a slice of bread: abroad, in the kitchen of his apartment, there was no toaster, so he had a different breakfast. He finds a loaf of bread, puts a slice in the toaster. But it doesn’t go in, there is some obstacle in the slit. Then he sees that there is already a slice of bread inside — dry, hard, cold.

To whom does that forgotten slice, still untouched, belong? His wife wouldn’t have left it there. She stopped eating that type of bread, she says she has an intolerance. A suspicion dawns, emerging out of nowhere, that instills a fear even more chilling than in the dream. He wonders if his wife has a lover, if the forgotten slice belongs to him.

He sees his wife and another man in the kitchen, they’re making breakfast the preceding morning. It would have been their last carefree breakfast before his return. He sees his wife in her bathrobe, serene, her hair uncombed. She is spreading jam on a slice of bread for her lover. Then the scene dissolves, the suspicion vanishes. He knows that nothing has changed, and that the slice of bread belongs to him, just like the house, and the wife he’s known for more than twenty years. He made it and then forgot to eat it that morning two months ago, when he was about to leave. It often happened, he’s an absentminded man.

He pours the coffee, spreads butter, then jam on the new piece of toast. He has breakfast in the nocturnal, absolute silence, until he hears in the distance, for a few seconds, the sound of a car driving rapidly along the street.

He doesn’t want to tell his wife the dream; he’s ashamed of it. The meaning of the dark road, the absent car, the shadows always on one side: it seems too obvious, even transparent.

He goes back to bed beside her. He holds her in his arms, even though she isn’t aware of it. Then he thinks of another car trip, many years earlier: their honeymoon, an entire month spent on the road in another foreign country. They drove together every day, for almost the whole day, traveling through the countryside of that land. He still remembers the endless road, the intoxication of speed. When he was young, untried, still looking forward to everything, the journey didn’t seem like an abyss.

Now he realizes the deeper meaning of the dream: the astonishment at having spent his life beside the same person. Without stopping, without obstacles, in spite of the shadows always alongside, the danger. Now he sees that first journey, their beginning, in half-light; he prefers the lucid truth of the dream. Only, at that time, whatever the dream was, he would have shared it with her.

AFTERWORD

In 1939, fifteen years before he died, Henri Matisse began to move away from traditional painting and develop a new artistic technique. It involved cutting up pieces of paper that had been painted in gouache, in various colors. Matisse then combined and arranged the different pieces to create an image. He fixed the elements first with pins, then with paste, often directly on the wall. He stopped using the easel, the canvas. His main tool became a pair of scissors rather than the brush.

The method, a sort of synthesis of collage and mosaic, arose out of certain limitations. The eyesight of the seventy-year-old painter, which had greatly deteriorated, was one factor. Further, after a serious illness in 1941 he used a wheelchair, and was often forced to stay in bed. One day he was inspired to make a “garden” in the house, an exuberant jumble of leaves and fruit attached to the walls of his studio. It was a collective process: Matisse had his assistants paint the paper. He was no longer able to execute his works by himself.

The result was a distinctive form, a hybrid style, notably more abstract than his painting. He continued to play with the same elements that he had always portrayed: nature, the human figure. But suddenly another energy emerged, a different language.

The images on paper were more simplified, crude compared to the ones on canvas, but they required painstaking, complex workmanship. One recognizes the hand and the eye of the painter, but they have changed. We follow the thread between the new method and the earlier paintings, and are aware of a turning point, a radical move.

For Matisse, cutting was not only a new technique but a system for thinking about and expanding the possibilities of shape, color, and composition. A rethinking of his artistic strategy. The painter said: “The conditions of this journey are a hundred percent different.” He compared his method — which he called “painting with scissors”—to the experience of flying.

Matisse’s new approach was at first received with distrust, with skepticism. One critic found it, at best, “a pleasant distraction.” The artist, too, was unsure. Cutting, for Matisse, began as an exercise, an experiment. Without knowing what it meant, he followed an unknown path, exploring on an increasingly vast scale. In spite of the difficulties, this was a period of intense, fertile work. Gradually he embraced this method completely; it remained, until his death, a definitive step.

Last year, as I was finishing In 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.

I was struck by the essential effect of the images on paper. There is nothing superfluous. They show the seams, the cracks. Being literally cut into pieces, the images communicate a sort of deconstruction, an almost violent act of demolition. And yet they are harmonious, balanced. They express a new beginning. Every image, first cut out, then reconstructed, suggests something temporary, suspended, vulnerable. It evokes other permutations, other possibilities.

