Molto bene grazie, Jhumpa

     Jhumpa Lahiri is a hyphenated-hyphenated Italian.

  She is Italian by amore. Londoner by birth, Bengali by ethnicity and American by nationality. But none of those things count quite as much.

  Her first time to Italy, to Firenze where falling in love with la citta is inevitable, was at 24-years-old. She fell in love with la lingua as well and determined to learn it. 

  Pulitzer-Prize-winner Lahiri spoke at a Montclair State University Inserra Chair event on Oct. 5.  The Theresa and Lawrence R. Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian-American Studies in the Department of Spanish and Italain (which should be the Department of Italian and Spanish)presents a series of events celebrating Italian language and culture. 

   Lahiri has been celebrating Italian language and culture since that first trip with her sister in the 1990s. She had earned a BA in English Literature from Barnard College. Her time in Firenze inspired her to study Italian and write her PhD dissertation on the Italian Palazzo. She had toyed with the idea of majoring in the classics and studied Latin and Greek, but that is very different from studying a powerful, living language.In

   That power of language was apparent to Lahiri as a child of parents who spoke accented English.  When her son was born, she said she found she couldn't love him in English, but only in Bengali, the language her parents used to show their love. 

   She realistically identifies her love of the language as unrequited. 

    As she became more proficient, Lahiri began writing in Italian, at first in secret, in her diary. Now she has moved on to publishing a book in Italian In Altre Parole -- In Other Words.

    During her talk, she spoke of the shelter of another language, the freedom to hide in another language. "Passport Control" is the phrase she uses to describe the effect of writing in another language. 

    Her books written in English are Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, The Lowland and Unaccustomed Earth. They have been translated into Italian.  Stay tuned for some reviews.