a day ago
Jhumpa Lahiri's act of love
For the last three years, Jhumpa Lahiri has been translating Ovid's The Metamorphoses, the most demanding literary endeavour she's ever undertaken, she claims. It's a book she fell in love with while in college, one in which 'change serves as a plot, and pretty much anything can become something else'. Who better to appreciate this than Lahiri, whose career is one of constant transformation — she is always becoming a different writer. Lahiri was in Paris for the launch of her book Bone Into Stone, a meditation on stones in The Metamorphoses as well as the process of translation, published by Sylph Editions, in collaboration with The American University of Paris, where I teach.
Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri's first book, was published in 1999, the year I left for the United States. Nine years later, I remember watching the screen adaptation of her second novel, The Namesake, just days before my departure for India; I don't think I have ever sobbed more wacthing a film. Upon my return to India in 2008, I devoured her later novels. In fact, reading Lahiri's last book, Roman Stories, in Paris, a few days before interviewing her, was a full-circle moment. In the time that Lahiri has gone from a Pulitzer-winning American writer to an author of books in Italian, to a translator of ancient Latin, I too have gone through a transformation: from being a waiter in Iowa to an ad guy in Bengaluru and now, a poet and professor in Paris.
Where are the women?
Never had I imagined that I'd be sitting in a cab, talking to Lahiri about Etel Adnan and Rosmarie Waldrop, radically experimental poets we both adore, who also wrote in languages they were not born into. Lahiri came to the writings of Adnan and Waldrop through her interest in 'exophonic women writers', authors writing in a language that is not their 'mother tongue'. Waldrop has been a lifelong translator to and from French, German, and English. Though born in Germany, she migrated to America in her early 20s, and started writing in English and translating from French and German. 'What I find interesting, is the way writing and translation go hand-in-hand and feed Rosmarie Waldrop's work,' says Lahiri.
'Waldrop learned French, which allowed her to translate the philosopher Edmund Jabès. Though German is her dominant tongue, she doesn't translate it into German but into English, and then this translation work is fundamental to her own poetic activity in English,' she says. Likewise, Adnan, a Lebanese poet, wrote in English when she lived in America and in French when she lived in France. Adnan gained much attention late in her life for her paintings, but what is often ignored is that she was also a publisher of experimental writing, mostly by women, through her Post Apollo Press, which she ran with her partner, the artist Simone Fattal. 'When one talks about what it means for a writer to switch languages, it's always Nabokov, Beckett, Conrad, Kundera, it's men,' Lahiri points out. In fact, she is determined to change such thinking; she has been teaching a class at Barnard College on exophonic women writers who are often left out of the literary canon.
The allure of originality
As someone with deep ties to many countries and cultures, Lahiri resists the word 'native'. In an increasingly oppressive world, it is important that we maintain the freedom to write in the language we love. Translation, for Lahiri, is also an act of love. Her invigorating and accessible book of essays — Translating Myself and Others (2022) — maps how reading in Italian helped her write in that language, in the same way that translating The Metamorphoses has allowed her to foray into poetry. Her Italian book of poems, Nerina's Notebook (2021) — a diary of a year in Rome — isn't available in English yet, but the author has translated some poems, which are available online. And she might even translate the book herself someday, she suggests, because Lahiri is also a very generous author, one who doesn't hesitate to share the intricacies of the creative process with younger writers.
'If you want to write better, start with translating the work of a writer you love,' she advised my students. As a young writer, she'd practice writing like the authors she admired — taking their sentences as a structure she could aspire to — something emerging authors shy away from doing, so enthralled we are by the allure of originality. But, to her, writing goes beyond being original. Like translation, it is a way of keeping the past alive. 'Sometimes I worry that young writers are meeting too much contemporary or relatively contemporary stuff. That they are not 'relating to older authors',' she says. 'Let's hope that young writers are still speaking to the dead.' Excellent advice for anyone who's picked John Greene over Henry James, Manga over Manto.
The writer is a poet and professor of creative writing at The American University of Paris.
