Literary translators have come up with plenty of analogies for
their trade. Some compare it to acting, others to performing in a chamber
ensemble.
اضافة اعلان
Jhumpa Lahiri opted for a more visceral description in “In Other
Words,” the first book she wrote in Italian. English was “a hairy, smelly
teenager” menacing her nascent Italian, she wrote, which she cradled “like a
newborn.”
That book traces her self-imposed linguistic exile: In 2012, she
and her family moved to Rome so she could pursue a decadeslong interest in the
language. She gave up English for years, reading and writing almost exclusively
in Italian. Before the book’s 2016 release in English, Lahiri passed the
translation to Ann Goldstein, who handled the English editions of Elena
Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, fearful that translating her own work would
contaminate her Italian.
Five years later and living back in the United States, Lahiri
has resolved those doubts. Knopf next week will release her new novel, “Whereabouts,”
which Lahiri published in Italian in 2018 as “Dove Mi Trovo” and translated
herself.
It is the first book Knopf will publish that was translated by
its own author. But that step wasn’t a given.
“I was just convinced that the book couldn’t be in English,
because I didn’t know where in me it had come from,” Lahiri said over video
from Princeton, New Jersey, where she is the director of the university’s
creative writing program. Presenting a book in Italy, “there’s a more formal
engagement with the text,” she said. “In a sense, your book is exposed to more
rigorous public reading.”
The thought 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, 53, said. “That was like the final challenge.”
That critical reception, and leaving plenty of time after the
book’s initial publication, was essential before starting the English version.
She had approached a translator, Frederika Randall, about the project, thinking
they would collaborate in its final stages. But once Lahiri reviewed Randall’s
early drafts, and saw that “the book could be in English,” she decided, “Maybe
I can do this.”
Fans of the intimacy and detail of Lahiri’s earlier work, such
as “The Namesake” and “The Lowland,” may be surprised by “Whereabouts.” Lahiri
was born in London to Bengali parents, moved to the United States at a young
age and grew up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Many of her stories draw on
her heritage and the persistent feelings of being an outsider or between
identities. Former Times critic Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Lahiri’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning debut, “Interpreter of Maladies,” called the characters’
experiences an “index of a more existential sense of dislocation.”
“Whereabouts,” in contrast, is an austere, virtually plotless
book. Its unnamed narrator is a solitary Roman woman — though Rome is never
mentioned — who recounts her few excursions in brief chapters. Lahiri offers
readers glimpses of the woman at the pool (“In that container of clear water
lacking life or current I see the same people with whom, for whatever reason, I
feel a connection”), herded unexpectedly into a guided tour (“I’m caught in the
charade, I play a part in it, albeit as an extra”), eating a sandwich in a
playground (“As I eat it, my body bakes in the sun that pours down on my
neighborhood, each bite, feeling sacred, reminds me that I’m not forsaken”).
Other characters appear — her therapist, her mother, a friend —
yet the interactions reinforce the narrator’s isolation. “Solitude: It’s become
my trade,” she tells herself.
Alessandro Giammei, an assistant professor of Italian at Bryn
Mawr and a former colleague of Lahiri’s, was an early reader of both the
Italian and English versions. In “Dove Mi Trovo,” he was struck by the elegance
of the language and the precision of Lahiri’s word choices. “You cannot read
this book without moving your mouth in Italian,” he said.
Apart from her own writing — “Whereabouts” is the third book she
composed in Italian, following “In Other Words” and “The Clothing of Books,”
published in 2016 — Lahiri kept busy with other translations and editing
projects. She has translated two novels by an acclaimed contemporary writer,
Domenico Starnone, one of which was a finalist for a National Book Award, and
has a third set for release in the fall. Dismayed by the lack of quality
translations of some of her favorite Italian writers, she edited and
contributed translations to a volume of collected short stories. Several of
those selections, including stories by Elsa Morante and Fabrizia Ramondino, had
never before appeared in English.
“Translation, to me, is metamorphosis,” Lahiri said. “It is a
kind of radical re-creation of the work, because you are recreating the
language to allow that work to be reborn.”
She, too, is changing, and readers can feel a shift in her work.
Sara Antonelli, a professor of American literature at Università Roma Tre and a
friend of Lahiri’s, had read her books in English. But reading her in Italian, “I
had the impression that I was reading another author,” she said. “It seemed
that the imagination was different, the shape of the sentences, too.”
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, Antonelli wrote in an
email, “not one of them found a home, a new home, in the Italian language.”
Readers in Italy appreciate Lahiri’s devotion to the language
and have become protective of her as one of their own. At her book events, “nobody
ever asks Jhumpa, ‘Why Italian?’” Giammei said, and some readers have even
worried over her return to America and English-language writing.
“Translation, paradoxically, is making it definitive,” he added,
as if Lahiri is declaring, “Now that I put myself in the position of
translating my own stuff, I really am an Italian writer.”
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