In Other Words

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  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 sus
picion 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: