Poured Over: Jhumpa Lahiri on Roman Stories

By Jenna Seery / October 26, 2023 at 6:00 am

In Roman Stories Jhumpa Lahiri translates her own writing from Italian in a feat of language and a love and connection to Rome itself. Lahiri joins us to talk about the role of a translator in literature, language and identity, exophonic authors and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.       

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode):
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
Trick by Domenico Starnone
Metamorphoses by Ovid

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
Well, hello New York. It is really good to see all of you. Thank you all for being here for being part of the audience. Jhumpa Lahiri needs no introduction. So we are kind of going to get straight to the conversation because I have been chomping at the bit to have this conversation with you about translation, you have been working in sort of what I think of as the ultimate liminal space, you read and write in Italian now and Roman Stories. You wrote, In Italian, you translated six of the nine stories yourself. It’s not the first time you’ve translated your own work. But I’m wondering how it feels to you to have this particular book out in the world now?

Jhumpa Lahiri
Well, it’s the second round. The book came out a year ago, in Italian, I was living in Rome. I was accompanying it in its first version. And now again, in the same season, accompanying it with a different title, a different cover and a different everything. Yeah, inside because it’s in a different language. And it’s very different. It’s very different to publish a book in Italy, as opposed to here in the United States.

I want to go back to something that you said in Translating Myself and Others, which is a book you did with Princeton University Press a couple of years ago. And you said you were a translator before you were a writer? I mean, you published very successfully right out of the gate with Interpreter of Maladies. What is translation allowed you to do with your own work? I mean, for instance, I feel like Roman Stories, you feel a little looser on the page to me, and I say that having pretty much read everything at least once, sometimes more. How did becoming a translator, first and foremost, change what you’re doing on the page in this particular collection of stories.

When I’m translating it, I’m trying to recreate a work that I’ve already conceived, already worked through, executed, completed, I’m trying to re-engage with it in another language, whether you think it’s looser, or whatever, that’s coming from the writing in Italian. Okay, that’s the way I’m writing in Italian. So whatever the result is, in English, it should capture some of the energy of the first text.

So in 2012, you moved to Italy, you’d been studying Italian before you moved? Correct? And in a couple of different points in different interviews, you’ve said, writing in Italian has forced you to become more precise in your language, which I think is really interesting, because you’ve had to pare it back. Right? You don’t have or you do now, at the time, you didn’t have the facility that you have now with Italian, correct?

Well, I began very, with very little, because I was learning. And I was writing as I was learning, I’m still learning, of course, I mean, it’s a language I’ve been really using for relatively shorter amount of time. So a decade says, So now there is some greater, you know, breadth of vocabulary and understanding of the syntax and constructions and but in the beginning, I stripped down to sort of the bare essentials, and I was surviving in the language. I was surviving in the language, and I was surviving on the page as a result. So that was a radical change, a radical situation, shall we say, as a premise. And it was an experiment that I was literally experimenting on the page, as I was writing the first stories that I wrote, some of which are in this book.

So when you’re working on the stories that become Roman Stories, the nine stories that are in this book, and there are, A Couple of the Steps is really the one that I sort of walk around with, still, and it’s longer than some of what you’ve been doing. It feels like the longest story in the book. Am I right about that?

Probably, but it has a different structure. So one could call it also the set of the shortest stories in the book put together.

For me as the reader coming to it. It is the big beating heart of this book, and it captures so many of the people and so much of what you’re working with this idea of outsiders trying to find their way in Rome. or you know who’s isolated and how we’re isolated. And all these things show when was that written in comparison to the other pieces in Roman Stories.

