When I first heard about this book, I was torn between interest and cynicism. But while she is happy with her improvement, is she just kidding herself? Can she really become an ‘Italian’ writer, and is she losing something else in the process?

Once immersed in the language, she finally feels she’s making progress, eventually plucking up the courage to actually begin writing in Italian, with this book being the result. Still, while her language skills do slowly improve, she never feels as if she’s really getting inside the language, so she makes the decision (a rather big one…) to move to Rome with her family. Intrigued by the language since visiting Europe as a student and backpacker, she takes lessons, visits Italy and even attends events in her new language. Already an award-winning writer in English, Lahiri found herself wanting a new challenge, and where most people would probably just take up pottery, she decides to take her passion for Italian to extremes. Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole ( Ann Goldstein’s English translation, In Other Words, is available from Knopf in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK) is a slightly different book to my usual selections. Which is, perhaps, quite apt, as the book I chose to read describes a female writer’s own journey into the linguistic unknown…

Sometimes, though, it’s nice to challenge yourself, and in attempting to read a book in Italian, a language I’ve never really studied in great detail, I was certainly taking a leap of faith.

French and German don’t usually pose me too many problems, and while my Spanish isn’t great, I normally manage to understand most of what I’m reading. As I mentioned in my warm-up post for Women in Translation Month, in addition to promoting interesting books by female writers, I also use the opportunity to do a bit of reading in foreign languages.

In other words jhumpa