This time: Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words.
Not poetry but raised all kinds of issues for me as the book was written in Italian and then translated by someone else.
Check out the review here.
NZ Poetry Shelf
a poetry page with reviews, interviews and other things
Great to see this, Paula. Lahiri is one of my favourite writers. Have read her since I first came across her, read Interpreter of Maladies aloud to my partner on a slow, hot trip down the Chesapeake. I have not stopped reading her since. Came to a piece about her relationship to Italy earlier this year — here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/31/jhumpa-lahiri-in-other-words-italian-language — and it made me want to read this book. I like how you capture the book with this: “She craves imperfection. Italian becomes her means of disguise. Whereas in English she was tormented by doubt and failure, in Italian she embraces it.” There is something about being ‘other’ in a foreign tongue. And about how we allow ourselves to embrace that other.
I agree. I always felt I was in disguise with Italian.