The first episode was written when I was first living in Rome between 2012 and 2015. An artist friend of mine was doing a project on Dante and the female figures in Dante and she asked me to write something, some text on a character named Monto, who is the daughter of Teresa’s and is condemned to look back as she moves forward. She’s a soothsayer, and she’s a wanderer. So I wrote the first of the episodes of the steps, which is about a mother, I wrote it based on that invitation, shall we say, to reinterpret the figure of month Oh, from Dante in some way. And so that character, the mother, walking up the steps I wrote very early on, and then I realized aberrated it a little bit. That idea came to me later, and it was during the summer, my family and I were able to go back to Rome during the pandemic, and 2020. Okay. And then I thought about putting a few more characters on the staircase, and what might happen.

There’s a beautiful moment with all of those teenagers pouring out after school, watching the sort of ebb and flow of people throughout this collection, not just in the steps, but do they know how isolated they are from each other? I mean, if you’re in a city, obviously, you’re colliding with people in ways that you’re not necessarily expecting, there’s more serendipity, there’s more chance for discovery. They’re more sort of random moments, as it were, but there is sort of an undercurrent of grief and longing to these stories. Do they know that they’re outsiders?

Well, I think everybody in the book is an outsider. I think we are all outsiders, I think all of human nature. We are all foreigners. And so with that as a premise, I’m exploring what it means, right? In this collection, I’m exploring what it means to inhabit a city like Rome, in which Rome which is historically built on people coming from the outside. Even if we think about sort of the building and the founding of Rome and look to literary models, say Virgil’s Aeneid, you know that Rome is created, because a Trojan comes, makes a long journey, right, and eventually sets down what is going to be Italy, by intermarrying, and adopting the Latin language, so moving into another language moving away from his original place, and his home. And so that’s how Rome comes to be, according to mythology, and history, and even in history. So Cicero says that all Romans had a dual citizenship, they had the citizenship of their birth, and the citizenship of the Cubitus, so citizenship, that status. And this is very interesting, this is very important to understand the city of Rome and how it was made, how it was built, how it is created on hybrid routes, it’s the opposite sort of, of the of the Greek model right of the of the Greek hero going home to his place. So everything about Rome, is built on that idea of people coming from the inside, and building it and making it. What I think I’m exploring in this book is what is happening more or less now in Rome, as opposed to 1000s of years ago, or as opposed to say, when Alberto Moravia wrote his Racconti Romani, his Roman Stories, what was happening in postwar Italy during the economic boom, and why were characters in those stories in Morocco stories also, wandering around, typically feeling lost and very alone. So it’s sort of looking at themes of alienation, which I think are common to us all. We had none, no one is excluded from that feeling, and putting it in a Roman context, even though I mean, having said that, I think you know, even the idea of Rome itself as a container, I leave things rather open ended in terms of how Rome was read in the stories, shall we say?

Your characters are nameless, and I’m wondering why you chose to do that your narrator’s nameless and whereabouts which you also wrote in Italian and translated all of your characters here. At most they get an initial.

Yeah, none of my characters in my Italian work have names yet, except for one, one book which I have written in Italian, that doesn’t exist in English yet. Il quaderno di Nerina. So there’s a book with a woman’s name, the name is Nerina. But in the work that I’ve written in Italian that’s been so far translated into English, the characters don’t have names. And even Nerina is a name that is, you know, very much an aspect of the book, and what does her name mean? And where does this name come from? You know, I mean, I wrote a novel that I presented in this very space years ago, called The Namesake, you know, and sort of looking at the significance of names and names, vis a vis identity, and how we wear our names, you know, how comfortably we wear our names, or not the disconnect, often between names and who we believe we really are, you know, sort of the broader reflection on on the significance of names. As I grow older, as I move from book to book as I moved from Latin now language to language, you know, what I’m doing in my Italian work is, is I’m looking at the question of identity in a much more direct, and I would say, existential way, and in that world, in that dimension, a name has no value, a name will only restrict the reading of the character, especially, I mean, the only the only name I’m willing to use is the name of the city of Rome, and therefore they’re called Roman Stories. And so to that extent, I’m willing to name the city we’re in because in whereabouts, I didn’t name that the city at all. So it’s an open question of where we are. And I think the minute you put a name, you give the character a name, the reader will have too many priests conception preconceptions, which are too limiting to restricting one would say, asphyxiating, the question of identity has become asphyxiating in our world. And so my way of breathing through this moment is by taking away those specific indicators of who we are, and where because the question of who we are, is tied to the question of where we are from,

