Roman Stories (published under the title Racconti romani in Italian) is, at once, splendid and searching but still she has her harshest critics saying that the stories are at times typically prosaic and dull. Be that as it may, it is no mean task for a writer born of Bengali-speaking parents, who is doubly diasporic, being in England and educated in Boston, to now adopt Italian to write fiction. The crux of her switching to Italian is rooted in her belief that “English is not my language. It’s never been my language. That’s the issue. But Bengali wasn’t my language either because I don’t know either how to read it or write it.”
In the story The Boundary, one family holidaying in the countryside near Rome is seen through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In her story P’s Parties, a Roman couple find comfort and a sense of belonging with foreigners at their friend’s birthday bash. In The Steps, on a public staircase connecting two neighbourhoods, the residents engage with each other, revealing the Italian capital’s multitudinous and varied cultures, aggression and what it means to find a home.
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, published by Penguin, 224 pages, Rs 364
In Roman Stories Lahiri does not name her characters. They remain nameless because she feels that names may act as identifiers and encourage readers to make assumptions about how the character looks, and which community they are from.
Fragments of translation
Racconti romani was also the title of a collection of stories by Alberto Moravia published in 1954, and set in Rome or its surroundings after World War II with a focus on the common people of Rome. Borrowing from Moravia, Lahiri says that the title of her collection is an allusion to Moravia’s short story collection. She draws on Moravia’s interest in those disenfranchised by society, such as the unemployed and criminals, and extends her focus to immigrants in Rome.
Lahiri wrote the Racconti romani short stories in Italian and then self-translated six out of the nine stories, leaving editor Todd Portnowitz to translate the remaining three. So why did Lahiri choose to write in Italian and live in Rome, while spending some of the time in New York? She began learning Italian in 1994, and moved to Rome as a resident in 2012.
She has stated unabashedly about her work as a translator in several interviews: “I am in the middle of a new translation of Italian poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis from Latin to English. It is a poem I read parts of when I was studying Latin at university, and it has always stayed with me.”
Lahiri’s act of translation is her way of deciphering a world in which millions of people travel to new homes, learning about their new lives in fragments of translation. The translation often gives a new meaning to the idea of belonging.
When she was going through her own series of linguistic, creative life changes, coming to Rome and deciding to move there, made her feel close to Ovid who lived in 43 BC to 17/18 AD in Rome. She is quick to remember that at times Ovid describes transformation as a kind of salvation from a previous condition. Whatever “I was looking for was drawing me to Rome, drawing me into the Italian language, slowly, mysteriously,” she has confessed.
In a recent interview with Princeton professor Yi Yun Li, Lahiri revealed “a new way of writing” while discussing her other book Whereabouts, which was also first written in Italian and then translated into English. Lahiri calls the process like receiving a “new set of keys” — the new language, that is, Italian — that gives her “the ability to open new doors”. She drew out the settings scene by scene, “imagining how this character I was in the process of creating would behave in each scene”.
Her literary engine
Lahiri had to fulfil her duties as professor before she could return to Italy and finish writing Whereabouts, which was finally published in 2018 in Italian. Where the impulse gets stronger and more demanding is when she wants to translate these stories she has written first in Italian, into English.
Australian frontrunner of fiction, David Malouf, who was nominated for the Booker Prize for his novel Remembering Babylon, chimes with Lahiri: “Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.”
Nevertheless, one still suspects that Lahiri has still some way to traverse before she can shake off the label of dullness and prosaicness in her being assessed as an exceptional writer.
Perhaps more than any other force, it is the feeling of being an outsider who wants to be included that drives the innermost wishes of the exile. Lahiri’s literary engine lies somewhere strongly tied to her condition as an exile and also to a new product of globalisation.
With clarity and a certain quotient of deeply felt exclusion, Lahiri’s quiet observation of not belonging is typically quiet. But it is powerful for those who can read between the lines. “I’ve never not had that feeling of being othered. I don’t know what it’s like to not have that feeling. My early childhood memories are linked to that feeling; [as is] my experience of growing up, my experience of visiting India as a child and as an adolescent, and my experience of visiting London where I was born — everywhere is that feeling, and all of my work has been an exploration of that, she has stated categorically and constantly.”
Lahiri echoes Edward Said, one of the last century’s greatest public intellectuals who wrote the iconic book about alterity and othering, with the seminal study, Orientalism. Said pointed out that exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
The way Lahiri describes her devotion to other writers as being an integral part of her own work as a teacher of literature and a writer, strikes a chord for her readers who are teachers. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s words about how all writers stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, echoes through Lahiri’s ruminations. Her evolution as an exile who wrote back to the centre from the margins has progressed to a writer with a global interest in translation and learning and playing with other languages like Italian, to express herself.
She has come a long way from representing the South Asian identity in Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake to a writer who has grown into a formidable force in world literature and is a source of inspiration for many diasporic Asian writers through Anglophone creations. Her greatest contribution with Roman Stories is as a teacher and a writer, both feeding off each other, and this gives me great encouragement.
Lahiri fits well into the idea of the new “global soul”, to borrow a term from travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer. In his book Globalisation published in 2001, Arjun Appadurai might have had the prescience to refer to Lahiri. As he puts it: “The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be had as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued... the past is usually another country.” Salman Rushdie and Meira Chand, the two popular contemporary novelists, seem to chime loudly with Jhumpa Lahiri’s idea of going forward in the very act of translation.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College