Last night at the Rizzoli Italian bookstore on Broadway, Jhumpa Lahiri joined the literary festival Le Convesazioni with acclaimed Italian authors Giulia Caminito, Ginevra Lamberti, and Paolo Nori. The festival, and Rizzoli’s hosting of it, is part of the celebration of the storied Italian bookseller’s 60th anniversary in New York.
With a decades-spanning career in literature and academia punctuated by awards and film adaptations for her work, Lahiri has lived in Rome since 2012 and has turned to writing in Italian since 2015. That year, she published a book about her experiences learning the language entitled In Altre Parole (“In Other Words”), and published her first novel in Italian in 2018, Dove Mi Trovo (“Where I Am”). In 2019, she compiled, edited, and translated a collection of 40 Italian short stories by 40 different authors called the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. Her most recent published work in Italian is a short story collection of her own called Racconti Romani (“Roman Stories”), the title being a reference to a book by one of Italy’s foremost literary figures post-World War II, Alberto Moravia. In writing works in more than one language, Lahiri joins a rarefied circle alongside Samuel Becket, Vladimir Nabakov, and Oscar Wilde.
Lahiri has charted her course Italian literature as a reader, author, and translator with an explorer’s excitement and a master’s confident perspective. “The idea of literature is to innovate, it is to say something in a way that hasn’t been said before,” she explains. “So if my two literary languages allow me to say what I would like to say, in a way that I haven’t before, then I’ll listen to that and follow that inspiration.” Lahiri has embraced the novelty afforded to her as an artist with this shift, and sees little use in offering an explanation to anyone who feels they might need one. “I’ve come to the point that I just accept there will always be scrutiny,” she says, “there will always be diffidence, there will always be bafflement by many people.”
Asked about her work translating the Italian short stories, Lahiri says that it was born out of her overall acquaintance with the Italian literary scene, and her realization that many works have not yet been translated or only have outdated versions, telling the audience at Rizzoli that “great works need to be translated over time,” much like a house needs to periodically be renovated. She also offers an elevated perspective on translation of works, saying that it’s “a calling, it’s a way of reading, it’s a way of rewriting and it has a spiritual value for those who practice it, as well as a literary aesthetic value.”
Lahiri is currently engaged in a Latin-to-English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