As I went through the show, I recognized an artist who at a certain point felt the need to change course, to express himself differently. Who had the mad impulse to abandon one type of vision, even a particular creative identity, for another. I thought of my writing in Italian: a similarly intricate process, a similarly rudimentary result compared with my work in English.

Writing in another language represents an act of demolition, a new beginning.

In Other Words is the first book I’ve written directly in Italian. It originated in the fall of 2012, in a private, fragmented, spontaneous way. I had just moved to Rome, after spending almost my whole life in America. I spoke Italian, but my knowledge was elementary. I wanted to master the language. I had a notebook in which I took notes in Italian, on Italian. I wrote down new words, grammatical rules to learn, phrases that struck me. I wrote all this in the usual manner, starting at the beginning of the notebook and filling the pages one after another.

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.

Gradually the notes became sentences, and the sentences paragraphs. It was a sort of diary, written without forethought. I had been keeping another Italian diary, in which I described my daily life, my impressions of Rome. Here, instead, I described only the emotions inspired by the linguistic drive.

By spring I had filled up the notebook. The head had met the tail. I bought a new notebook, and put the first one away in a drawer. I continued to study Italian, but I stopped recording my thoughts backward. The following autumn I picked up the first notebook. I found a hodgepodge of thoughts, some sixty disorganized pages. At that point I had written just a few things in Italian and had shown them to a couple of friends. But I had no desire to share the contents of the notebook with anyone.

Here are some notes from the last page, which was also the first.

“language like a tide, now a flood, now low, inaccessible”

“reading with a dictionary”

“failure”

“something that remains forever outside me”

Rereading the notes, I almost immediately glimpsed a thread, a logic, perhaps even a narrative arc. One day, to better understand their meaning, I took notes on the earlier notes. I saw that there were points to develop, to analyze. Chapters, titles came to mind. I sensed a pace, a structure. In a short time I knew that the contents of the first notebook would become this book.

I needed more space. I bought an exercise book. More or less every week, from November to May, I worked on a different idea until I got to the last one. I had never before written anything in this rapid, farsighted manner, knowing already almost every step ahead of me, aware already of where the path would lead. In spite of the effort, the process of writing was fluid, immediate. Everything was extraordinarily clear, except the central element, except the subject itself: language.

How to define this book? It’s the fifth I’ve written. It’s also a debut. It’s a point of arrival and of departure. It’s based on a lack, an absence. Starting with the title, it implies a rejection. This time I don’t accept the words I already know, the ones I should be writing with. I look for others.

I think it’s a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured.

It’s a travel book, more interior, I would say, than geographic. It recounts an uprooting, a state of disorientation, a discovery. It recounts a journey that is at times exciting, at times exhausting. An absurd journey, given that the traveler never reaches her destination.

It’s a book of memory, full of metaphors. It recounts a search, a victory, a continual defeat. Childhood and adulthood, an evolution, maybe a revolution. It’s a book of love, of suffering. It recounts a new independence together with a new dependence. A collaboration, and also a state of solitude.

Unlike my other books, this one is rooted in my real, lived experiences. Apart from two stories, it’s not a work of imagination. I consider it a sort of linguistic autobiography, a self-portrait. It seems fitting to cite Natalia Ginzburg, who, in the foreword to Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings), writes, “I have invented nothing.”

And yet, from another point of view, I have invented everything. Writing in a different language means starting from zero. It comes from a void, and so every sentence seems to have emerged from nothingness. 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.

In learning Italian I learned, again, to write. I had to adopt a different approach. At every step the language confronted me, constrained me. At the same time it allowed me to rebel, to go beyond. Here is Natalia Ginzburg again, 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.”

I think that my new language, more limited, more immature, gives me a more extensive, more adult gaze. That’s the reason I continue, for now, to write in Italian. In this book, I’ve talked quite a bit about the paradoxical relationship between freedom and limits. I don’t want to repeat myself here. I would prefer to examine further the interconnection between reality and invention, and clarify the question of autobiography, a question that has been hanging over me for many years.

In the beginning I wrote in order to conceal myself. I wanted to stay far from my writing, withdraw into the background. I preferred to hide between the lines, a disguised, oblique presence.

I became a writer in America, but I set my first stories in Calcutta, a city where I have never lived, far from the country where I grew up, and which I knew much better. Why? Because I needed distance between me and the creative space.

When I began to write, I thought that it was more virtuous to talk about others. I was afraid that autobiographical material was of less creative value, even a form of laziness on my part. I was afraid that it was egocentric to relate one’s own experiences.

