Review | Jhumpa Lahiri, American writer, on her ‘Italian years’ and the freedom adopting another language has given her
- Translating Myself and Others, a collection of essays written since Jhumpa Lahiri switched languages and countries, is a portrait of humane curiosity
- Alongside personal reflections are essays on Italians such as writer Italo Calvino and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, jailed by dictator Benito Mussolini
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri, pub. Princeton University Press
Seven years later, the fuss still sounds remarkable, not least when compared to everything else that was happening that year: the collapse of the Greek economy, the discovery of water on Mars, widespread attacks by Islamic State, and (plus ça change) war in Ukraine.
Viewed in its most positive light, the commotion was a product of Lahiri’s exalted status on the literary scene. Having launched her career with 1999’s short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies, she promptly won every major prize going: the Pulitzer, the O Henry Award, and The New Yorker’s Best Debut of the Year.
But the commotion also carried unsettling accents of nationalism and racism. A typical question aimed at Lahiri was: “Why Italian instead of an Indian language, a closer language, more like you?” Which begs the question: what is Jhumpa Lahiri supposed to be like?
The shortest (and best) riposte contained in Translating Myself and Others is: “I write in Italian to feel free.” For although her adoption of Italian might have seemed trivial or traitorous to her readers, for Lahiri herself it was an act of liberation and self-definition. In that same interview with Post Magazine, she said: “The idea of choosing a language is very powerful. Choosing an identity that isn’t given to you or forced upon you. It’s a creative choice, an intellectual choice, a personal choice.”
Lahiri has written extensively about her “Italian years”. Translating Myself and Others collects 12 pieces (including an Introduction and Afterword) that cover everything from how she refashioned herself into a writer of Italian to the related challenges of (re) translating herself into English.
There are essays on Italo Calvino, arguably the most famous Italian writer of the 20th century, and Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist philosopher whose denunciation of Benito Mussolini meant he spent his last 11 years in a Roman prison.
Lahiri fans will be drawn to the self-questioning essays “Why Italian?” and “Where I Find Myself”. The former recounts her literal transition to Italy (when her family relocated from the United States to Rome) and her literary translation towards Italian.
Reading, writing, and living in Italian, I feel like a reader, a writer, a person who is more attentive, active, and curious
The titular question recurs like a motif to capture the mystification of anglophone and Italian friends alike and, in a different key, Lahiri’s own bemusement about the widespread confusion. “I didn’t think that my growing dedication to the Italian language was anything unusual,” she writes.
What Italian did provide was an escape from Lahiri’s unstable relationship with English. One of her earliest memories involves what she calls a “translation dilemma”.
Soon after arriving in the US, the five-year-old found herself torn between writing the Bengali “Ma” and the American “Mom” in a Mother’s Day card. Within her new surroundings, the Bengali sounded familiar but also embarrassing; the English, by contrast, sounded strange and alienating. A similar tension would inform her highly praised anglophone fiction, in which Bengali characters are translated “falsely but necessarily” into English prose (and English speakers).
Ironically, the two cultures that helped make Lahiri into one of the most admired authors of her generation threatened to crush the creative life out of her. Enter Italian. Even when her prowess was rudimentary, the challenge required to find the best word or image breathed new life into her art. “Reading, writing, and living in Italian, I feel like a reader, a writer, a person who is more attentive, active, and curious.”
Even more profoundly, Lahiri was released from those formative dual and duelling cultures. As she poured her energy into Italian, Lahiri was no longer “translating anyone, never mind myself, into the language I know best”.
The move is not without its own ironies. Lahiri has become her own translator, in effect continuing to write English-language fiction but only through the filter of her Italian prose. And even though Italian has provided a release, there are always new cultural restraints to be broken.
The Italian critics who write, approvingly, that “Lahiri scrive nella nostra lingua” (Lahiri writes in our language) contrive to remind her “that Italian remains, by definition, the language of others as opposed to my own”.
While Translating Myself and Others holds the interest in any number of ways, it was the portrait of intelligent, sensitive and deeply humane curiosity that this reviewer found most inspiring.
