Quotes About Culture

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive.

I became a writer in America, but I set my first stories in Calcutta, a city where I have never lived, far from the country where I grew up, and which I knew much better. Why? Because I needed distance between me and the creative space.

When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

I continue to admit that Italian is not my language, that it's an adopted language I love and use without possession. But I also ask myself: Who possesses a language, and why? Is it a question of lineage? Mastery? Use? Affect? Attachment? What does it mean, in the end, to belong to a language?

To translate is to alter one's linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.

Once back on Pemberton Road, in the modest house that is suddenly mammoth, there is nothing to remind them; in spite of the hundred or so relatives they've just seen, they feel as if they are the only Gangulis in the world. The people they have grown up with will never see this life, of this they are certain.

In a sense I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. At

She prefers books to jewels and saris.

Credo che tradurre sia il modo più profondo, più intimo di leggere qualcosa. Una Traduzione è un bellissimo incontro dinamico tra due lingue, due testi, due scrittori. Implica uno sdoppiamento, un rinnovamento. Nel passato amavo tradurre dal latino, dal greco antico, dal bengalese. È stato un modo di avvicinarmi alle diverse lingue, di sentirmi legata ad autori lontanissimi da me, nello spazio e nel tempo.

Quando la lingua con cui ci si identifica è lontana, si fa di tutto per tenerla viva.

on the surface of the Grand Canal, my writing in Italian is something impalpable. Nebulous, like the fog. I'm afraid that the bridge between me and Italian doesn't, ultimately, exist. That it will remain, at best, a chimera.

Imparare una lingua straniera è il modo essenziale per integrarsi con gente nuova in un nuovo Paese. Rende possibile un rapporto. Senza la lingua non ci si può sentire una presenza legittima, rispettata. Si rimane senza voce, senza potere.

L'inglese rimane il presente: permanente, indelebile. la matrigna non mi abbandona. Per quanto sia una lingua imposta, mi ha regalato una voce pulita, corretta, per sempre.

Una lingua nuova è quasi una vita nuova, grammatica e sintassi ti rifondo, scivoli dentro un'altra logica e un altro sentimento.

Credo che leggere in una lingua straniera sia il modo più intimo di leggere.

La lingua è vera, ma la maniera in cui la assorbo e utilizzo sembra finita. Un lessico cercato acquisito, resta per sempre anomalo, come se fosse artefatto, anche se non lo è.

In questo libro la lingua non è soltanto lo strumento ma anche il soggetto. L'italiano resta la maschera, il filtro, lo sbocco, il mezzo. Il distacco senza il quale non riesco a creare niente. Ed è questo nuovo distacco che mi aiuta a mostrare il mio volto.

Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred, inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared.

She refused to think of it as an arranged marriage but knew in her heart that that was what it was. In Rome, she communicated with Navin by e-mail and spoke to him a few times on the phone, conversations heavy with the weight of things to come but lacking the foundation of any lived history between them.

And yet, certain physical aspects of Rhode Island—a state so small within the context of America that on some maps its landmass was indicated only by an arrow pointing to its location—corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta, within India. Mountains to the north, an ocean to the east, the majority of land to the south and west.

Questo libro mi permette di leggerne altri, di aprire la porta di una nuova lingua. Mi accompagna, ancora adesso, quando vado in vacanza, durante i viaggi. È diventato una necessità.

Writing in another language reactivates the grief of being between two worlds, of being on the outside. Of feeling alone and excluded.

Like the rest of their Bengali friends, [Gogol's] parents expect him to be, if not an engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminds him, the professions that have earned them security and respect.