In this book I am the protagonist for the first time. There is not even a hint of another. I appear on the page in the first person, and speak frankly about myself. A little like Matisse’s “Blue Nudes,” groups of cutout, reassembled female figures, I feel naked in this book, pasted to a new language, disjointed.

I haven’t read what people write about me for years. I know, however, that certain readers consider me an autobiographical writer. If I explain that I’m not, they don’t believe it; they insist. They say the fact that I am a person of Indian origin, like the majority of my characters, makes my work openly autobiographical. Or they think that any story in the first person must be true.

For me an autobiographical text is one that is shaped by the writer’s own experiences, and in which there is little distance between the life of the writer and the events of the book. Every writer tends to describe the world, the people he knows. But an autobiographical work goes a step further. Alberto Moravia was from Rome, so he set many of his stories in Rome. He was Roman, like many of his characters. Does that mean, then, that every one of his stories, every one of his novels, is autobiographical? I don’t think so.

I spent more than a year promoting my last novel, The Lowland. I don’t share the experiences of the characters in that novel. What happens to them never happened to me. I know the main places in the book, and the plot is based on a real episode, but I have no memory or impression of it. Reality provided the seeds. I imagined the rest.

More than once I’ve been confronted by a journalist or critic who maintains that I’ve written an autobiographical novel. And every time it amazes me, and also irritates me, that a novel whose plot and characters I completely invented is considered autobiographical.

It’s not for me to evaluate my books. I would like simply to distinguish between a realistic novel, created out of the knowledge and curiosity of the author, and one that is autobiographical.

In Other Words is different. Almost everything in it happened to me. I’ve already explained that it began as a sort of diary, a personal text. It remains my most intimate book but also the most open.

Even my first attempt at fiction in Italian, “The Exchange,” is autobiographical, I can’t deny that. It’s a story told in the third person, but the protagonist, slightly changed, is me. I went that rainy afternoon to that apartment. I saw and observed everything that I describe. Like the protagonist, I lost a black sweater, I reacted badly. I was bewildered, uneasy, like her. A few months later I transformed the raw experience into a story. “Half-Light,” written almost two years later, is an invented story, but it also has an autobiographical basis: the dream of the protagonist that begins the story comes from me.

I used to think that making things up, rather than drawing directly on reality, would give me more creative autonomy. I preferred to manipulate the truth, but I also wanted to represent it faithfully, authentically. Verisimilitude was very important to me, as a writer. After writing this book I changed my mind.

Invention can also be a trap. A character fabricated out of nothing has to seem like a real person — there’s the challenge. It was a challenge, especially in The Lowland, to portray a real place where I have never lived, and to evoke a historical era that I didn’t know. I did a lot of research to make that world, that time, believable. Beginning with my first book I evoked Calcutta, my parents’ native city. Because it was, for them, a far-off place that had almost disappeared, I was looking for a way, through writing, to bridge the distance, and to make it present.

Today I no longer feel bound to restore a lost country to my parents. It took me a long time to accept that my writing did not have to assume that responsibility. In that sense In Other Words is the first book I’ve written as an adult, but also, from the linguistic point of view, as a child.

I continue, as a writer, to seek the truth, but I don’t give the same weight to factual truth. In Italian I’m moving toward abstraction. The places are undefined, the characters so far are nameless, without a particular cultural identity. The result, I think, is writing that is freed in certain ways from the concrete world. I now construct a less specific setting. That’s why I understand Matisse, when he compared his new technique to the experience of flight. Writing in Italian, I feel that my feet are no longer on the ground.

What drove me to take a new direction, toward writing that is both more autobiographical and more abstract? It’s a contradiction in terms, I realize. Where does the more personal perspective originate, along with a vaguer tonality? It must be the language. In this book language is not only the tool but the subject. Italian remains the mask, the filter, the outlet, the means. The detachment without which I can’t create anything. And it’s this new detachment that helps me show my face.

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 from my determination. It was a risky procedure. That I was able to conceive, draft, prepare the pages for publication 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.

It’s interesting, now that the book is about to come out, to hear some of the reactions. When I say that my new book is written in Italian, I am often regarded, mainly by other writers, with suspicion, almost with disapproval. Maybe I’m wrong; I wonder if it will be considered a dead end, or, at best, “a pleasant distraction.” Some say to me that a writer should never abandon his or her dominant language for one that is known only superficially. They say that the disadvantages serve neither writer nor reader. When I hear these opinions I’m ashamed, and I have the impulse to erase every word.

