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In an excerpt from In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri describes reading Italian by marking unfamiliar words and looking them up after she finishes a book. The practice becomes more than a way to build vocabulary: it lets her record a changing relationship with a language she is still learning.
What book is the excerpt from?
Scroll published the excerpt on February 13, 2016. It comes from In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. The publisher describes the book as Lahiri’s account of her love of Italian and her experience of reading and writing in the language. Seeking immersion, she moved to Rome with her family in 2012 and began reading and writing in Italian.
That background matters to the excerpt: Lahiri is not presenting a universal study plan, but reflecting on what it feels like to read literature in a language she has not known as long as English.
How does Lahiri handle unfamiliar words?
Rather than stop at every unknown word, Lahiri usually underlines it and keeps reading. After finishing the book, she returns to the marked words, checks their meanings, and writes definitions in a notebook. At first, she recorded those definitions in English; later she began writing them in Italian, turning the notebook into what she calls a personal dictionary.
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Her account leaves room for different choices in the moment: a reader can pause and look something up, mark it for later, or let it pass. Lahiri’s usual approach is to mark and continue, then review. The sequence lets her stay with the book while still returning to words that caught her attention.
Why does she value reading in Italian?
Lahiri says reading in Italian feels more intimate and intense than reading in English, in part because Italian is a language she has known for less time. Her incomplete knowledge makes her more alert to the text. As she puts it, “I’m a more active reader, more involved, even if less skilled.”
She does not frame the process as a temporary hurdle on the way to reading without aids. Instead, she values the effort and the limitations, and sees learning as an ongoing possibility rather than a task that ends with complete mastery. “I like the effort,” she writes in the excerpt.
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The personal dictionary captures both the words Lahiri encounters and the way her reading changes: English definitions give way to Italian ones as she becomes more immersed in the language. Her method is one writer’s account of sustained attention, not a claim that every reader should use a notebook or follow the same routine.
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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →A 2019 PEN America interview offers a related recollection: Lahiri said that when she first read Alberto Moravia in Italian, she was looking up many words, yet was struck by the precision of his language and the emotional force of the work. The anecdote reinforces the tension at the heart of the excerpt: linguistic difficulty can coexist with a powerful reading experience.
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Sources
- Scroll: “Reading with a dictionary: An excerpt from Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book”
- Publisher page for In Other Words
- PEN America interview with Jhumpa Lahiri
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