Privilege, Authority, and the Authorial Self in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Self-Translations
by Stiliana Milkova Rousseva
Roman Stories is the newest chapter in Lahiri’s literary journey in exophony and self-translation.
For more than ten years, Jhumpa Lahiri, an American writer of Bengali heritage, has been engaged in the conscious and systematic construction of a new authorial self as an Italophone writer and as a literary translator from Italian. Lahiri, the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), of two novels, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), and of another collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), has embraced Italian as the language of her creative expression.
She has now written and published in Italian a collection of short essays, In altre parole (2015), a novel, Dove mi trovo (2018), a collection of poetry, Il quaderno di Nerina (2021), and a collection of short stories, Racconti romani (2022). She has translated from Italian three novels by Domenico Starnone, Ties (2017), Trick (2018), and Trust (2021), as well as several stories in the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019), which she edited. This project of self-creation as an Italophone writer has culminated in two self-translations, her novel Whereabouts (2021) and the short story collection Roman Stories (2023), and in a book of essays, lectures, and translator’s notes tellingly titled Translating Myself and Others (2022).
Roman Stories, which is the subject of this essay, was translated by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz. In fact, the book cover proclaims in a large font, “Translated by the Author with Todd Portnowitz,” whereby the preposition “with” (rather than “and”) signals Lahiri’s dominant position in the translation process, her “doubly privileged status as an author(ity) and as an authorized agent” (Grutman and Van Bolderen, 324). Readers are thus invited to consider Roman Stories not so much a translation as a second original, surrounding it with “an aura of authenticity that is rarely, if ever, granted to ‘standard’ translations” (Grutman and Van Bolderen, 324).
The book consists of nine stories, organized in three parts. As Lahiri’s “Acknowledgments” explain, six of the nine stories were already published in various journals, in Italian and/or in English. And as Lahiri specifies further, six of these nine stories were translated by her, and three (“P’s Parties,” “Well-Lit House,” and “Notes”) by Portnowitz. In reading Roman Stories, I paid attention to this division of labor and creative license, noticing that Lahiri’s English sometimes seemed more literal, raw and unmediated, while Portnowitz’s sounded smoother and more polished. Was this difference the outcome of the self-translator’s poetic license as an author (Grutman and Van Bolderen, 324) or an intentional approach to showcase distinct translational strategies and identities?
In Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri has consolidated her achievement of the past ten years by assembling her writings in a cohesive whole held together by a charismatic but solipsistic authorial figure. Her Italian language memoir (or linguistic autobiography) In Other Words (In altre parole, 2015) compiles short reflections on learning and writing in Italian originally published in the Italian weekly Internazionale. Lahiri, who in 2012 moved with her family to Italy to follow her love for Italian language, settled in Rome and resolved to write only in Italian. The autobiographical essays comprising In Other Words revolve around her anxiety about posing and passing as Italian and document her struggles with linguistic imperfection. The book traces her path of reinventing herself as an author in a new language and negotiating a complex identity that fluctuates between her Bengali origins, her American career as a Pulitzer-prize winning author, and her newly fashioned Italian self. Replete with dozens of metaphors for language learning at times bordering on cliché (falling in love, swimming across a lake), the essays can be read as Lahiri’s workbook, as a series of authentic tasks or advanced exercises in vocabulary building and meaning making in the target language.
In Other Words contains two short stories that constitute Lahiri’s debut as an Italophone writer, “Lo scambio” (“The Exchange”) and “Penombra” (“Half-Light”). These stories, like all her writing in Italian, explore questions of translation and border crossing – literary and metaphorical, linguistic and cultural – in relation to the self. “The Exchange,” in particular, narrates a woman translator’s search for a new identity in a new country, dramatizing Lahiri’s own translinguistic experience (de Rogatis, 181). In her reflections on adopting Italian as her creative tongue, Lahiri devises metaphors and analogies that express a profound unease about being a novice learner and writer, but also manifest an unrelenting will to master a foreign language and receive recognition for her accomplishments. Her consistent Italian-language production since In Other Words offers the proof of her Bildung, and of her success, as an exophonic writer.
