Dove mi trovo (Italian Edition)

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Other than for her bilingual book In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri announced that this time she would self-translate her first novel written in Italian into English.

Lahriri, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” is a careful explorer of subterranean emotional pain. It was like getting this inclusive intel into this person’s life, while it is not super life changing it gets increasingly interesting. She wrote her first work in Italian in 2015, a non-fiction piece entitled In altre parole which was translated into English as In Other Words by Ann Goldstein. Having read, and deeply empathised with, Lahiri's In Other Words—a nonfiction work in which she interrogates her love for and struggles with the Italian language—I was looking forward to Dove mi trovo. Nell’arco di un anno e nel susseguirsi delle stagioni, la donna arriverà a un «risveglio», in un giorno di mare e di sole pieno che le farà sentire con forza il calore della vita, del sangue.I loved that novel a lot and had other titles by Lahiri on my list when I learned that she had written another book in Italian. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Throughout nearly 50 vignettes/chapters with titles like “On the Sidewalk”, “In the Piazza”, “On the Couch”, “At Dawn”, "In the Mirror”, “In My Head”, we get glimpses of her solitary life – and in the process we put together the personal landscape the author set out to paint.

Even if this is not said, you immediately have the feeling that the book refers to the authors’ solitary life in Rome. The book is set out in a series of short chapters – set over a year, in which the unnamed narrator, living in the unnamed City (which seems to be Rome) in which she was born traces her life over the course of a year. And this might be petty, but I take some issue with how she translated the Svevo quote that is used as the epigraph to the book. In a series of vignettes set over a year and spanning the seasons, Whereabouts chronicles the daily life of a middle aged single woman in an unnamed city, presumably Rome in Italy. Like a poem, every word has weight and meaning here; it forces you to stop and listen, to reflect deeply.While I can’t say whether Lahiri always articulated phrases like an Italian would, I didn’t notice any Englishism on her part. Why an author would chose deliberately to substitute the precision instrument that is one’s mastery of a language for one that can only be a blunter one, rendering what is perhaps solely an approximate expression of one’s thoughts?

Lahiri has always been adept at describing emotional depths with spare literary means: the simplest words, the least elaborate sentences. Una grande scrittrice ha scelto l’italiano per la “libertà di sentirsi imperfetta”, creando un canone che prima non c’era: morbido ed essenziale, sospeso, rarefatto e incantevole. Ciò che accomuna tutte le pagine è questo senso di totale abbandono all' impossibilità di godere della vita, tutto è schiacciato da questa visione cupa e mesta di oblio e tristezza. I understand her relationship to Italian as I share her passion for living and breathing a foreign language. She follows a couple having an argument and builds up a whole narrative in her head about their personal life based on the few words she hears them speak.It was as if at every chapter the curtains opened and I could get some insight into the mind and soul of this woman in a foreign city. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote, "Lahiri's poetic flourishes and spare, conversational prose are on full display.

In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. She is oddly distant from those around her, enjoying it seems being surrounded by people, but without wanting any intimacy or real lasting connection with them. Novel doesn't feel like the correct descriptor for this slim and delicate self-portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. This novella was written by the Booker shortlisted (and Pulitzer Prize winning) author Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian, a language with which she has said that she fell in love since first visiting the country in 1994 prior to moving to Rome), one in which she has written and from which she has translated (most noticably a novel by Domenico Starnone – an author at the heart of Elena Ferrante identify claims). Nel dispiegarsi dei giorni e della nostra esistenza, rischiamo di restare affamati presso una tavola imbandita.The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. She translated the work into English, and during this time she also began translating Italian-language books by other authors.