Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue, which wraps them in a tight embrace and never lets them go. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find at home.

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 and 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.

About the Author: 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.