Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
I've been thinking about this recently because I became aware that an Indian-American author I greatly admire, Jhumpa Lahiri, has taken the extraordinary step of trying to adopt Italian as her primary language for both reading and writing. Indeed, her latest book was written in Italian and then had to be translated back into English.
It's all very flattering that she so loves the Italian language and culture, but the whole thing strikes me as bizarre. I can understand wanting to learn the language, especially as she had a concentration in the Renaissance in university, I can understand her loving Italy and Italian culture, but to uproot your family by moving them there, calling it your home, reading only in Italian, and putting your career at risk by suddenly writing in Italian? There are all sorts of psychological issues at play, as the article she wrote suggests.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/trading-stories
She talks about it in English here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfLVFwAl6PU
For anyone who understands Italian, or wants to hear her Italian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF90zsj7ODE
Anyway, the question for me is, can she ever really be proficient in Italian, can anyone ever really be totally proficient in a language learned totally in adulthood? Is this a fool's errand?
It's all very flattering that she so loves the Italian language and culture, but the whole thing strikes me as bizarre. I can understand wanting to learn the language, especially as she had a concentration in the Renaissance in university, I can understand her loving Italy and Italian culture, but to uproot your family by moving them there, calling it your home, reading only in Italian, and putting your career at risk by suddenly writing in Italian? There are all sorts of psychological issues at play, as the article she wrote suggests.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/trading-stories
She talks about it in English here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfLVFwAl6PU
For anyone who understands Italian, or wants to hear her Italian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF90zsj7ODE
Anyway, the question for me is, can she ever really be proficient in Italian, can anyone ever really be totally proficient in a language learned totally in adulthood? Is this a fool's errand?