In Other Words (20 page)

I think that studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and Bengali. A rejection of both the mother and the stepmother. An independent path.

Where is this new path leading me? Where does the flight end, and when? After fleeing, what will I do? It's not really a flight in the strict sense of the word. Although I'm fleeing, I realize that both English and Bengali are beside me. Just as in a triangle, one point leads inevitably to another.

English and Italian seem to be the two closest points. Having in common many words of Latin origin, they share a certain territory. Needless to say, I often come across a word in Italian that I already know thanks to the English equivalent. I can't deny that my comprehension of English helps. But it can also mislead me. Every so often, I think I know the meaning of a word in Italian because of the Latin root, but when I have to define it I'm wrong, and I realize that I haven't learned the proper meaning in English, either. The more my comprehension of Italian increases, the more it reveals a weakness in English. The process deepens my understanding of both languages, and thus the flight is also a return.

The distance between Bengali and Italian, apart from their shared Indo-European roots, seems much greater than that between Italian and English. As far as I know, they have only one word with a meaning in common:
gola
(throat). In Bengali one says
chi
(who) for
che
(that), and
che
to mean
chi
. These are trifles. And yet Bengali helps me in another way. Because I grew up speaking Bengali, I don't speak Italian with an Anglophone accent. My tongue is already adapted, conditioned for the pronunciation of Italian. I recognize all the Italian consonants, the vowels, the diphthongs; I find them natural. From the phonetic point of view, I find Bengali much closer to Italian than to English. I have to admit, therefore, that in certain ways Bengali, too, accompanies me, helps me in this flight.

Where does the impulse to introduce a third language into my life, to create this triangle, come from? What does the triangle look like? Is it equilateral or not?

If I were drawing it I would use a pen to draw
the English side, a pencil for the other two. English remains the base, the most stable, fixed side. Bengali and Italian are both weaker, indistinct. One inherited, the other adopted, desired. Bengali is my past, Italian, maybe, a new road into the future. My first language is my origin, the last the goal. In both I feel like a child, a little clumsy.

I'm scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It's a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.

Italian remains an external language. It, too, might disappear, especially when I have to leave Italy, if I don't continue to pursue it.

English remains the present: permanent, indelible. My stepmother won't abandon me. Even though the language was imposed on me, it has given me a clear, correct voice, forever.

I think that this triangle is a kind of frame. And that the frame contains my self-portrait. The frame defines me, but what does it contain?

All my life I wanted to see, in the frame, something specific. I wanted a mirror to exist inside the frame that would reflect a precise, sharp image. I wanted to see a whole person, not a fragmented one. But that person wasn't there. Because of my double identity I saw only fluctuation, distortion, dissimulation. I saw something hybrid, out of focus, always jumbled.

I think that not being able to see a specific image in the frame is the torment of my life. The absence of the
image I was seeking distresses me. I'm afraid that the mirror reflects only a void, that it reflects nothing.

I come from that void, from that uncertainty. I think that the void is my origin and also my destiny. From that void, from all that uncertainty, comes the creative impulse. The impulse to fill the frame.

S
hortly before I began to write these reflections, I received an email from a friend of mine in Rome, the writer Domenico Starnone. Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he wrote, “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.” How much those words reassured me. They seemed to echo my state of mind after I came to Rome and started to write in Italian. They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language: to subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis.

Around the same time that I received this note, I was asked, during an interview, what my favorite book was. I was in London, on a stage with five other writers. It's a question that I usually find annoying; no book has been definitive for me, so I never know how to answer. This time, though, I was able to respond without any hesitation that my favorite book was the
Metamorphoses
of Ovid. It's a majestic work, a poem that concerns everything, that reflects everything. I read it for
the first time twenty-five years ago, in Latin, as a university student in the United States. It was an unforgettable encounter, maybe the most satisfying reading of my life. To understand this poem I had to be persistent, translating every word. I had to devote myself to an ancient and demanding foreign language. And yet Ovid's writing won me over: I was enchanted by it. I discovered a sublime work, a living, enthralling language. As I said, I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.

I remember vividly the moment when the nymph Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree. She is fleeing Apollo, the love-struck god who pursues her. She would like to remain alone, chaste, dedicated to the forest and the hunt, like the virgin Diana. Exhausted, the nymph, unable to outstrip the god, begs her father, Peneus, a river divinity, to help her. Ovid writes, “She has just ended this prayer when a heaviness pervades her limbs, her tender breast is bound in a thin bark, her hair grows into leaves, her arms into branches; her foot, a moment before so swift, remains fixed by sluggish roots, her face vanishes into a treetop.” When Apollo places his hand on the trunk of this tree “he feels the breast still trembling under the new bark.”

Metamorphosis is a process that is both violent and regenerative, a death and a birth. It's not clear where the nymph ends and the tree begins; the beauty of this scene is that it portrays the fusion of two elements, of both beings. The words that describe both Daphne and the tree are right next to each other (in the Latin text,
frondem/crines, ramos/bracchia, cortice/pectus;
leaves/hair, branches/arms,
bark/breast). The contiguity of these words, their literal juxtaposition, reinforces the state of contradiction, of entanglement. It gives us a double impression, throwing us off. It expresses in the mythical, I would say primordial, sense the meaning of being two things at the same time. Of being something undefined, ambiguous. Of having a dual identity.

Until she is transformed, Daphne is running for her life. Now she is stopped; she can no longer move. Apollo can touch her but he can't possess her. Though cruel, the metamorphosis is her salvation. On the one hand, she loses her independence. On the other, as a tree, she remains forever in the wood, her place, where she has another sort of freedom.

As I said before, I think that my writing in Italian is a flight. Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn. But the change, this new opening, is costly; like Daphne, I, too, find myself confined. I can't move as I did before, the way I was used to moving in English. Now a new language, Italian, covers me like a kind of bark. I remain inside: renewed, trapped, relieved, uncomfortable.

Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me?

The most obvious answer is the English language. But I think it's not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is
the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I'm tired of it.

And yet I was in love with it. I became a writer in English. And then, rather precipitously, I became a famous writer. I received a prize that I was sure I did not deserve, that seemed to me a mistake. Although it was an honor, I remained suspicious of it. I couldn't connect myself to that recognition, and yet it changed my life. Since then I've been considered a successful author, so I've stopped feeling like an unknown, almost anonymous apprentice. All my writing comes from a place where I feel invisible, inaccessible. But a year after my first book was published I lost my anonymity.

By writing in Italian, I think I am escaping both my failures with regard to English and my success. Italian offers me a very different literary path. As a writer I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself. I can join words together and work on sentences without ever being considered an expert. I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but, unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.

If I mention that I'm writing in a new language these days, many people react negatively. In the United States, some advise me not to do it. They say they don't want to read me translated from a foreign tongue. They don't want me to change. In Italy, even though many have encouraged me to take this step, many support me, I'm still asked why I have a desire to write in a language that
is much less widely read in the world than English. Some say that my renunciation of English could be disastrous, that my escape could lead me into a trap. They don't understand why I want to take such a risk.