That’s the thing that I liked the most about Roman Stories is the stripped down, not lack of detail. But I’m much more grounded in the stories as I’m reading, because I’m not distracted by exactly what you’re describing. There are no brand names, the details that you give me, for each of these people. Those are the details I need. And I never felt distracted. I never felt like wait a minute, I need to go back. I need to, I could stay in the moment with you. And these characters. And I’m wondering, though, you say you feel like you’re more protected writing in Italian. And this may have changed. This is from a slightly older interview. But I’m wondering, is it simply because you’ve had to pare back the language? Or is it changed your thinking, writing in Italian?

It’s changed my life. Italian has changed my life.

Okay, let’s go back to that, then it changed your life. I mean, you’ve talked about how translation has given you something in your writing that was actually just missing. So you move your family, you start reading in Italian every single day, you realize at one point, you’ve started to write in your diary in Italian, which, you know, having struggled with foreign languages. I admire that beyond belief that suddenly you have that moment or like, Oh, I did the thing, right? Like I am not the only person sitting in this room who has thought it would be great if I was not a monolingual human being well guess what I am. But your face changed, as you said that. So can we sit there for a minute? Can we talk about all of the things that happened for your work and your craft? Because you changed your life with Italian?

This is a very good question. I don’t know if I can give a simple answer, okay. I mean, it changed my center of gravity. It allows me to have a language of my own choosing. It allows me to have distance from one language that I inherit from my parents, to which I have an imperfect relationship, but which I was under constant pressure to know and to speak and to inhabit and to identify with, and it gives me distance from another language that I was told to learn in order to assimilate and to survive in this country, a language which for my parents represented colonial power in India, when they were young. And therefore my speaking that language was not without significance. So my entire life as I’m raised in this country and educated in this country and learning how to read books and by writing things. And so you know, the whole process of my formation and my socialization is happening in a language that my parents considered not only foreign, but the language of colonial power, right. And therefore, how can be raised with those two languages not result, for me, at least for me, a person who has no connection to any sense of national identity, no sense of clear origin, no connection to any type of group, or organization in that way that things that give us documents, passports and certificate flags, or any of these things, I’ve had never any connection to any of these things in my life, the only thing I had connection to in my life was language. And I’ve written about this, the only thing I had connection to was words, but what I realized is that even the words I had connection to, I was at a disconnect. And it took me many years, and a lot of thinking and a lot of reading and a lot of reflection. And this slow but very steady move into another language into a third language, which enables me to not only have a better perspective on the two languages, of my upbringing, but also the everyday state of conflict between those languages and the everyday feeling of failure in those two languages as a human being, in some sense, failing, either the side of me that spoke Bengali, or the side of me that learned how to speak English, there was a sense of double failure. Okay. Now in Italian, of course, there’s lots of failure involved in the Italian project, as well, because it’s a language I learned as an adult. And not only do I learn it as an adult, but I then take the enormous one says in Italian, you’re doing this crazy backflip, and you’re not supposed to do these things, normal people don’t do these things. And yet I did, one can think of it as an as a very audacious thing to do. But for me, as with all of my writing, from the very beginning, also in English, it was a matter of survival. And that is why I say changed my life.

It’s really amazing listening to you, be willing to be this vulnerable when you talk about learning a new language. I mean, you’re sitting on a stage in front of, you know, a lot of folks who don’t actually know you, right, they know your work. They know the interviews, they know what they’ve seen kind of thing. And I want to get back to something you said in other words, that I’m still thinking about. And again, this is a book I’ve read a couple of times, but it’s your fifth book, the first one that you’d written in Italian, and it started as a series of columns that you’d written for an Italian newspaper, magazine. Okay, there were folks here in the States referring to it as a memoir, and you kept saying, well, actually, it’s not really a memoir. But it is the first time I am the protagonist in one of my own books. And that felt like a really big shift, for me reading you. I felt like I learned a lot more about you. Because there’s this presumption, right, especially for certain kinds of writers where there’s an assumption that everything is auto fiction, and it’s not, right, people make stuff up as they go, that’s the beauty of fiction. And I felt like that was in a lot of the early coverage of your work. It was just kind of like, well, hey, look at this, you know, she’s writing from life. And the rest of us are saying, No, it’s fiction. Okay. But in terms of sort of putting yourself on the page, I mean, every time you talk about writing and translation, every time you talk about the work you’ve done as a translator, Domenico Starnone, I mean, he was shortlisted for the National Book Award for a book that you translated, obviously, the work starts with him, but it’s nice to see something like that get a nod, like a shortlist for the National Book Award. Right.

I was thrilled for Domenico.

But where’s the line between Roman Stories? Where’s the line between you giving yourself the freedom? I mean, you talk about translation as transformation. You talk about translation in ways that the people who think of it as sort of a lesser art would not ever refer to it and I feel like you’re really showing us who you are when you talk about this.

I mean, insofar as a translator is someone who is, as you said, in the beginning of the conversation, always inhabiting a liminal space. A translator is someone who is always in conversation with the other. A translator is someone who’s always seeking out the other and has need for the foreign so called foreign in that sense. That’s what I say when I say I’m born as a translator, right. And so of course, of course, I was a translator before I was a writer because I’m born into a world of translation and born into a world in which there is a need daily need to translate not only two languages, but two modes of being, two modes of thinking, of relating to the world. So it’s not just a matter of words, and what is this mean. And that mean, I mean, my parents spoke English, right? Perfectly well, it’s not about that it’s about decoding ways of literally of being in another language, therefore, in another culture. So that’s what I’m referring to, when I say that my efforts as a writer in English, come after that groundwork has already been prepared, in which I am constantly aware of another way of saying things, of thinking about things, and of reacting to things. And that is the great advantage of those of us who do grow up with two or more languages, because we are living in simultaneous realities.

That phrase you used reacting to, is really interesting, that’s not something that most people would admit to, right. Like, there’s this whole idea that you move through the world as you can, kind of not necessarily turning the other cheek, but that there is a perception of face, right, like family face, and how you sort of present all of this. And the idea that you get to be messy, and human because of language, right, because of the freedom that you have. And saying this is mine, that you’re no longer defined by someone else’s structure, someone else’s expectations.

Well, we don’t possess language, language cannot be possessed. Language cannot be possessed by people, okay, or by nations. And what proves this is it language can be learned, any language can be learned by anybody. And that’s the beauty. That’s the power of language. And they are in relationship to each other. And they are alongside each other and overlapping, or in very intimate or less obvious ways. But they’re connected interconnected in some way as part of the human conversation. But what is so empowering about learning language is precisely that, that I can learn any language at any place, I may not have the documents, the right papers, the right passport, the right, the right set of details, given issued by a government to enter that country physically. But I can go to a library and study that language, I can go take a class, I can find the means to learn the language. This is so extraordinary. And that I find, to me, is the way to understand how to live in the world. That’s why writers like Antonio Gramsci are so important to me that he speaks to me so deeply because of his ongoing engagement with the study of language to the point where he says in prison, if I were to die tomorrow, I would like the day before, to have a Chinese lesson, that this would be the most fulfilling thing he can imagine, is to think about another language as a way to live as a way not only to survive, but to live, to thrive, to go into that space, where your understanding is being challenged, because you you’re not in your quote, unquote, home in your place in your identity. So this is what it’s all about. Yeah, it’s put its positioning myself in that place where what is most reassuring, is what is most unknown.

You and I before we came out, we were talking a little bit about what you’re teaching at Barnard right now. And I had to say, I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is exophonic writing. But I want to bring that into the conversation here because you were talking about identity and having a home and not being able to possess language that we don’t possess language, right? But the idea of a mother tongue is part of this exophonic writing. So can we just talk about that for a minute? Can we just bring that in? Because I love the idea that you’re teaching this? And already my brain is slightly blown from what you just said a second ago, but can we just talk about extra phonic writing for a second?

Sure. I mean, it’s week seven of my semesters. Okay. I have lots of things to say. I’m teaching this course, at Barnard. For the first time I’ve been thinking about exophony. Needless to say, as a practitioner, I’ve been thinking about it for the past decade or so. But I’ve been thinking about exophony ever since I was at Barnard, ever since I was at Barnard and I discovered the work of Samuel Beckett and I read Nabokov and I read Conrad. And I started thinking about what it meant to write in other languages. I started thinking about what it meant to be a writer like James Joyce, or even a writer like Virginia Woolf, who was reinventing language, who was reinventing language along with form. So these were the writers who marked me as an 18 year old. Then also thinking about examples in antiquity and thinking about the inherently bilingual nature of almost all of Latin literature, and how almost all of Latin literature is in some sense of reappropriation translation of Greek models, okay, and incorporating Greek into the Latin. So I’ve always been thinking about what exophony means, when I moved to Italy, and almost immediately started writing in Italian, first in my diary, and then eventually, in places that, you know, showing things publishing them and what have you, I started thinking about not only a number of Italian writers who practiced exophony, so one whom I cite, and in other words, famously, Antonio Tabbuchi, who writes about the death of his father in the novel, Requiem in the Portuguese language. So he writes, he mourns his father and language with which he never spoke to him. This kind of distills what often is driving the practice of exophony. It’s that finding yourself or finding language to talk to yourself or to somebody else in language that has to be reconfigured, rerouted in some fundamental way. Anyway, so I’ve been thinking about what this has meant, historically, in literature, as a student of literature is as thinker, teacher, literature reader of all my most of my life. And then I went on to think about other examples. I was very impacted by my reading of the Hungarian writer, Ágota Kristóf, when I was in Italy, and thinking about what, you know, I was speaking to people like Domenico Starnone, who was following what I was doing. And he said, You should read Ágota Kristóf, do you know her? I said, No, I have never heard of her. And so I read her work in Italian. This is one of many, many examples. So the class grows out of not only decades of thinking about what it means to learn to express oneself in another language. And now, the fact that I find myself doing this very same thing. And so, you know, the first day of class, I asked my students, what do you think we mean, when we say x? Often? What does this mean? One student bravely raised your hand and said, It means not riding in your native tongue. And I immediately questioned her, right? And I said, What makes a tongue native? What does native mean? And so really, what we’re doing in class is we’re still trying to define what exophony really means, because I don’t think we really understand what it means. Right? I don’t think most people understand what it means because most people will say, Oh, exophony means writing, not in your mother tongue or not in your native tongue. I don’t have a mother tongue. I don’t have a native tongue. Right. I don’t have either of those things. And yet I practice exophony. So the work is to go back and to understand these terms. And to understand how terms like mother tongue and native tongue are, again, much too restrictive, far too restrictive for many people. Now, tomorrow, I’m going to talk about Hannah Arendt with my students who it’s so moving today I was reading that she came into New York, she was forced to flee Germany, of course, she came to New York after Paris, when she first fled from Germany, in 1933. And she had one sonnet of Shakespeare memorized, that was the extent of her English. And a year later, she was writing in the English language. And she, of course, went on to be one of the most seminal philosophers of the past century in English. But what’s interesting about her case is that she all her life, maintained fidelity, fierce attachment to what she called her mother tongue, which is the German language. So she’s an interesting example of an exophonic writer who maintains a relationship, an extraordinarily nuanced relationship to a language, which has taken over a country in which totalitarianism has taken over her country and is being expressed in that inset language. And she says, it’s amazing thing. She says, It’s not the German language that went mad. It’s not the language that went mad because languages can’t go mad in the same way that languages can’t be possessed. She has a relationship with to the mother tongue, which tomorrow we’ll talk about, but otherwise There’s have very different relationships to what that means. And other writers don’t have one, right because they grew up in situations that preclude the existence of one language that is the point of reference that remains the point of, you know, Hannah Arendt said, Oh, she has all of his German poetry in the back of her mind. And that’s what creates that sort of solid relationship to that notion of the mother tongue, but is simply a construction, the mother tongue, the phrase, mother tongue, it’s just a construction, which is valid for some people, but has no holds no water for other people.