Lahiri’s passion for Italian has led to her creative investment in literary translation. Her translations of contemporary writer Domenico Starnone’s short novels Ties, Trick, and Trust stand as superb laboratories for her exploration of Italian literature and language. Her translator’s commentaries on Starnone’s books shed less light on the novels than on her own linguistic development and progress towards mastery. These translator’s commentaries, together with her lectures on translation and essays on self-translation, were collected in the volume Translating Myself and Others (2022). Self-translation, as evidenced by the title, forms Lahiri’s paramount priority and literary concern. She self-translated her novel Dove mi trovo (2018) as Whereabouts (2021) and wrote extensively about the process. Her exophonic production, her bilingualism, and her self-translations have authorized her entry into a lofty literary tradition of male writers she pinpoints herself – Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Antonio Tabucchi.
Roman Stories is the newest chapter in Lahiri’s literary journey in exophony and self-translation. The nine stories in this collection revolve around a constellation of thematic foci – creativity and the writing process, displacement, exile and immigration, language learning and belonging, living between cultures, hybrid identities, and urban spaces – that has defined her works in both English and Italian. Although the protagonists span different socio-cultural milieus and points of view – from caretakers to professors, from tailors to writers, from immigrants to Italians, and from teenagers to delinquents – the narration of their experiences illuminates a privileged authorial position where Rome’s multilingual, multiethnic population serves as the inspiration for writing.
For example, the opening story, “The Boundary,” is ostensibly narrated by the teenage daughter of a family of immigrants who take care of a summer vacation rental in the Italian countryside. The girl observes the American family of four renting the house – mother, father, and two daughters – and notes their carefree routine. She then recounts the story of her parents and the xenophobic violence that has marred their lives. And yet, her voice is silenced by the story’s last line which casts doubt on whose words we are reading: are they those of the caretaker’s daughter, or those of the American mother who has been writing about the caretaker’s family all along?
Likewise, “P’s Parties” can be read as a story about an upper middle-class Roman writer finding inspiration in a chance encounter with a mysterious foreign woman at an upscale party, sublimating the ensuing emotions and reflections in the plot of the story he has been struggling to write. “The Reentry” (“La riunione”) follows a non-Italian university professor of ancient Roman history who feels at home in Rome and who has returned for a sabbatical year. During lunch with a Roman friend who lives abroad, the professor feels humiliated by a little girl in the restaurant who dislikes her for her dark skin. This unpleasant encounter, unnoticed by her Roman friend, spurs the professor to muse on her own visibility as la moretta, the dark-skinned outsider in a city she loves. Lahiri’s message is loud and clear: the professor realizes that she is just as dark-skinned as the Italian woman who works at the restaurant and who looks like her. The failure to pass as Italian recalls the essay “The Wall” (from In Other Words) where Lahiri, speaking confidently in fluent Italian, cannot cross the line of her own otherness and is repeatedly addressed in English by an eager Italian saleswoman.
Much of Roman Stories echoes the style and content of Lahiri’s autobiographical writing in In Other Words. “The Reentry” revisits, thematically and stylistically, Lahiri’s literary debut in Italian, “The Exchange.” Both focus on the experiences of an educated woman who inhabits a foreign urban space, wishing to be accepted and invisible, yet insisting on her own difference. Both share a lexical simplicity, a third-person narration, and a dry, somewhat clinical descriptive voice. The following passage from “The Reentry” reads in English like an academic’s bio, or, if recast in the first person singular, like an autobiographical statement:
The professor, too, has recently returned to Rome, not to face a loss but to enjoy a year on sabbatical with her family. She knows the city well and loves it. She visits often to conduct research or attend conferences, either on her own or with her family, at times for lengthy stays. Ancient Roman history is her field. (16)
Anche la professoressa è rientrata di recente a Roma, non per affrontare una perdita ma per godersi un anno sabbatico con la sua famiglia. Conosce bene la capitale e la ama; ci viene spesso per le sue ricerche e per conferenze, da sola o con la sua famiglia, ogni tanto per lunghi periodi, per studiare la storia antica della città.
Although Lahiri transforms the two long Italian sentences into four shorter ones in English, the passage strikes me as stiff and cumbersome, too literal to recognize in it Lahiri’s brilliant Anglophone prose. Her self-translations throughout the book bear the traces of an effort to stay close to the original, to convey the aura – through syntax or lexical choices – of her Italian. The resulting language is sometimes awkward and sometimes transparently, unmistakably Italian. For instance, when I read the sentence, “The girls in this family resemble each other” (“The Boundary,” 5), all I hear is the Italian verbal construction “si assomigliano” (“resemble each other” for “look alike”) and indeed, this is what Lahiri writes in the original. One could interpret this tendency as an act of resistance, as a declaration of the text’s own foreign origins. And one could also read it as a refusal to tamper with an original, as a way of privileging the source over the target text.
