The Trauma of Language Learning and Self-Translation in Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri

ABSTRACT

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (2011–2014) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s first work in Italian, In altre parole (In Other Words, 2015) can both be read as ‘language memoirs’, for they both posit language, language acquisition, and self-translation as central narrative events as well as sites for identity construction and reinvention of the self. In this essay I juxtapose Ferrante’s and Lahiri’s works to argue that both authors explore the traumatic encounter between a repressed or unlearned native/mother tongue and an adoptive language which is also the very language of their texts and the very proof of their linguistic mastery. The essay draws on trauma studies and translation theory to examine the lexical, structural, and thematic dimensions of what I define as ‘dialect trauma’ in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and to analyse the recurring rhetoric of linguistic incompetence or what I term ‘language imperfection trauma’ in Lahiri’s In altre parole. I contend that ‘dialect trauma’ in Ferrante’s Quartet manifests as Elena Greco’s recurring metalinguistic glosses which compulsively re-enact Elena’s traumatic memory on the level of her literary language. I then propose that Lahiri’s ‘language imperfection trauma’ can be located in her repeated attempts to pose and pass as Italian, all the while documenting her own language learning practice. My analysis puts in conversation depictions of language acquisition and the exiled or migrant self, representations of trauma, and translingual writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Language memoir
• translingual writing
• trauma
• self-translation
• dialect
• Elena Ferrante
• Jhumpa Lahiri

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Lahiri is not the only exophonic writer who has adopted Italian. The Algerian writer Amara Lakhous who fled to Italy after he was persecuted in his home country has written several remarkable novels in Italian recounting the experience of immigrants. Others include Elvira Dones who fled the communist regime in Albania, Edith Bruck — a Shoah survivor, and Helena Janeczek, a German-Italian writer of Polish Jewish origins. A somewhat younger generation of exophonic authors such as Heddi Goodrich, Elvis Malaj, Jana Karsaiova, and Nicolai Lilin should be noted. Tim Parks, a prolific British writer in both English and Italian, is worth mentioning as well. Interestingly, Lahiri positions her own exophonic writing alongside prominent male authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Fernando Pessoa (Walkowitz 2020), and Antonio Tabucchi, as implied by her epigraph in In altre parole which quotes a line by Tabucchi about his adoption of Portuguese.

2. As Lahiri herself comments, she rents an apartment in via Giulia, ‘una strada elegantissima’ (Iap, 49; ‘a most elegant street’, IOW, 53), in the heart of Rome.

3. Ferrante included Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies on her list of her favourite works by female writers (Cain 2020) while Lahiri has discussed Ferrante’s writing at public events (2017) and in the press (Ferrante 2014).

4. Lahiri’s formal education includes three Master’s degrees and a Ph.D in Renaissance Studies from Boston University.

5. Here I have in mind Ferrante’s volume of essays and interviews La frantumaglia (2011, 2013, 2015a), the collected essays written for her weekly column in The Guardian (L’invenzione occasionale, 2019) and the three lectures and one keynote address Ferrante gave in 2020–2021 published together in I margini e il dettato (2021).

6. For example, Jhumpa Lahiri discussed Ferrante’s writing at an event presenting the last volume of the tetralogy, Story of the Lost Child, at the Center for Fiction on 27 January 2016. Lahiri says she corresponded with Ferrante who sent her ‘a personal manifesto’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlnNyqqyYh4&t=437s).

7. On In altre parole as a language memoir and linguistic autobiography (‘autobiografia linguistica’), see Lahiri’s ‘Postfazione’ in the 2016 bilingual edition of In altre parole (IOW, 212–213). See also (Bergantino 2022, 172; Brioni 2022, 94; de Rogatis 2023; Nergaard 2021). Siri Nergaard defines Lahiri’s book as ‘a self-reflexive, autobiographical, psychological metanarrative on Lahiri’s own relation to language, or rather to languages’ (Nergaard 2021, 172).

8. As Cathy Caruth explains, ‘it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language’ (2016 [1996], 4).

9. Pinto (2020) has interpreted the absence of dialect in Elena’s narration as a form of cultural and class appropriation, as embodying Elena’s social mobility at the cost of erasing her (dialectal) identity: Elena’s standard, upper-class Italian absorbs and dominates Lila’s voice.

10. Interestingly, the two episodes Lahiri recounts take place in a shop and are both inflected by compromised power dynamics. Lahiri, the buyer, is addressed as a foreigner by the salesperson serving her.

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Notes on contributors

Stiliana Milkova Rousseva

Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She specializes in Italian, Russian, and Bulgarian literatures, travel writing, literature and the visual arts, and literary translation. Her publications include Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), articles on contemporary Italian women writers as well as on Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, and translations from Italian of works by Adriana Cavarero, Anita Raja, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, and others. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan) and the editor of the online journal Reading in Translation. She is also the author a book of short fiction in Italian, Storia delle prime volte (Voland, 2022).