Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I think the whole situation is completely blown out of proportion and ridiculous. I know personally the person who has been accused of being Elena Ferrante. She’s actually the wife of Domenico Starnone, who has also been “accused,” whatever the word is. It is like a trial, and this is the absurd thing because whoever wrote those books did nothing wrong. It’s been treated almost as if it were a crime, and the nature of the article, the very violent article, inappropriate article, that was published a couple of months ago, the language of that was very disturbing and offensive to me. Whoever wrote those books, the world is no better off knowing who the actual person is. I think we’ve all completely lost perspective. So many beautiful things have been created by mankind that we still go to look at and marvel at or read or whatever the case may be, and nobody’s hung up on who exactly the person was and what their name was and what their birthday is. This whole cult of the individual and the individual’s hand and signature behind what’s being done. These are recent concepts if you think about them. People in Italy just don’t care about this. They have other things to think about and worry about at this point. So this whole Ferrante thing, the article came out, I exchanged some messages with my friends, saying, “This is just disgusting. And why? And so unnecessary.” And then everybody moved on. Whereas here, in America, it’s just ongoing and it’s just not dying. People aren’t saying, “Let’s either read the books or not read the books.” If someone goes out of their way to say “I would like to write in anonymity,” why that can’t be respected in our culture is really kind of mystifying to me, and also distressing. And the projection people have onto the idea of who the writer might be, and the reasons, and all of this speculation, it could be a very simple thing. But it’s become contorted, I feel, at least in the United States, maybe in England. I don’t know. But it’s not the same in Italy. People aren’t really talking about it in the same way. Hello, Miss Lahiri. I admire your writing, so thank you for all your books. I grew up in Poland, actually, and my first degree is from Gdańsk University. I’m bilingual, but I teach English here and I write in English. I’m a fiction writer. When I think about being bilingual, I feel like I’m inhabiting two different types of personality. When I am in Polish I’m a different person than when I am in English. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about being bilingual and writing in Italian now. Do you feel like you are one person who inhabits two different worlds or do you feel yourself splitting apart and feeling that you are, depending on the language, a totally different sort of person? I think anybody who is fortunate enough to have more than one language recognizes that. Some people go so far as to say, “If you know more than one language, you have more than one soul.” That’s a very thoughtful way of thinking about it. But I think language represents a very specific but vast universe, and each language represents that. Even before I learned Italian, I grew up with two languages side by side. And maybe I didn’t know them with the same level of proficiency, but they were both incredibly strong influences on who I was. So I always was divided in that sense, so I think that’s true. For the Italian project, as I was saying, this new point of view that comes from a new language, and in addition, the sense of freedom that a learned language might provide you to set to the side certain baggage that the long distance you traverse in another language might be holding you back from saying what you really need to say. For example, I would never have written In Other Words in English. I would never have written The Clothing of Books essay in English. So this is why the Italian is valuable to me.…

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