translated from the Italian
December 12, 2015 7:30 PM   Subscribe

Teach Yourself Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri
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 write it, or even read 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.
Writing in a new language, writing anew

via Mssr. Chapeau de Langue
posted by the man of twists and turns (15 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's not enough to study a foreign language. The act of speaking and recreating your own thoughts is very different from understanding what others are saying or what you are reading. The only way to learn to speak a language is to speak; the only way to learn to write in another language is to write.
posted by oheso at 7:49 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


(Totally putting aside the author's transformation, which is the real point of the piece ... )
posted by oheso at 7:49 PM on December 12, 2015


Just the pullquote alone made me shout "Yes!" at my screen. This is precisely why many of us have been fighting for universal mother tongue classes for children of immigrants in primary school. It helps bridge that sense of estrangement from both worlds, apart from having the added bonus of actually helping these kids learn the local language (for linguistic/brain development reasons I've had linguists explain to me before but I admittedly do not completely understand). The sense of alienation is palpable when you're an immigrant; strengthening a sense of belonging is crucial.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:13 PM on December 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


So wonderful. I drank in every word. Some writers are transcendent, and their power can be felt no matter their language.
posted by bearwife at 11:20 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thanks for posting that. I have been thinking that I should find something to write in one of the languages I have been trying to learn (which would mean either German or Swedish at this point). A personal journal would be one idea, though something that gets feedback from people who know the language I'm trying to use may be more useful.
posted by acb at 5:25 AM on December 13, 2015


So many thoughts about this.

- grazie mille for the fascinating read, first off. (Thankfully I missed the somewhat spoilerish post title.)

- the mention of the bridge near her teacher's home in Brooklyn provides a neat little instance of embedded linguistic remove between English and Italian: locally it's called the Verrazano Bridge (or, more officially, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge) in homage to the Florentine mariner. But his name is not, nor was it ever, spelled like that, with only one z. (Italian Wikipedia has it as "Ponte di Verrazzano".) Double consonants are perhaps the most notorious Italian trip-up for Anglophones - so the bridge's name remains... of indeterminate/ambivalent spelling, and pronunciation.

- as noted in the fine languagehat comments, the article seems to be an extract of her first book in Italian, In Altre Parole. (Whose title lent itself poignantly to the conference at Montclair State U where she first introduced the work in the US: In Other Wor(l)ds.)

- wonderfully, there's a video of Lahiri speaking Italian at that conference here - you can feel the love, and witness the transformation.

- I've always thought of myself as more of a language chameleon, one identitary self adopting temporary adaptive guises, fully transformative but readily reversable. Her Ovidian take... has me challenging my metaphors.

- in her first exposure to the city, there are echoes of Andrew Doerr's (albeit temporary, and differently motivated) move to Rome.

- both of them were (are?) in my neighborhood, which lends a further tinge of kinship to their experience for me.

- loads to put on the Christmas wishlist from this - much appreciated!
posted by progosk at 5:46 AM on December 13, 2015 [5 favorites]


It's not enough to study a foreign language. The act of speaking and recreating your own thoughts is very different from understanding what others are saying or what you are reading. The only way to learn to speak a language is to speak; the only way to learn to write in another language is to write.

This is true for one's native language as well.
posted by librosegretti at 7:51 AM on December 13, 2015


This
We meet once a week, for an hour. I’m pregnant with my second child, 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.
makes me idly wonder if there's been any research into the effects of pregnancy on the brain's speech areas in non-monolingual speakers. Both of my pregnancies there were days where I could not for the life of me remember the word I wanted to use in neither my mother tongue English nor in Italian.
posted by romakimmy at 8:38 AM on December 13, 2015


This is fascinating to me as a native Italian speaker who has learnt English and other languages at some stage later in life (not actually bilingual from early childhood). I can relate to how it can change your way of expressing yourself or even your way of thinking, in many ways. And regardless of which languages can be more difficult than others, which is kind of relative anyway, I can understand sometimes you get a sort of psychological block you need to overcome first to make the final leap and feel completely at ease and confident enough in that language.

It's amazing that she chose to switch to Italian for writing and publishing really. I totally get why they told her it was a crazy idea.

I watched that video, she seems to speak Italian so fluently and with practically no accent, just a slight noticeable hesitation in pronouncing those tricky double consonants. It's clear she's a perfectionist.

(And personally I think it'd be great even if she spoke with more of an accent - I don't subscribe to the notion learning another language means an effort to eliminate all traces of your mother tongue when you speak it, but of course it's natural to want to immerse yourself to the point you do want to try and speak that language as naturally as a native, especially if you love it so much.)
posted by bitteschoen at 9:03 AM on December 13, 2015


This is true for one's native language as well.

Hah, 'native' and 'foreign' is tricky for us immigrant and third world people, because they both are constantly fluctuating, so please understand that things are very different for a very large amount of people. Those types of qualifiers don't necessarily apply to me.

I'm supposed to speak both English and Chinese, but my Chinese is comparably poor to my English due to only English being institutionally supported in the US. I wish I was encouraged through 18 years of also mandatory instruction in Chinese, with the end result of being able to read Chinese classics with the same fluency as I do with English-language classics, and being able to talk and listen and write about it with the same fluency as I do in English.

Being an English major and reading a great deal of very good and very bad literature in those classes, plus having to listen to a lecture about Ezra Pound's "attempt" to write Chinese poetry in English compounds my angst. I wish I had the fluency to listen to a Chinese academic talk about the BS that Ezra Pound was trying to pull, in Chinese. It is disorienting to hear how the whole medium of English is reinforced through that hegemony of knowledge. I want to be in that reality.
posted by yueliang at 10:02 AM on December 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


Woops, I typo'd the above. I meant to say, I want to be in a different reality where I am able to access the fluency in both. Lahiri's sentiments really ring so strongly for me, considering my own experiences with being a diasporic Chinese-American.
posted by yueliang at 10:09 AM on December 13, 2015


Hah, 'native' and 'foreign' is tricky for us immigrant and third world people, because they both are constantly fluctuating, so please understand that things are very different for a very large amount of people. Those types of qualifiers don't necessarily apply to me.


Yes--I should have said "true for all languages".
posted by librosegretti at 10:16 AM on December 13, 2015


A personal journal would be one idea, though something that gets feedback from people who know the language I'm trying to use may be more useful.

Lang-8

Originally a Japanese creation, so I don't know how the community of German or Swedish native speakers is, but there was a sprinkling of users from various European countries the last time I used it regularly years ago, and it seems to have only grown.
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:07 AM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


As a native English speaker who has become a fluent speaker of Italian, I find Lahiri's story incredibly touching.

We are a very rare group. I actually have never met another fluent Italian speaker who grew up speaking English. Selfishly, I am extremely happy to learn her story. From my personal point of view it exposes the incredible diversity of the learning process.

Although she exaggerates, my partner explains to the curious that I learned Italian in a month. I did so by total immersion that I maintained through stubborn refusal of my native language. I made many mistakes, and I cared little about it as long as I was understood. Truly, it took much longer to master the language, but I always spoke it, from the first times I arrived in the country.

If Lahiri is a perfectionist in her acquisition of Italian, I am an imperfectionist, joyfully focusing first on the transmission of idea and feeling, and only by later accident achieving clarity and correctness in my communication.

In her, I see that somehow both approaches can achieve the same end. But one must try, eventually, to be understood perfectly or a certain level of connection can never be achieved. In my case, and hers, it is love that motivates this final level.

She inspires me to approach the language from a literary perspective. Italian has an incredible vocabulary, much of which is impossible to learn through casual conversation. Her intense focus on the written language inspires me to approach my learning of Italian again, using literature as my guide.
posted by melatonic at 6:07 PM on December 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I wish I was encouraged through 18 years of also mandatory instruction in Chinese, with the end result of being able to read Chinese classics with the same fluency as I do with English-language classics, and being able to talk and listen and write about it with the same fluency as I do in English.

I feel this strongly as well :( Sadly even if I had 18 years of mandatory instruction in Chinese, it wouldn't have been enough. For me to learn a language I need to speak it and use it everyday i.e. immersion. My nephews took a couple of years of weekend Cantonese classes. At graduation, they had little to show for it.
posted by storybored at 8:09 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


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