Extraits-

• From the cover THE CROSSING
   
  I want to cross a small lake. It really is small, and yet the other shore seems too far away, beyond my abilities. I’m aware that the lake is very deep in the middle, and even though I know how to swim I’m afraid of being alone in the water, without any support.
   
  The lake I’m talking about is in a secluded, isolated place. To get there you have to walk a short distance, through a silent wood. On the other side you can see a cottage, the only house on the shore. The lake was formed just after the last ice age, millennia ago. The water is clear but dark, heavier than salt water, with no current. Once you’re in, a few yards from the shore, you can no longer see the bottom.
   
  In the morning I observe people coming to the lake, as I do. I watch them cross it in a confident, relaxed manner, stop for some minutes in front of the cottage, then return. I count their arm strokes. I envy them. 
   
  For a month I swim around the lake, never going too far out. This is a more significant distance—the circumference compared to the diameter. It takes me more than half an hour to make this circle. Yet I’m always close to the shore. I can stop, I can stand up if I’m tired. It’s good exercise, but not very exciting.
   
  Then one morning, near the end of the summer, I meet two friends at the lake. I’ve decided to make the crossing with them, to finally get to the cottage on the other side. I’m tired of just going along the edge.
   
  I count the strokes. I know that my companions are in the water with me, but I know that each of us is alone. After about a hundred and fifty strokes I’m in the middle, the deepest part. I keep going. After a hundred more I see the bottom again. 
   
  I arrive on the other side: I’ve made it with no trouble. I see the cottage, until now distant, just steps from me. I see the small, faraway silhouettes of my husband, my children. They seem unreachable, but I know they’re not. After a crossing, the known shore becomes the opposite side: here becomes there. Charged with energy, I cross the lake again. I’m elated.
   
  For twenty years I studied Italian as if I were swimming along the edge of that lake. Always next to my dominant language, English. Always hugging that shore. It was good exercise. Beneficial for the muscles, for the brain, but not very exciting. If you study a foreign language that way, you won’t drown. The other language is always there to support you, to save you. But you can’t float without the possibility of drowning, of sinking. To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. Without a life vest. Without depending on solid ground.
   
  A few weeks after crossing the small hidden lake, I make a second crossing, much longer but not at all difficult. It will be the first true departure of my life. On a ship this time, I cross the Atlantic Ocean, to live in Italy. 
   
   
  THE DICTIONARY
   
  The first Italian book I buy is a pocket dictionary, with the definitions in English. It’s 1994, and I’m about to go to Florence for the first time, with my sister. I go to a bookshop in Boston with an Italian name: Rizzoli. A stylish, refined bookshop, which is no longer there.
   
  I don’t buy a guidebook, even though it’s my first trip to Italy, even though I know nothing about Florence. Thanks to a friend of mine, I already have the address of a hotel. I’m a student, I don’t have much money. I think a dictionary is more important.
  ...

Au sujet de l’auteur-

• JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.
  
  
  ANN GOLDSTEIN is an editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from the Italian Foreign Ministry and from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Critiques-

• Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri's powerful nonfiction debut illuminates her quest to explore her identity through writing in a new language. Her memoir is written in Italian and translated into English; the production includes both versions. Her beloved Italian, which she began learning after college but never mastered, offers a refuge from the "long clash in my life from studying English and Bengali." She views her "rejection of mother and stepmother" tongues as a completely independent third path. Lahiri's voice, clear and articulate, initially strikes the ear as reserved, even aloof. But that impression fades, especially when she voices the Italian words and phrases that weave through the English translation. In addition to exploring her remarkable love affair with Italian, Lahiri voices striking insights on writing, exile, and the transformative power of language. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
• 

  November 9, 2015
  Readers who have followed Pulitzer-winner Lahiri's stellar career might be surprised to discover that she has written her latest book in Italian. In this slim, lyrical nonfiction debut, Lahiri (The Lowland) traces the progress of her love affair with the Italian language and the steps that caused her to move to Italy and stop reading and writing in English. Unlike Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, who also wrote in adopted languages, Lahiri doesn't leap directly into fiction. Though the book contains a short story, "The Exchange," Lahiri's first order of business is to tell her own story. She writes exquisitely about her experiences with language: her first language was Bengali, but when her family moved to the United States, she made a difficult adjustment to using English at nursery school. Now, she reports, her literary life in English seems distant and unmoored from her self. By embracing the increased difficulty of writing in a new language, Lahiri has forced herself to write in short, syntactically simple sentences. For admirers of her previous work, it will feel strange but pleasant to read her writing in translation. Lahiri's unexpected metamorphosis provides a captivating and insightful lesson in the power of language to transform.

• 

  April 25, 2016
  Lahiri, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of Interpreter of Maladies, tries her hand at memoir—and audiobook narration—with this brief recounting of her quest to immerse herself in the Italian language. She tells of her initial passion for learning Italian, her third language after Bengali and English, and her decision to move her husband and two children to Rome for the full experience. In the print version of this memoir, which Lahiri wrote in Italian, Lahiri’s Italian words and their English translation are side by side on facing pages; here, she narrates the entire memoir in English before doing it all over again in Italian, starting in the third compact disc. In English, Lahiri makes for a quiet and unassuming narrator. Her emotional register feels monochromatic even when she is giving voice to her deepest longings, and the performance falls flat, particularly during the very short pieces of fiction she weaves in: every character sounds the same. Speaking in Italian, however, her voice takes on added depth and fervor. It’s not just that her accent is flawless but that Italian allows her access to a more avid, colorful, uninhibited version of herself. This is what she tells listeners during the English chapters that open the book, but the truth of it is not apparent until they hear the story told all over again in the language of her choosing. A Knopf hardcover.

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