Two other stories feature American protagonists in privileged positions or professions. “The Procession” follows a couple of university professors, husband and wife, visiting Rome to see a religious procession the wife had seen decades earlier during a year of study abroad in Italy. In “Dante Alighieri,” a first-person narrator maps her life as an American expat in Rome, and then as university lecturer of Italian on the east coast of the USA. Both stories deal with loss and grief, alienation and belonging: the two university professors mourn their dead child, while the American expat examines her relationship with her now dead immigrant mother. Both stories are included in Part III of the book. And interestingly, both “The Procession” and “Dante Alighieri” were not previously published or translated. The third new story in this collection, “The Steps,” occupies a liminal position as the only story in Part II, bridging Part I and Part III.
Part I consists of four stories, three of which I have already mentioned – “The Boundary,” “The Reentry,” and “P’s Parties” – and which betray a metanarrative propensity for an authorial perspective, rehearsing a writer’s voice. The narrator of “P’s Parties,” the jaded Italian writer, exposes his literary aptitude when describing the music at the party:
The music felt liberating, at moments wrenching. It levitated us magically above the cramped and craggy present, it restored a glimmer of hope. We were, all of us, each on our own, replaying our previous lives: lives still in progress, foolish, makeshift, splendid lives. (49)
L’effetto di quella musica era liberatorio, anche struggente. Ci levava magicamente dal presente sempre stretto e spigoloso, e ci restituiva uno spiraglio di speranza. Ricordavamo, ognuno per proprio conto, le nostre vite di prima: vite ancora da realizzare, vite ridicole, arrangiate, splendide.
Lahiri’s prose in translation is alive, animated by alliterations and chiasmic consonances, by words and bodies moving with the music. Portnowitz, who translated this story, has not given in to the (common) temptation to translate the Italian adjective “ridicole” as “ridiculous,” opting instead for “foolish” to hint, perhaps, at the writer’s own foolish infatuation with a foreign woman he meets at the party.
The fourth story that completes Part I, “Well-Lit House,” also in Portnowitz’s translation, reverses the privileged gaze and surveys the harrowing lives of immigrants in a xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist Rome. The first-person narrator’s family has been forced out of their subsidized housing by their neighbors, and his wife and five children return to their home country. After roaming the streets, the homeless narrator ends up at the train station and there awaits the approaching train calmly, almost contentedly, with his feet firmly planted between the tracks. This ending confers to the story a literary, intertextual intentionality, conjuring up a legacy of fictional suicides, of oppressed or desperate characters who seek salvation in this final exercise of free will.
“The Steps” connects Part I and Part III through its topographic narration of Rome’s diverse demographics as six different characters negotiate the 126 steps in their urban neighborhood. Notably, the story concludes with a screenwriter working on a film that is set on those very steps. Lahiri’s metanarrative inclination manifests itself again, asking us to consider whether we are not reading a film script, or to underscore Rome’s ubiquitous cinematic and literary representation. This resounding motif of Rome as the steps where diverse lives, languages, and identities intersect – the city as contact zone – echoes the works of other contemporary exophonic writers in Italian such as the Algerian political refugee Amara Lakhous. (But it is not Lakhous that Lahiri is indebted to; the volume’s title references its illustrious Italian genealogy – Alberto Moravia’s 1954 collection of stories Racconti romani or Roman Stories.)
Part III is comprised of two stories already mentioned, “The Procession” and “Dante Alighieri,” which bookend this part, and two others in the middle, “The Delivery” and “Notes.” The latter two stories espouse the optics of immigrant women subjected to discrimination and hateful language, even physical violence. But the protagonist of “Notes,” a tailor assailed with threats written on pieces of paper, neutralizes the verbal attacks in the story’s ingenious ending by letting the notes’ language (lingua) dissolve into a pleasant taste on her tongue (lingua).
