![]() ![]() That I cherish a hope – in fact a dream – of knowing it well. I don’t reveal that Italian is an infatuation. I explain that I’m going to Rome in the summer to take part in another literary festival. She asks me why I want to learn the language. ![]() She teaches in a private school, she lives in the suburbs. A likable, energetic woman, also from Milan, arrives at my house. On it is written “Imparare l’italiano”-“Learn Italian.” I consider it a sign. A piece of paper torn from a notice that he happened to see in our neighbourhood, in Brooklyn. That I studied the language years ago but I can’t speak well. I tell him I would have liked to do the interview in Italian. I am in an overcrowded room, where everyone but me speaks an impeccable Italian. One day, I go to the Casa Italiana at New York University to interview a famous Roman writer, a woman, who has won the Strega prize. I need someone with whom I can struggle and fail. But with whom? I know some people in New York who speak it perfectly. Returning to America, I want to go on speaking Italian. Thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They switch to their language, although I’m able to respond only in a very simple way. When I mention that I’ve studied some Italian, and that I would like to improve it, they stop speaking to me in English. There, I meet my first Italian publishers. Photograph: AlamyĪ few months later, I receive an invitation to the Mantua literary festival. Rome is now the second home of Jhumpa Lahiri and her family. Even though I’ve returned to Italy, I still feel exiled from the language. I manage to order in a restaurant and exchange a few words with a saleswoman. In reality, in Venice I’m barely able to ask for directions on the street, a wake-up call at the hotel. In addition to the dictionary, I take a notebook and on the last page I write down phrases that might be useful: Saprebbe dirmi? Dove si trova? Come si fa per andare? – Could you tell me? Where is? How does one get to? I recall the difference between buono and bello. In the spring of 2000, six years after my trip to Florence, I go to Venice. I am constantly looking in the dictionary. I underline almost every word on every page. But when, after two years of studying, I try to read Alberto Moravia’s novel La ciociara ( Two Women), I barely understand it. ![]() The first teacher is a Milanese woman who lives in Boston. As if I were studying a musical instrument without ever playing it. But I don’t like the silence, the isolation of the self-teaching process. I manage to memorise some conjugations, do some exercises. Having studied Latin for many years, I find the first chapters of this textbook fairly easy. As if it were possible to learn on your own. An exhortatory title, full of hope and possibility. How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine? That I don’t know? Maybe because I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language. Almost as soon as we met (on a trip to Florence with my sister in 1994), Italian and I were separated. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too.Īs for Italian, the exile has a different aspect. I don’t know how to read it or even write it. In my case, there is another distance, another schism. ![]()
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