Interpreter of languages
Author-translator Jhumpa Lahiri, who joined Barnard College in New York as the Millicent C Mcintosh professor of English and director of creative writing in April 2022, is out with a new book called Translating Myself and Others. It is a contemplative collection of essays examining her own experience with translation, and her identity as a translator. These essays speak of exclusion without sentimentality, freedom without rage, and border-crossing without euphoria. They are tender and sharp, weighing in on matters of craft, gatekeeping and grief.
She reflects on how it felt to repeatedly hear the question, “Why do you speak our language?”, from multiple Italians when she lived in Rome. They could not fathom why a person of Indian origin who was born in London, raised in the United States, and wrote books in English, wanted to communicate in Italian. The explanation that she had studied Italian because she loved the language, and wanted to have a relationship with it, did not suffice.
Lahiri admits that she felt unfairly interrogated, and often got defensive. Readers who are familiar with her fiction — Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2008), The Lowland (2013), Whereabouts (2021) — would recognise the themes of loss, alienation, and linguistic exile that she foregrounds and revisits frequently.
She persisted with the discipline of language learning, wrote fiction and nonfiction in Italian — In altre parole (2015), Dove mi trovo (2018) — and translated the work of Italian writers. Apart from English translations of three Italian novels written by Domenico Starnone, she has edited The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2020). It features 40 Italian writers in English translation. Some of these are Italo Calvino, Luigi Pirandello, Elsa Morante, Lalla Romano, Elio Vittorini, Umberto Saba, Antonio Tabucchi, and Tommaso Landolfi.
Lahiri writes poignantly about the fact that her desire, choice and audacity to make Italian her own were questioned. She notes, “It has been suggested to me to be more careful and conservative with my use of the language were I to write in Italian again, so as not to ‘offend’ certain readers. Italian in its official form — whatever that may mean —should not and cannot…be touched or marred.” One wonders how much of this has to do with gender, and whether men who make similar creative decisions receive as much criticism as Lahiri has.
At the same time, it is worth noting that Lahiri does not yearn for a borderless utopia. She writes, “I don’t wish to live, or write, in a world without doors. An unconditional opening, without complications or obstacles, doesn’t stimulate me. Such a landscape, without closed spaces, without secrets, without the presence of the unknown, would have no significance or enchantment for me.” Perhaps the exhilaration is in the unlocking or breaking open of doors. This must sound encouraging to translators who are struggling to have their work noticed or taken seriously on account of cultural biases and structural barriers in the publishing industry.
Those who scoff at identity politics, or find it plain boring, might perk up when they come across Lahiri’s analogies. While discussing the challenges involved in translating her own work from Italian to English, she writes, “The responsibility of translation is as grave and precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs, or to direct the blood flow to our hearts, and I wavered at length over the question of who would perform the surgery.”
She sought out Frederika Randall, an American translator in Rome, to translate Dove mi trovo from Italian to English. Randall agreed to translate a dozen pages so that both could “get a feel for how her translation would sound”. Lahiri was excited as Randall was “an extremely skilled translator” and she knew the setting of the book better than Lahiri herself. After she saw Randall’s sample translations, Lahiri had a change of heart. She embarked on the task of translating her own novel from Italian to English. Read Translating Myself and Others to find out what happened when she took charge instead of trusting another pair of hands.
This book would be of interest not only to translators, students and scholars, but to anyone who cares about how language represents, shapes and transforms our reality especially in a world where questions of linguistic purity are being raised and quashed. Lahiri’s thoughts on Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s practice as a translator are particularly noteworthy because they push us to think about the politics of language in unconventional ways.
This book marries erudition with intimacy, and that is a truly laudable achievement.
Lahiri opens the book with an anecdote about a “translation dilemma” from her childhood. All the kids in her American kindergarten classroom were busy making cards for Mother’s Day using sheets of white paper and pink crepe-paper roses with green stems. When the assistant teacher, who sprayed perfume into each of these roses, asked them to write, “Dear Mom, happy Mother’s Day”, Lahiri felt “stymied” as her Bengali mother was “Ma” to her, not “Mom” but she was also “embarrassed” to use the Bangla term that her mother responded to. On the one hand, she wanted to belong. On the other hand, “Mom” sounded “foreign” to Lahiri, and she was aware that it would have “certainly alienated, even offended” her mother. The book concludes with an account of her mother’s final days in 2021 due to excessive carbon dioxide in the blood. An insight struck Lahiri while translating the Roman poet Ovid’s magnum opus Metamorphoses from Latin to English in collaboration with Yelena Baraz — her colleague in the Classics Department at Princeton University where Lahiri used to work before she joined Barnard College. Lahiri writes, “For though I knew that her time was limited, I kept thinking to myself, she’s not dying as much as becoming something else.”