My Language Is a Jealous Lover

Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere.

My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language.

Adrián N. Bravi was born in Buenos Aires, has lived in Italy since the late 1980s, and is a librarian. He published his first novel in Spanish in 1999, in Buenos Aires, and after a few years he started writing in Italian. He has written a number of books, including Restituiscimi il cappotto, La pelusa, Sud 1982, Il riporto, L’albero e la vacca, L’inondazione, Variazioni straniere, La gelosia delle lingue, L’idioma di Casilda Moreira, Il levitatore, and Quattro novelle sui rattristamenti. His books have been translated into several languages.

Victoria Offredi Poletto (Senior Lecturer Emerita) and Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi (Professor and Chair) have taught and collaborated together in the Department of Italian Studies at Smith College since 1990. They are committed to bringing the voices of migrant and second-generation writers-in particular women writers-to the English-speaking world. Their many translations include Genevieve Makaping’s Reversing the Gaze: What if the Other Were You?, Gabriella Ghermandi’s Queen of Flowers and Pearls, and Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother.