I wanted to have these conversations in Italian,” Lahiri, 53, said.
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. “In a sense, your book is exposed to more rigorous public reading.” Presenting a book in Italy, “there’s a more formal engagement with the text,” she said. “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, N.J., where she is the director of the university’s creative writing program. It is the first book Knopf will publish that was translated by its own author.
Knopf next week will release her new novel, “ Whereabouts,” which Lahiri published in Italian in 2018 as “Dove Mi Trovo” and translated herself. 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.įive years later and living back in the United States, Lahiri has resolved those doubts. She gave up English for years, reading and writing almost exclusively in Italian. That book traces her self-imposed linguistic exile: In 2012, she and her family moved to Rome so she could pursue a decades-long interest in the language. English was “a hairy, smelly teenager” menacing her nascent Italian, she wrote, which she cradled “like a newborn.” Jhumpa Lahiri opted for a more visceral description in “ In Other Words,” the first book she wrote in Italian. Some compare it to acting, others to performing in a chamber ensemble.
Literary translators have come up with plenty of analogies for their trade.
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