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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