ABSTRACT
The book In altre parole (In other words), by the writer Jhumpa Lahiri, written in Italian, her third language, is analysed in this chapter as an example of self-translation, or rather a translation of the self. This autobiographic metanarrative in which Lahiri describes how she opts for a third language not feeling at home in her two first languages (Bengali and English), rejecting “both the mother and the stepmother”, and considering herself a “contradiction in terms”. Lahiri’s narrative exemplifies how it feels to be in exile not belonging, and how the feeling of estrangement incites a longing for a “true mother tongue”, “a sharp image”.
But the foreign language does not become a new home, on the contrary, it is by definition foreign, other, forever distant, and precisely due to these features, its being a peripheral zone of not belonging the foreign language becomes the only one to which she can belong. In altre parole is analysed as an example of how the condition of living in translation both shapes and is shaped by the biography of a person, of how its ambivalence and uncertainty is deeply ingrained in all human beings’ sense of lack.
