On Interpretation

And a big book club announcement you don't want to miss

I am currently rereading Interpreter of Maladies, the Pulitzer-winning short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri, a book I first read after I had just moved to Italy. The last lines of the final story had a deep impact on me even then and whenever I am in a bookstore that has a copy, I flip to the last page so I can read them again, for the umpteenth time:

While astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Though I was a fresh transplant then, I am now at nearly thirty years in a foreign land myself. Nearly thirty years of interpreting languages both spoken and unspoken—a fact that is truly bewildering and beyond my imagination.

I don’t know what happened to my original copy of Interpreter of Maladies, I likely lent it to someone or lost it in a move, but I recently picked up a used copy at Paperback Exchange after I realized I needed it back on my shelf. The book is a collection of stories about Indians in exile and how they navigate their new North American lives as outsiders and interpreters—in all senses—and my new-to-me copy is the twentieth anniversary edition with a short but poignant Preface by Italian writer Domenico Starnone:

An interpreter is many things: a mediator between different languages; a well-equipped reader able to fully grasp the complexity of a text and impart its meaning; someone who performs, either faithfully or fancifully, a piece of music or a part in a play. But Jhumpa Lahiri gave her interpreter another, somewhat peculiar, matter to interpret: the malaise of men and women. The idea of a person who must find exact, efficacious words for ills appealed to me. I went home satisfied with my new purchase. But I was already convinced, even before I started reading, that I had discovered a splendid definition for someone who, in today’s globalized world, sets out to tell stories. For what is a writer, if not an interpreter of maladies?

Starnone had first read the stories in Italian and his preface becomes a sort of meditation on translation—the supreme act of interpretation?—itself. By the time the anniversary copy was printed in 2019, Jhumpa Lahiri was already living in Rome and writing in Italian (let us take a moment for this woman’s brain, please).¹

In writing about Lahiri’s Italian work, Starnone says, ‘As a result of meaningful and unexpected deviation, she is now narrating the ills of the world not in English—a mighty powerful language—but in Italian, a beautiful language of limited reach.’ What a sentence, what a truth, this beautiful language that reaches so few!

Now enter the Italian-English translator—the interpreter of the beautiful into the powerful, as Starnone might say. How skillful and creative one has to be to both wrangle and liberate language. It is an art.

I think about and work with translation a lot, both in teaching Italian literature and in running a book club that treats Italian works in English translation. In this vein, this year the book club decided to showcase four books that have been in the running for the most prestigious award for translated fiction, the International Booker Prize. In March, we had a robust discussion about Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection that was as much about the themes and contents of the novel as it was about the mechanics and artistry of the translation by Sophie Hughes.

On June 8^th at 6pm CEST, we will gather to discuss Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo and I am thrilled to announce that the translator, Leah Janeczko, will be joining us live. Lauren and I are already nerding out and we hope that you, too, will come with your most illuminating thoughts and questions on translation and interpretation for Leah.

Participation is free and open to everyone, please register here to get the Zoom link.

In the meantime, happy reading and happy interpreting—whatever that means to you.

1. Side note: I met her once—she came to Florence for a lectio magistralis which I didn’t attend, but somehow a little quartiere writing group got her to come speak and I raced to hear her. She was so generous and soft-spoken and I squirmed like mad in the hot little room when some of those burgeoning writers challenged her on meaning in her most recent novel, The Lowland. My own cheeks still burn at the audacity but she was lovely and didn’t redden at all.