It was only after writing this book that I discovered Ágota Kristóf, an author of Hungarian origin who wrote in French. Maybe it was best that I didn’t know her voice and her works before — to have taken this step unaware of her example. I read, first of all, a brief autobiographical text, The Illiterate, in which she talks about her literary education and the experience of arriving in Switzerland, at twenty-one, as a refugee. She begins to learn French, a hard, demanding process. She writes:

It’s here that my struggle to conquer this language begins, a long, relentless struggle, which will certainly last for my whole life. I’ve spoken French for more than thirty years, I’ve written it for twenty, but I still don’t know it. I can’t speak it without mistakes, and I can write it only with the help of a dictionary that I consult frequently.

Reading this passage, I was both stunned and comforted. They could have been my sentiments, my words.

Then I read, unable to put it down, her celebrated trilogy of novels, beginning with The Notebook, which the author considered an autobiographical work, and which I find an absolute masterpiece. I was even more captivated by the lapidary, purified, incisive quality of her writing. The effect is overwhelming, as powerful as a punch in the stomach. Although I read Kristóf in Italian, I can perceive, even in translation, the effort implicit in the writing. I intuit the linguistic mask in which she, like me, finds herself constrained and at the same time free. Knowing her work, I feel reassured, less alone. I think I’ve met a guide, maybe even a companion, on this path.

And yet there remains a fundamental difference between her and me. Ágota Kristóf was forced to abandon Hungarian. She wrote in French because she wanted to be read. “It became a necessity,” the author explains. She regretted not being able to write in her native language, and so she always considered French “the enemy language.” I, on the other hand, choose willingly to write in Italian. I don’t miss English, not even the superior control it gives me.

Kristóf’s work brings into focus the fact that an autobiographical novel is not always what it seems, and that the boundary between imagination and reality is blurred. The protagonist of The Third Lie, the third volume of the trilogy, says: “I try to write true stories, but, at a certain point, the story becomes unbearable, precisely because of its truth, and so I’m forced to change it.”

Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts. In the words of Lalla Romano — another writer who in her novels has, like Kristóf, always played with things that really happened—“in a book everything is true, nothing is true.”

Everything has to be reconsidered, shaped anew. Autobiographical fiction, even if it is inspired by reality, by memory, requires a rigorous selection, a merciless cutting. One writes with the pen, but in the end, to create the right form, one has to use, like Matisse, a good pair of scissors.

My journey is coming to an end. I have to leave Rome this year and return to America. I have no desire to. I wish there were a way of staying in this country, in this language.

I’m already afraid of the separation between me and Italian. At the same time I’m aware of a significant, formal distance between me and English, an idiom in which I haven’t read for three years. The decision to read only in Italian led me to take this new creative path. Writing comes from reading. Now, in spite of my uneasiness, I prefer to write in Italian. Even if I remain half blind, I can see certain things more clearly. I feel more centered even if I’m adrift. I feel more at home, in spite of the discomfort.

This book leads me to a crossroads. It forces me to choose. It brings home to me that everything is upside down, overturned. It asks me: How to proceed?

Should I continue on this road? Will I abandon English definitively for Italian? Or, once I’m back in America, will I return to English?

How would I return to it? I know from my parents that, once you’ve left, you’re gone forever. If I stop writing in Italian, if I go back to working in English, I expect to feel another type of loss.

I can’t predict the future. I prefer to enjoy this moment, the work just finished. In spite of the doubts, I’m very happy to have written and published a book in Italian. Working on the Italian proofs as we closed the text, I felt moved. One could say that it’s an indigenous book, born and raised here in Italy, even if the author was not.

In Other Words will now have an identity independent of me. The first readers will be Italians; it will be found, first, in Italian bookstores. In time it will be translated, transformed. Next year it will be published in America, in a bilingual edition. Yet it will have specific, localized roots, although it remains hybrid, slightly outside the frame, like me.

Thanks to this writing project I hope that a piece of me can remain in Italy, and that consoles me, even though I hope that every book in the world belongs to everyone, or to no one, nowhere.

— ROME, DECEMBER 2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book seems to me an unattainable goal until it is finished, but this one more than any other. I couldn’t have done it without the support and careful attention of Sara Antonelli, Luigi Brioschi, Raffaella De Angelis, Angelo De Gennaro, Giovanni De Mauro, Michela Gallio, Francesca Marciano, Alberto Notarbartolo, and Pierfrancesco Romano.

Particular thanks to Gabriella Giandelli for her illustrations for the chapters that appeared in Internazionale; to Marco Delogu, whose photograph inspired the story “Half-Light”; and to the Centro Studi Americani in Rome, a place of the heart.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from the Italian Foreign Ministry and from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.