If I were to say, it sounds like Italian has become your mother tongue, you would actually disagree.

I would never say that, I would never claim that Italian it has had its role in raising a part of me, and making me I think, a fully mature human being. It has had that role. But it’s not the exclusive language that has done that I think I needed three languages.

But I don’t want to let you leave before we talk about Metamorphoses for a second. Metamorphoses Ovid’s poems, but also the idea of that kind of transformation, because it’s a book that you’ve always held very close that you have always found something to come back to you are in fact, working on a new translation with one of your former colleagues from Princeton, and I cannot wait to get my hands on this book. So I am not the only one who’s excited about this. But this idea of metamorphosis, it just has come through in everything you said tonight. But does it start with Ovid in a way did that set you up? I mean, you talk about studying Latin before you got to Italian you talk about the freedom that you found. I mean, Emily Dickinson actually, you spent a lot of time with Emily Dickinson as you were learning Italian, where did those influences come in and help sort of push you forward?

I can say, well, if I could only read one book, you know, if I had to choose, I could comfortably choose Metamorphoses. Okay, I could do that. But I feel that I’m grateful to every writer who has who has shaped me and guided me and taught me in my life. There’s no hierarchy in that sense. But I will say that all of its poem, that text is, for me, it contains all experience. So for me, it’s a kind of It’s a sacred work. I mean, it’s a work in which I find the strength to go on, and to understand the biggest, most complicated things about the human condition and about my small time personal set of experiences that I will have in my lifetime. So on that small personal level, and also on the larger level of what is war, what is battle, what is life, what is death, what is birth, what is love? What is desire? What is ambiguity? What is identity? What is everything? Well, Ovid has addressed those things in ways that I find constantly challenging, and stimulating, and beautiful. But what he really speaks of, of course, is the instability of all things. And the sliding sort of slippery nature of what we think of as a series of binaries in life and in the universe. He is questioning and he is undermining our whole safe way of reading and being in the world. And that is what is so that’s why the poem is a is an ongoing earthquake. It’s literally it’s a destabilizing work, it destabilizes that the core, the reader. And I mean, I think everything I’ve been doing has been moving more and more toward that idea of being at the very edge of something as I was saying, and of its poem is all about the convener the border to the boundary. The first story in this book is called the boundary of it is about acknowledging, on the one hand, the need, I mean, at the very beginning of the palm there is, as in many traditions, mythologies, cultures, religions, what have you at the beginning, there is chaos, there is no form, there is no shape to anything. And so there has to be borders that are set to divide day from night land, from sea, and so on and so forth. But it’s this very act of creating those borders that of course, what is a border, it separates, and it joins. And so it’s that double nature of the separation and the joining that infiltrates every line of this poem. So to read it is a life altering experience but to translate it has been a life altering experience and is continuing very, it is very slow. pace at this moment but a transformative experience for me.

And that’s the next project. Right?

That’s the next project. That’s really the only project. I mean, sometimes I think I would be very happy to simply see this project to completion. I feel that in some sense, my life’s work could be done I, I hope I will have more time and I’ll work on other things, but I think if I can finish this project, I will have enormous satisfaction.

And this is where I say thank you for master class, an absolute masterclass in language and translation. Jhumpa Lahiri, ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining us tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank