My Language Is a Jealous Lover

By Adrián N. Bravi; Translated by Victoria Offredi Poletto and Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi; Foreword by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel

SERIES: Other Voices of Italy

Rutgers University Press

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.

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

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 and after a few years started writing in Italian. He has written a number of books, including L’idioma di Casilda Moreira 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.

SHIRIN RAMZANALI FAZEL is a novelist and poet. She was born in Mogadishu to a Somali mother and Pakistani father in 1953, and moved to Novara, Italy, in 1971. Among the first voices of so-called "migration literature" in Italy, Fazel writes in different languages and across different genres, gracefully narrating the benefits and challenges of our transnational reality. She is the author of Far From Mogadishu and Clouds over the Equator. The Forgotten Italians.

Translators’ Note
Preface
Introduction