One day she walks into a store to try on new clothes. Soon her mind becomes a mirror reflecting everything she observes: strangers walking, running, eating, the landscape mutating, the days getting shorter. She arrives in the new city as the season changes. She likes her life, she is comfortable with it, but something mysterious compels her to leave, to become invisible in a different city, listening to a foreign language. It is about a woman, a translator, who wants to be a different person. The story Lahiri imagined in that library is a good place to start.

Reading her first two books in Italian offers a moment to reflect on what she has gained or lost in her new language.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s work is now part of the Italian canon, and her contribution to the language is already significant, having edited a remarkable anthology of modern Italian short stories. In 1998, reviewing Milan Kundera’s eighth novel Identity (his second in French), the critic and film director Antoine de Gaudemar wondered where Kundera’s sense of humor had gone what had happened to the ironies, digressions, and jokes that made his first novels so original? Kundera undoubtedly loved French literature (when he migrated to France in 1950, he started translating-rewriting, really-his first novels, insisting they should be considered part of the French canon), but it is not clear he gained more than he lost when he abandoned Czech, the language that had allowed him to write novels like The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Changing languages is a great risk for a writer, especially for one who has already developed a style. One has to love a language to write in it. She shares this anecdote in her first Italian book, In Other Words (first published in 2016 as In Altre Parole). By then, she had stopped writing in English. Years later, she walked into a library in Rome, and for the first time, a story came to her in Italian. The prediction was correct: without knowing it, that formula encapsulated the uncertain process of adopting Italian as a new literary language. Around that time, a friend of hers predicted she would soon be living in an Italian dictionary. When Jhumpa Lahiri started learning Italian, she wrote on the first page of an Italian dictionary a formula: “provare a = cercare di” (try to = seek to).

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