Jhumpa Lahiri

For Jhumpa Lahiri, the third language was the charm, said Caryn James in The Wall Street Journal. The Londonborn, New England–raised author, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 debut, Interpreter of Maladies, surprised many readers in 2012 when she moved to Rome and began writing in Italian. She has heard the disappointment in the questions of fans who, she says, “came up to get their book signed, saying, ‘Aren’t you ever going to write in English anymore? What happened? I used to like you.’” But Lahiri, who grew up speaking both Bengali and English, has fallen lastingly in love with Italian. “It’s a language in which I feel very at home, very alive, and very inspired,” she says. And her enthusiasm for Italian extends beyond her writing. Though she still teaches in the U.S., she has arranged her life so that she can speak Italian while at home with her family and during her off time, which she often spends in Rome.

Lahiri’s new essay collection, Translating Myself and Others, examines another of her passions, said Mary Louise Kelly in NPR.org. For several years, she has been translating works from Italian to English, including her own. She has also taught the skill at Princeton, and has found the process energizing. “What I’ve come to realize is that translation is nothing but a form of writing,” she says. “If anything, it’s more of a pure form of writing because it’s language that is at the center of every choice that’s being made.” And there’s a side benefit for her own writing. “Self-translation is now for me the most effective form of editing,” she says. Each book, in other words, gets better on the second pass.