Echo, the feminine figure, is cursed by Juno into being able to repeat only a portion of what she hears from others. Lahiri reads the tragic love affair of Narcissus and Echo as an allegory of both writing and translation. She summarizes the debt she owes to the experience of learning Italian as an adult: “The Italian language did not simply change my life it gave me a second life, an extra life.”Ĭontinuing with poetic metaphors to elaborate her theorization of translation, Lahiri turns to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, specifically the myth of Narcissus and Echo, to elaborate her understanding of translation in the chapter titled “In Praise of Echo.” She opens her seminar on translation at Princeton with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work she is drawn to because it represents the Roman poet Ovid’s encounter with Greece as a young man and the reproduction of cultural narratives of the older Greek culture into Latin poetry. Italian opens for Lahiri a door which allows her “a sweeping splendid view.” She also uses the metaphor of grafting from the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter to elaborate this botanical metaphor as something crucial to ensuring the robustness of a plant species. In this essay, Lahiri attempts to answer the question she has faced often from Italians: “Why do you know, speak, and write in our language?” This question makes her painfully aware that “Italian is not mine.” Nevertheless, she attempts to answer this question through a series of metaphors. The collection begins with the essay “Why Italian?” which Lahiri wrote in Rome in 2015 and which has been translated by Molly L.

The current collection of ten essays is a lyrical meditation on translation and a manifesto establishing translation as an artistic pursuit as creative and authentic as writing in the original language. In addition, she has also emerged as a translator of three novels by the Italian novelist Domenico Starnone as well as a translator of her Italian novel into its English version, Whereabouts (see WLT, Summer 2021, 90).

Since 2015, she has published three nonfiction works and one novel in Italian. Having achieved critical acclaim as a South Asian American fiction writer in English, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection of stories, The Interpreter of Maladies (2000), and producing several novels afterward, she made the path-breaking decision to move to Italy, immerse herself in Italian, and write exclusively in this language that is not connected to her cultural heritage. JHUMPA LAHIRI’S CAREER as a writer has defied conventional expectations.

Jhumpa lahiri new book 2022