Language barriers

Jhumpa Lahiri's much-awaited book on her love affair with Italian is lost somewhere between the first language, the second and the translation

IN OTHER WORDS
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin India
Pages: 203
Price: Rs 399

In Other Words is the kind of book that sets editorial-and-sales meetings on fire in publishing houses. A well-known Pulitzer-winning author of four books of fiction, revered for her fine style and insight, will write her first non-fiction book in Italian, about "a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language".

The book, "written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Nabokov" (from the blurb again), is translated from the Italian, In Altre Parole, by Ann Goldstein back into English, the language in which most of Jhumpa Lahiri's readers know her best.

In Other Words is Lahiri's most personal work, breaking the skin of her usual reticence, but only the skin: the tone is intimate, not autobiographical. It begins promisingly, as she makes the reader a secret sharer in the grand love story between her and Italian.

The flirtation commences with a pocket dictionary, "the dimensions of a bar of soap", clad in a green plastic cover, which she buys at Rizzoli, a bookshop in Boston; the details, you understand immediately, are as significant as a first meeting with someone who will later become a lover.

Over 20 years, she pursues Italian, infatuation turning into obsession. "I'm in love, but what I love remains indifferent. The language will never need me." In 2009, she takes lessons with the third of her teachers, who is from Venice, and the future shapes itself: she will move to Italy, as one does, to be closer to the beloved.

This is where her quest, the obsessiveness with which she stalks Italian, is most tantalising, as her writing life takes a sharp, unexpected swerve. What does it mean for a writer to admit that her first language, English, no longer satisfies her, and that she wants to read, and write, in the unmapped territory of an alien tongue?

She is both renunciate and novice: she suffers the humiliation of never knowing enough, of losing the tools -words, contexts, allusions - that were hers by right in English. "I write on the margins, just as I've always lived on the margins of countries, of cultures," she writes, and it is around here, 89 pages in, that you start to suspect that the remaining 114 will be a long slow slog.

There are two problems with In Other Words. The first will sort in time, as Lahiri develops the same fluency and dexterity in Italian as she had in English. Until then, the reader must settle for admiring her bravery in writing a book on such demanding subjects - language, belonging, exile and memory - in a language that she possesses, but does not yet entirely inhabit. But admiring a writer's courage is of no consolation when you would rather have been in a position to admire her turn of phrase, which is lost somewhere between the first language, the second, and the translation.

There are cliches, as in this sentence on falling in love with Italian: "It stirs an indiscreet, absurd longing. An exquisite tension. Love at first sight." There are clunky metaphors: she constantly hunts for words, they seem more valuable than money, she collects them in a basket, and finds that scarcely a handful remain, for "the basket is memory".

I survived the phrase "the sweater of language", because it appeared in a short story, about a woman searching for something lost, that had a touch of the classic Lahiri magic. But there were thickets of banal epiphanies: "Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable."

This flaccid prose is annoying, but Lahiri is too intelligent and too fine-grained a writer to continue writing baggy-sweater sentences, in any language. What can't be fixed is everything that's missing from this meditation on language. In this century, millions of people have been evicted from their homelands, and often forcefully exiled from their mothertongues. Knowing this, it is sometimes difficult to empathise with Lahiri's hardships as a new learner, given that her exile was voluntary and self-imposed.

She touches lightly on her awkward relationship with Bengali - she knows it haltingly, and has never felt at home in it. She mentions her struggles fleetingly, but she need not have shared the personal in order to explore the political choices she made. Language choice is always political, and this is not so much about Italian versus Bengali as it is about the pull of Europe over Asia.

In the last few pages of In Other Words, Lahiri discovers the writings of Agota Kristof: The Illiterate, The Notebook. She reads Kristof obsessively, "both stunned and comforted", treating her as a guide, a companion, kin. And yet there is a fundamental difference: "Kristof was forced to abandon Hungarian. She wrote in French because she wanted to be read. I, on the other hand, choose willingly to write in Italian. I don't miss English…"

Kristof's voice has clarity, resonance, a diamond edge. "I read. It is like a disease," says the protagonist of The Illiterate. She learns French with her body; the women at the watch factory where Kristof worked taught her the words for body parts, used body language to teach her the names of objects. Following Lahiri's lead, I read Kristof's books, as obsessively, flinching from some of her experiences, seduced by her knifeblade prose. It is a strange feeling: one writer, Lahiri, arouses your curiosity about language, about moving house from one to another. But Lahiri's essays only play with that curiosity; it is Kristof's harsh, rich novels that answer all the reader's questions, the difficult ones, the unspoken ones.