Translation and Jhumpa Lahiri

I read this April 21, 2021 article by Joumana Khatib about Jhumpa Lahiri and it set me thinking. The famed author of ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ and ‘The Namesake’ and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the former has now written in Italian, and then gone ten steps forward to translate her latest book from Italian to English.

Sri Lankan translator

I spoke about the article with Vijita Fernando who is one of Sri Lanka’s foremost translators from Sinhala to English (mostly) and vice versa. She won both the Gratiaen Prize and HAI Goonetilke Award for translation, also the national award and Sahitya Ratna. In our chat she narrated how Christopher Ondaatje had approached her to translate his 1992 travelogue ‘The Man Eater of Punanai: a journey of discovery to the jungles of old Ceylon’. She undertook the massive job with trepidation as she had by then translated only three books from English to Sinhala. Her translation was very successful, appreciated and published in 2009 by the British publishers Rare Books and Berry. She added with a laugh an epilogue to the tale. “I was given just one copy of the book by a Nugegoda bookshop that was sent a package of the published translation. I lent my copy to someone before I had even read my own work in print. That was the end of the book. Much later a niece bought the two remaining volumes in the bookshop and presented one to me. Funny how incidental it is that I have taken it up for reading during this lockdown.”

Another friend I spoke about Lahiri and my intention of writing about her was Leelananda de Silva. He gave me some worthwhile info. Constance and Edward Garnett, connected to the Bloomsbury Group of Clive and Vanessa Bell, Virginia Stephens Wolfe and others, translated and made available to readers of English the outstanding Russian novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and others. Needless to say it was worthy of the Nobel for Literature. Leelananda also added that translation of literary work is gaining more importance and significance as ancient and new languages are being recognized. I added that we are now a global village in communication all around the world.

I remember almost two decades ago marveling at the 1981 published Merriam-Webster Seven Language Dictionary that covered translated words and phrases from French, German, Spanish, Russian, Urdu, Arabic and probably Hindi. The newer seven language dictionary edited by David Schumaker has, instead of the last three languages listed above, Hebrew, Italian and Portuguese. Malalasekera’s is the best known of Sinhala-English, Engl-Sinh dictionaries.

“Literary translators have come up with plenty of analogies for their trade. Some compare it to acting, others to performing in a chamber ensemble.” Undoubtedly it is a skilled form of literary composition and only a few are endowed with the ability to succeed in it.

American author now an author of Italian books

Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri born in 1967 and now aged 53, preferred to use her pet-name Jhumpa as her two first names could be unprounceable to the westerner – her primary readership. She was born to Bengali parents in London and moved to the US at the tender age of three and grew up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, living an American life with her Indian blood strong in her mostly because her mother kept close contact with Bengali relatives back home .

Much of her work were instant successes and reviewed very favourably. Her debut collection of short stories – the 1999 Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel The Namesake (2003) was adapted to the popular film by the same name, directed by Mira Nair. Her second story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won her the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker and national Book Award for Fiction. In all these Lahiri explored the immigrant experience in America; drew on her Indian heritage and the persistent feeling of being an outsider striving to connect between identities. Superb critic, formerly of the Times – Michiko Kakutani – described this conflict as an “index of a more existential sense of dislocation.”

Lahiri has written her latest novel ‘Whereabouts’ in Italian and then translated it to English. Her earlier novels in Italian were ‘In Other Words’ (Jan 2015) and ‘The Clothing of Books’ (2016) showing how quickly she mastered Italian to be literate enough to write in it. ‘In Other Words’ is her memoir of learning Italian and named by a critic as a love affair as she was always fascinated by the language, since working for a short time in Venice. She dubbed English “a hairy smelly teenager” endangering her nascent Italian which she nurtured like caring for a newborn. She also edited and translated the ‘Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories’ which consists of 40 Italian writers.

And why did Jhumpa Lahiri switch to writing in Italian? Because she and her family moved to Rome in 2011, her husband being Italian, and her long having yearned to study the language. To do this she gave herself a “self imposed linguistic exile” from 2012, giving up English and reading and writing exclusively in Italian. The thought of writing in Italian initially terrified her, but at the same time, “it was one of the things that inspired me to learn Italian, because I wanted to be able to speak about my work in Italian. I wanted to have these conversations in Italian.” Lahiri also kept busy with other translations and editing projects.

When drafting ‘Whereabouts’ she said it was an “austere, virtually plot-less book. Its unnamed narrator is a solitary Roman woman – though Rome is never mentioned – who recounts her few excursions in brief chapters: at the pool, eating a sandwich in a playground, on a guided tour. Lahiri commented: “Solitude: it’s become my trade.” She moved in 2015 to Princeton to accept the post of Professor of Creative Writing, but while in America writing her novel, she returned frequently to Rome. “The Italian was like a faucet back then,” she said. “It would only work when I was there.” ’Whereabouts’ in Italian was published in 2018 as ‘Dove Mi Trovo’.

Wanting a translation of the novel in English, Lahiri passed the task to Ann Goldstein, who handled the English editions of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet and translated her ‘In Other Words’ to English; fearful that translating her own work would contaminate her Italian. But the first drafts of Goldstein’s translation did not satisfy her so she decided to translate it herself. It will be published soon, the first book Knopf will publish that was translated by its own author.

Lahiri is not the first American writer to live and write in Rome: Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Ellison and Margaret Fuller were all expatriates there for a time. But aside from Lahiri, “not one of them found a home, a new home, in the Italian language.”

A literary critic and scholar questioned her: “What was missing or absent in the English language that compelled you to make this transition?” Her answer was “Joy.”