It was a literary event I was looking forward to. I had not heard Jhumpa Lahiri speak about her writing ever before, consequently, I was there at McCarter Theater with an indescribable set of expectations. It was a 45 minute discussion with Lahiri lead by Zahid Chaudhary who currently teaches British and Post Colonial Literature at Princeton Univ. The discussion was followed by a Q & A that, unfortunately, left much to be desired. Given that I did not pose a question myself, I am equally to blame for the lack luster Q & A. The thing was that the handing out of the ‘question cards’ went unnoticed by the audience, me included, as it happened during the 45 minute discussion itself, so when the Q & A started there were many of us who had questions for Lahiri, but those questions were never penned.
The discussion revolved around Lahiri’s introspective approach to her writing and to the writing process in general, and she dwelled a lot on her new role as a translator. Frankly, it’s hard to understand her new found love for translation and for writing in a foreign language . I wonder whether Lahiri the creative writer is being pushed over by Lahiri the translator with her obsession for linguistics. Lahiri is often speaking about the enormous power of words, and how she is carrying the weights of several dictionaries in her head, to the point that she believes ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. It’s almost like the creativity within her has laid down arms and is now subservient to the linguist in her, and that would be a shame. For a writer of such tremendous imagination and creativity as is exhibited in her novels such as The Namesake & The Interpreter of Maladies, I was surprised to know that Lahiri was going to spend the next few years translating Ovid. Not that being a translator is wrong or less important, but for Lahiri it seems to be limiting her. She herself admits in one of her interviews that translating can be “psychologically …destabilizing. To spend a lot of time with your head in dictionaries is to understand the extent to which your head is made up of dictionaries.” Her role of translator is indeed baffling. For a writer of her caliber to want to write in a second language is somewhat understandable, but then wanting to translate that work appears stretched. Is she experiencing a writer’s block, or is the muse of creativity evading her for her to want to spend lengths of time translating?
The McCarter Theater discussion was mostly centered around how Lahiri wrote and translated her latest book “Roman Stories”, and I left the theater wondering whether Jhumpa Lahiri the writer would be able to overcome the web of limitation that Lahiri the translator seems to have woven around herself. I personally prefer Jhumpa Lahiri the writer over Lahiri the translator, and I hope she stops hiding behind this new role of translator that she has taken on with such fervor.
Iditis 