My Language Is a Jealous Lover ADRIÁN

Bravi

FOREWORD BY SHIRIN RAMZANALI FAZEL

TRANSLATED BY VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO AND GIOVANNA BELLESIA CONTUZZL

“A wonderful semi-autobiographical book about thinking and writing in a second language, about embracing many languages without betraying one’s mother tongue. A thoughtful book about the languages in which global citizens think and write.”

—Graziella Parati, author of Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture

“A masterful assemblage of intimate memories from the author and utterly persuasive arguments from fellow travelers, this book offers readers a multifaceted and nuanced portrait of what it means to live in and between languages. That it has now been admirably and creatively translated into a third language, beyond the author’s own Spanish and Italian, triangulates Bravi’s defense of linguistic relativity into an irrefutable work of realism.”

—Jim Hicks, Executive Editor of Massachusetts Review

My Language is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors, who at different points in history, lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue. They include Samuel Beckett, writing in French to find a simplicity and austerity he could not attain in his native English, Vladimir Nabokov, writing masterfully in English but feeling frustrated about the way Russian underpinned and influenced his style, Ágota Kristóf forced to abandon her native Hungarian for political reasons and choosing then to compose her award-winning novels in French, and Joseph Brodsky, living in exile from the Soviet Union but retaining a connection with his homeland by writing poems in Russian. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in both the language of his new life and recalling that of his childhood memories. Discussing everything from creoles to dying languages, from the Tower of Babel to the Sicilian Vespers, Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language, while never escaping the embrace of the mother tongue.

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.

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.