Published: 11:28 AM, 21 September 2026
Enigmatic Lingual Conundrums Addressed in Jhumpa Lahiri's Book on Living in Italy
Bernard Priyam
Language can be a home, a barrier and, sometimes, a form of liberation. Few contemporary writers have explored that contradiction as intimately as Jhumpa Lahiri, whose decision to leave the familiar linguistic world of English and Bengali for Italian transformed not only her writing but also her understanding of identity, belonging and displacement.
Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake and Whereabouts, has spent much of her literary life examining the complicated experiences of immigrants and people caught between cultures. Her later work takes that exploration into an unusual territory: Italy and the Italian language.
Her book In Other Words, originally published in Italian as In altre parole and later translated into English by Ann Goldstein, is both a memoir and a meditation on language. It recounts Lahiri's increasingly intense relationship with Italian and her decision to write in a language that she did not inherit from her family or master effortlessly.
The book asks a deceptively simple question: What happens when a writer deliberately abandons linguistic familiarity?
For Lahiri, the answer is uncertainty.
Choosing a Foreign Language
Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents and grew up in Rhode Island in the United States. English became the dominant language of her education and professional life, while Bengali remained deeply connected to family and heritage.
Italian entered her life much later.
Her fascination with the language began during childhood holidays in Italy, but it developed into a serious intellectual and emotional commitment as an adult. Lahiri has described Italian as a language she desired rather than one she was expected to possess.
That distinction is central to In Other Words.
A mother tongue can carry childhood memories, family relationships and cultural expectations. A foreign language can initially offer distance from all of those associations.
For Lahiri, Italian became a place in which she could experiment with another version of herself.
Yet the process was far from easy.
The Vulnerability of Speaking Imperfectly
One of the book's most compelling themes is linguistic vulnerability.
A writer accustomed to controlling words suddenly becomes a beginner. Vocabulary is limited. Grammar can fail. Pronunciation can reveal foreignness. Simple conversations may require concentration.
This reversal is significant for Lahiri because writing had previously been a domain of confidence.
In Italian, she became a learner again.
That experience allowed her to examine the emotional dimension of language acquisition. Learning another language can involve embarrassment, frustration and dependence. It can also produce freedom because the learner is temporarily released from the expectations attached to their established linguistic identity.
Lahiri's Italian is not presented as a flawless achievement. Its imperfections are part of the story.
The mistakes matter because they reveal the gap between what a person wants to express and what they are currently capable of saying.
That gap is where much of the book's emotional power resides.
Language as Identity
Lahiri's earlier fiction frequently explores the experiences of immigrants and their children, particularly the tension between inherited traditions and life in America.
In The Namesake, for example, names become symbols of cultural inheritance and personal identity. In Interpreter of Maladies, characters often struggle to communicate across emotional and cultural boundaries.
In Other Words turns that concern with communication inward.
Instead of examining characters who struggle to communicate with one another, Lahiri examines her own relationship with language.
Italian becomes a third space between Bengali and English.
Bengali represents family and ancestry. English represents the language in which Lahiri became an American writer. Italian represents a language she actively chose.
The choice complicates conventional ideas about identity.
Identity is often described as something inherited: nationality, ethnicity, family background or mother tongue. Lahiri's linguistic journey suggests that identity can also be constructed through deliberate acts of attachment.
A person can choose a language.
And in choosing it, they can create a new relationship with the world.
The Metaphor of the Foreign Land
The book's English title, In Other Words, is itself suggestive.
The phrase evokes translation, reinterpretation and the attempt to express something differently. Lahiri's experience of Italian becomes a metaphor for living between worlds.
A foreign language can make familiar experiences strange.
At the same time, it can make strange experiences newly familiar.
That paradox lies at the heart of migration.
Immigrants often experience their adopted country through a mixture of closeness and distance. They may understand the dominant language but remain conscious of an accent, a cultural difference or an inherited identity.
Lahiri reverses the situation.
In Italy, she deliberately becomes the outsider.
This enables her to experience a condition that many immigrants know intimately: the feeling that language has placed you slightly outside the room.
Translation and the Loss of Certainty
The English version of In Other Words adds another layer to the book's linguistic puzzle.
Lahiri wrote the original text in Italian, while Ann Goldstein translated it into English. The author therefore created a work about linguistic displacement that itself passed through translation.
This raises an intriguing literary question: Can a book about choosing another language retain its meaning when translated back into the author's original literary language?
Rather than eliminating the tension, translation highlights it.
Every translation involves decisions about words, rhythm, tone and cultural associations. Something changes as language changes.
Lahiri's project therefore challenges the assumption that a literary work has only one natural linguistic home.
A book can cross languages without becoming linguistically neutral.
The Writer as Beginner
Perhaps the most radical aspect of Lahiri's experiment is her willingness to surrender mastery.
Writers are often associated with authority over language. They choose words carefully and manipulate syntax, rhythm and meaning.
Lahiri's Italian writing disrupts that authority.
She writes from the position of someone learning.
That can be unsettling, but it is also creatively productive.
The beginner notices things that an expert may overlook. A familiar word becomes interesting because its meaning is not automatic. Grammar becomes visible. Everyday conversations acquire texture.
The foreign language slows perception.
Instead of moving effortlessly through sentences, the writer must consider each linguistic step.
That slowness becomes a literary method.
A Different Kind of Exile
Lahiri's relationship with Italian can also be understood as a form of voluntary exile.
Traditional exile involves being separated from one's homeland, often unwillingly. Lahiri's linguistic exile is self-imposed.
She chooses to distance herself from the language in which she achieved literary success.
This does not mean abandoning English entirely. Instead, it creates a productive tension between languages.
Her experiment suggests that belonging does not necessarily require linguistic certainty.
Sometimes, living between languages can itself become a form of identity.
For readers who speak multiple languages, this idea may be particularly recognizable. A person may feel emotionally different depending on the language being spoken. Certain memories may belong naturally to one language, while professional or social experiences belong to another.
Languages do not merely carry information.
They carry versions of ourselves.
Italy as More Than a Setting
Italy in Lahiri's work is not simply a picturesque European backdrop.
It becomes part of her linguistic transformation.
Italian cities, streets, cafés and everyday encounters provide the environment in which she tests her new linguistic identity. The country becomes a place of study, uncertainty and self-discovery.
Her relationship with Italy also demonstrates how literature can emerge from sustained attention to another culture.
Rather than approaching the country only as a tourist, Lahiri approaches it through language.
Learning Italian requires her to listen closely-to sounds, expressions, gestures and social conventions.
Language becomes a method of observing society.
Beyond the Immigrant Story
Lahiri's Italian project also expands the conventional immigrant narrative.
Immigration stories often focus on people moving from one country to another and struggling to adapt. Lahiri introduces a different possibility: cultural movement without a straightforward loss-and-gain equation.
Her relationship with Italian is neither simply assimilation nor rejection of heritage.
She remains connected to Bengali and English while developing an attachment to Italian.
The result is not a single identity replacing another.
It is a layered identity.
That may be one reason her work resonates with readers living in increasingly multilingual societies.
The Meaning of Not Belonging
At the center of In Other Words is an idea that can seem uncomfortable but may ultimately be liberating: complete belonging may be impossible.
Every language excludes as well as includes.
To speak one language fluently is to enter a particular cultural world, but it can also separate a speaker from those who do not share it.
Lahiri embraces this contradiction.
Her Italian is a language of desire precisely because it remains difficult.
The distance between herself and the language gives her something to pursue.
Instead of treating linguistic imperfection as failure, she turns it into a source of creativity.
A Continuing Literary Experiment
Jhumpa Lahiri's decision to write in Italian represents more than an unusual career experiment by an established author.
It is a sustained inquiry into what language does to identity.
Her work suggests that language can simultaneously connect us to family, culture and history while limiting what we can easily express. A new language can feel alien, but that alienness can also provide a fresh perspective.
In In Other Words, Lahiri transforms the experience of learning Italian into a literary investigation of displacement, translation and belonging.
Her journey demonstrates that the boundaries between languages are not always walls. They can also be doors.
For a writer whose career began by exploring the lives of people living between cultures, choosing Italian offered a remarkable extension of that exploration. She became, in a sense, a stranger to her own literary voice-and discovered that unfamiliarity could itself become a creative home.
That is the enduring significance of Lahiri's Italian experiment.
Language does not merely tell us where we come from.
Sometimes, it helps us discover where we might go.
Bernard Priyam is a freelancer
and a columnist.
