In Other Words

Начало книги

Readers may ask why I chose not to translate this book myself from Italian into English. I explain my motivation, in part, in the chapter called “The Hairy Adolescent.” There I describe the surprising difficulty of translating from Italian, a language in which I had only begun to express myself creatively, into English, the language of my previous books. I was reluctant to move back and forth between the two. My impulse at the time was to protect my Italian. Returning to English was disorienting, frustrating, also discouraging. It made me acutely aware of how limited my Italian was compared with my English. It made me question the value of the experiment I had undertaken.

My Italian is still limited compared with my English. And yet it is the sole language in which I continue to write. Apart from obligatory correspondence, I have written exclusively in Italian for more than two years now. These few words are, in fact, the first formal prose I have composed in English since my last book, The Lowland, was completed, in 2012.

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