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S'està carregant… In Other Words (edició 2017)de Jhumpa Lahiri (Autor)
Informació de l'obraIn Other Words de Jhumpa Lahiri
S'està carregant…
Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. 2.5 stars Firstly, this is a bilingual book, so it's much shorter than I realized - only about one hundred pages. I could certainly relate to some of the author's struggle to learn a new language, but I didn't really understand her disdain for English. She spoke solely Bengali until preschool, when she was immersed in English; I get that this could be somewhat traumatic. But eventually, she masters the language and goes on to become a writer. I also didn't see why she loves Italian more when she's so much more limited in it than in English. I'm currently in a foreign country, struggling to communicate in even the most basic way, and I know that when I can speak English again, it will taste like water in a dry land... The essays/chapters were repetitive, all saying the same thing in slightly different words. And weirdly, Lahiri incorporated two short stories into the already-short book. For those who need encouragement in learning another language, this is an okay read, but certainly not the best. I would have preferred for the author to write a more detailed and nuanced memoir in English. (Also, what was her family doing for these three years in Italy? They're barely mentioned!)
Nothing reminds you how far you are from home more than trying to speak in someone else’s tongue. As Jhumpa Lahiri writes in her gorgeous new memoir, “In Other Words,” a language is as vast as an ocean; the most a foreigner can ever hope to make of it is the size of a lake. “In Other Words” presents the same author with a different voice. The English we read is not hers, but belongs to her translator, Ann Goldstein, who has garnered well-deserved praise for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s recent Neapolitan novels. Lahiri wrote “In Other Words” in Italian, refusing — wisely, I think — to translate her own work because she wished to maintain the discipline that has enabled her to write exclusively in Italian the past few years. Her unusual, personalised and relentless new book, which she describes as “a project”, is an impressionistic and unexpectedly painful, clinical and at times strained, account of her struggle to master Italian. Perhaps Lahiri in time will find in Italian the passion and irony absent from her graciously melancholic fiction. She would do well to heed Makine’s opinion: “Language is just grammar. The real language of literature is created in the heart, not a grammar book.” It is difficult to detect any warmth within In Other Words only an aspiration to excel and, after all, ambition can prove a distancing motivation, as it does here. There is no celebration, only struggle; no humour merely frustration. Lahiri’s book feels starved of actual experiences of Italy, or reflections on how that language gives form to its different world. Monkishly, all her contemplation is turned inwards on to her own processes of learning, not outwards on the messy imperfect matter the language works to express. Very likely this period of withdrawal and purgation will turn out to have been necessary to finding her next step as a writer. But if we want our babies to live, we need to reconcile ourselves to their hairy adolescence, and then their necessarily fraught and compromised maturity. I was relieved when at the end of the book Lahiri was packing to return to America – and, presumably, however reluctantly, to English, which is her language, because she uses it with grownup mastery. DistincionsLlistes notables
Biography & Autobiography.
Foreign Language Study.
Travel.
Nonfiction.
HTML:From the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful nonfiction debut??an "honest, engaging, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words." ??Kirkus Reviews (starred) In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story??of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for "a trial by fire, a sort of baptism" into a new language and world. There, she begins to read, and to write??initially in her journal??solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention. Read by the Author, in both English and the original Italian From the Compact Dis No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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In some curious, but probably intentional way, another important dimension of the book reflects on why anyone would write at all? We are all different but for Lahiri, ‘writing is a way of absorbing and organising life.’
As a compulsive journal writer, I found myself wondering about all that is unrecorded, glossed over, even ignored. Here we meet what I’ll say is the genius of Lahiri the maker: the way she can grab hold of truth as it flashes past in fugitive, evaporative thought.
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