Lahiri’s clever double entendre points to language as another prevalent thematic thread that links the expats and the foreign professors who communicate in Italian with the Roman writer and screenwriter navigating their own tongue with the immigrants who are often silenced. Characters for whom, in other words, invention and self-invention, translation and self-translation are at stake. The narrative interest in the verbal expression of the self and the identity constructed through language recalls Lahiri’s language-learning subject who holds together the disparate essays in In Other Words. But it also circles back to her very first collection of stories, and in particular, to the titular story, “The Interpreter of Maladies,” which centers on linguistic and cultural mistranslation of both self and other.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories testify to her perpetual fascination with Italy as a source of inspiration and narrative authority, as a site where one’s identity can be taken apart and then sewn back together. The plots she crafts are compelling, the themes she explores urgent and devastating, and the narrative structures rewarding, especially in the ending of “Notes” and in the metanarrative twist of “The Boundary.” But as much as Roman Stories strives to inhabit diverse and marginalized subject positions, it presents an assemblage of characters whose interiority never fully comes to life. Despite the pressing issues that emerge through the focalization of “foreigners,” the characters’ home countries, native languages, and religious or ethnic identities remain unnamed. Even if this technique may well be intended as inclusive, as a refusal to categorize modes of otherness, it nonetheless risks subsuming individual pain and its narratives into the lingua franca of universalized global suffering.
Many of the book’s characters remind us of Lahiri herself – a language-learning, self-translating expat; an educated woman negotiating a new, elective identity; a voluntary exile or a Grand Tourist in a country where she wants to be welcomed and feel at home. Lahiri, who dedicated herself to mastering Italian and settled in Rome, entering its literary establishment, exemplifies how literary talent and reputation can be leveraged, and translated, in a foreign context. On the other hand, the fact that a famous American writer has learned and adopted a foreign language associates language learning with education, status, and privilege.
That Rome supplies the raw material for Lahiri’s literary imagination is not surprising – the eternal city boasts a long tradition of literary representation. It’s not surprising either that she has received much acclaim in Italy, including three honorary degrees. Italians are eager to experience their reality through the eyes of an outsider, to see themselves described, in their own tongue, by a renowned American writer. And it goes without saying that Lahiri’s embracing of Italian flatters Italian readers, validating the unique worth of their semi-peripheral language in a world dominated by English.
But how do we read, and respond to, her self-translations in English of her Italian version of her Anglophone authorial self? Lahiri’s linguistic self-transformations have endowed her with the authority and agency to “repair and recalibrate” (Translating Myself and Others, 77), that is, rewrite, her Italian works in English and elevate them to the status of new originals, granting them an aura of authenticity – a privilege never afforded to “regular” translators. Although this new original, in the case of Roman Stories, is announced on the cover as “Translated by the Author with Todd Portnowitz,” the Author retains her primacy, wielding control over both original and translation. And yet, we do not feel closer to, or more intimately involved in, the narratives she crafts through self-translation. Roman Stories reads like the English translation of the Italian translation of an English original.
In reflecting on her self-translation in Translating Myself and Others, Lahiri notes that “it is an operation that feels doomed from the start, even contrary to nature, like the experiments of Victor Frankenstein” (79). She compares her project to breathing life into a monstrous creature assembled from the body parts of different corpses. This simile is particularly striking in the context of Lahiri’s own piecemeal construction of her new authorial self, a construction which looms large in her latest experiment, Roman Stories.
Works Cited
de Rogatis, Tiziana. 2023. “In altre parole di Jhumpa Lahiri. La traduttrice, la metamorfosi e l’esposizione narrativa al trauma” in Tiziana de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi. Traumi e tranlinguismi in Morante, Hoffman, Kristof, Scego e Lahiri. Siena: Edizione Università per Stranieri di Siena, 169-190.
Grutman, Rainier and Trish Van Bolderen. 2014. “Self-Translation.” In A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter. John Wiley & Sons.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2023. Roman Stories. Translated by the author with Todd Portnowitz. Alfred Knopf.
Lahiri, Jhumpa, 2022. Racconti romani. Guanda Editore. Ebook.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2022. Translating Myself and Others. Princeton University Press.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2015. In altre parole. Guanda Editore.
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is a writer, translator, and associate professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College (USA). She has translated in English works by Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Anita Raja, Adriana Cavarero, Dario Voltolini, Alessandro Baricco, and other Italian writers and literary critics. She edits Reading in Translation, an online journal which specializes in reviewing translated literature.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
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