YouSaid · the spoken record

Jhumpa Lahiri

lines on the record: 77
first: 2017-01-11
most recent: 2017-01-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, that's nice to hear. I'm glad that that's the case, in your opinion. I think I write about loss. I write less about nostalgia, I think. I mean, it's connected, of course, but that's really what the writing, you know, everything I've written has that at its core, the idea of loss. And as for how I write, I just don't know how I write, but I certainly am not, you know, I go through a million drafts and I'm constantly reworking everything. So the idea of writing a sentence that's all set to go and then moving on to the next one is the opposite. Whatever the opposite of that is, that's how I work.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And think about it, read Agota Christoph because she's just, she's a genius. She's like the oracle of all of this stuff. She really knows. What it means to create out of life and that incredibly fluid, mysterious boundary between real life and art. Her work investigates it just head on in a way that's unforgettably powerful.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think, as I say in the afterward to in other words, the most kind of explicitly autobiographical story I've ever written is the first story I wrote in Italian, which is called the Exchange, which is a very weird, abstract story, but that came literally from an experience I had, and I wrote the story very quickly afterward based on that experience. And it was just sort of lifted from something that had happened to me. In that sense, I feel very close to that character, needless to say, because I shared what happened, though there are certain invented details in that story as well. And I'm not, and because it's fiction, you know, it's not the truth. But Agota Christoph, if you really want to talk about this,”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I mean, there are pieces of me and some of various things I've written, aspects kind of concealed or jumbled together, rearranged. So various characters, if I had to say they're shadings that I feel close to literally”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to question it at every step and you have to question what you're doing and how you're doing it and why you're doing it. So I believe that that's very important”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While writing always scares me and intimidates me and I've always felt that and I think if I ever stop feeling that I probably shouldn't write anymore. Think now there's a kind of formal challenge of writing in a language that I don't have full control of. So that's intimidating and just very daunting. But I was talking to a group of students before this larger conversation about how even in English I started out with that same trepidation. And in some sense, I don't want to lose touch with that unease because I think that's important. It's important to approach that way, at least for me. To not feel totally comfortable and Certainly not to feel confident because it's really more about an investigation, an experiment, a challenge. And so these things cannot be undertaken in the spirit of, sure, I can do that.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So no, I never sat ever sat down and asked them what it was like because I was living it every single day and I saw the effects of what it means to live your life. Away from your point of reference, right? So, and this just goes so deep and so vast and so specific and so minute by minute. And that constant back and forth in one's being to kind of make sense and to be, I mean, it's like, again, the interpreter, you know, it's like being a simultaneous interpreter all the time. And I think Of course, it's not ironic that my book is called The Interpretive Maladies and involves this character who is literally interpreting simultaneously for people because I feel like that's what that's not what I was necessarily doing for my parents. It was what I was doing for myself.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was living that experience. That was my whole experience. That was my whole life. I mean, there was no moment where I wasn't aware that my parents came from a place that was very far away where people spoke a different language and ate different food and wore different clothes and thought about the world in different ways and that they were not there. Know, and that's my life. That's my whole life. And there's no part of my life that was anything else. And every relationship I had that I made, that I created, that I forged outside of my family kind of base was informed by that awareness that these were the parents that had brought me into the world and this is what their experience was.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that is really what is the heart of the matter. It's just that refusal to recognize ourselves in the other. So if you have someone who has a kind of features that can be perceived as this or be perceived as that, I mean depending on where I go in the world, I'm mistaken for lots of things. If I'm in Latin America, if I'm in India, if I'm in maybe some other places and sometimes not and sometimes I'm immediately identified as the other, but I think it's sort of more based on the context and not on the person. I wasn't really thinking very deeply about it, to be honest with you. I think it was just one of those small details about other people's desire. To render the same people who are actually different”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I wasn't really thinking about those things. I think I think I'm now recalling maybe there's a moment in the book where someone says to him oh you could be Spanish or something But I think that's more about projecting. Not about who he is, but maybe how we project how we like to project kind of sameness onto other people, right, to make them more comfortable to us and to dilute the sense of difference. Maybe that's what it's really about. Just to go back to this book covers piece, there's a certain part of the essay in which I talk about the intolerance of foreign And I showed it to this person, and I just remember the expression on, you know, it was like Interesting, you know.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that's true. And I can say for the Italian project, as I was saying, this idea of a new point of view that comes from a new language. And in addition, the sense of freedom that a learned language might provide you to just kind of Set to the side certain baggage that the long distance you traverse in another language might be in some sense holding you back from saying what you really need to say. So for example, I would never have written, in other words, in English. I would never have written the clothing of books essay in English. So this is why the Italian is valuable to me, is interesting.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think anybody who is fortunate enough to have more than one language recognizes that, you know, I mean, some people go so far as to say if you know more than one language, you have more than one soul. And that's a very thoughtful way of thinking about it. But I think language represents kind of a very specific but vast universe and each language represents that. And I think even before I learned Italian, I always grew up with two languages side by side. And maybe I didn't know them in exactly the right kind of the same level of proficiency, but they were both incredibly strong influences on who I was. You know, I always was, you know, divided in that sense”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who the writer might be and the reasons, and all of this speculation, which it could be a very simple thing. But it's become kind of contorted, I feel like, at least in the United States, maybe in England, I don't know. But it's not the same in Italy. People aren't really talking about it in the same way.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The article came out, you know, I exchanged some messages with my friends saying, you know, this is just disgusting and why and so unnecessary. And then everybody moved on, whereas I think here in America it's become, it's just going, it's just ongoing and it never, it's just not dying. It's not people aren't moving on and saying, you know, let's just either read the books or not read the books, but if someone goes out of their way to say, you know, I would like to write with anonymity. Why that can't be respected in our culture is really a kind of mystifying to me and also distressing in terms of. You know what that means and the projection people have onto the idea of, you know.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whoever wrote those books, the world is no better off knowing who the actual person is. And I think we've all completely lost perspective in that so many beautiful things have been created by mankind that we still go to look at and marvel at or read or whatever the case may be. And nobody's hung up on who exactly the person was and what their name was and what their birthday is or this whole cult of the individual and the individual's hand and signature behind what's being done. These are kind of recent concepts if you think about them. So, I mean, and again, people in Italy just, they don't care about this. They have other things to think about and worry about at this point. So this all...”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the whole situation is, you know, completely blown out of proportion and ridiculous. I know personally the person who has been accused of being Elena Ferrante or she's actually the wife of Domenico Sarnone who has also been accused whatever the word is. I mean it is like a trial though. I mean and this is the absurd thing because Whoever wrote those books did nothing wrong and it's been treated almost as if it were a crime and the nature of the article, the very violent article, an appropriate article that was published a couple of months ago, the language of that was very disturbing and offensive to me.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next work, so I have two kind of things that are happening. One is, so I just translated this novel called Ties in English. It's Lachi is the Italian title by Domenico Sarnone, who is my friend. Whom I consider the finest Italian living author. And I just translated this novel. I'm just at the final stages and it will be out in March. I think it's an amazing novel. I read it two years ago and it was first published. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have brought it into English. I'm really excited about it. And then on the other side, I am slowly, quietly writing some very short stories in Italian.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A beautiful exhibit there right now, which it's not that far. I really do recommend a big collection of miniatures, two big rooms of extraordinary works, and one of the whole chambers of this exhibit is dedicated to miniatures basically inspired by the rog cycles. And there was headphones and I put them on and I was listening to one of them. And it's just a part of that music is a part of me. And I really am very... It's sort of part of my formation. I think it's extraordinary.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again from my mother, I inherited received, learned to appreciate Indian classical music, most of all sitar music, which she's always been passionate about and my family, all my uncles, my great uncles, my cousins. I mean, I come from a broad extended family, passionate enthusiasts of the Saro, mostly the instrument of Aliad Barkhan and Amzad Ali Khan. So I grew up my whole life listening to this very complex, beautiful music that really has spoken to me. And there's the other day I was in the Princeton Art Museum.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big capital F, and it always has, and we hope it always will for the good. But there's also the danger of that in that, you know, I mean, even as a young girl in the 70s, as a kid, immigrant child of immigrants, I knew what it meant to shop in one store versus another store. I saw what the girls in my class were wearing, the kinds of shoes, the kinds of purses. I knew that my parents weren't taking me to those stores, that they thought that was a waste of money, and that we're not going to pay all of this forty dollars for Nike sneakers or whatever it is, because it's a waste and you're going to grow out of them in six months. Whereas my other schoolmates had these things, and suddenly there was the gap between me and them, reinforced by these things. And I think for a child, at least for me, these things were traumatizing. And I imagine for others as well.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they were all the same and they just put on what they had to wear to school every day and it was the same thing and I and I dreamed about that. I dreamed of being able to wake up in the United States and just putting on my blue skirt and my white shirt and my black shoes and going to school and nobody commenting on what I was wearing because I was always so terrified because people were always commenting on what I was wearing and either teasing me or whatever. And so in that sense, I think there's this kind of, you know, where do you stand between wanting to express yourself and be free and being afraid of that freedom and being actually vulnerable to that freedom? I mean, I think America represents freedom with a...”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think if I had to choose, I would choose the safety of the uniform because, of course, I mean, the whole piece, the whole little essay, whatever begins with the memory of being a child and being traumatized by having to dress myself, because it just churned up so many problems and was a source of true anguish for me as a child to have to put on my, to choose clothes and put them on. And this has economic ramifications, this has cultural ramifications, this has all sorts of ramifications because clothes are things we buy in stores and et cetera, et cetera. I had this sort of crazy envy, admiration, envy, obsession with my cousins school uniforms in color.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I prefer this kind of cover because to me there's a protective quality to the lack of specificity and the belonging to the series, which is what Europe in the US you have certain series as well. And in fact, I was thinking, I mean, I wrote the essay when I was in Rome and I was far away from my American library and my books and things. But now that I'm back here and I unpacked a lot of my books, there are certain presses here that have that. Aesthetic philosophy. You know, city lights books makes those beautiful little books of my copy of Alan Ginsburg's Howell.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To this system, well, I mean, I talk about that in the book. The whole piece is a kind of meditation on the idea of wearing a uniform and dressing yourself and how this, you know. These contradictory approaches to presenting oneself what they mean.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe this, maybe that. Who knows? Maybe an image could even inspire a book in that sense. If one had that ability to say, oh, you know what, I went to this show, this gallery the other day and I saw this image and it was so beautiful and I was thinking about it and this whole novel grew out of it or this whole collection of stories or whatever, these things can happen. They just don't happen here as much as I wish they did.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, but suddenly you have a whole, you know, you have the inside, you have the words, you have the pages that the author created, and you actually have an image that the author felt. they wanted, he or she wanted to represent visually what the book is saying. I mean, if I had that freedom, if I had that ability, I would be such a happy, you know, it would make going to museums even more exciting because I would always be thinking, oh, well, maybe...”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I say what I feel about blurbs in the essay. Some of my publishers have been a little uncomfortable about publishing that sentence in my book, actually. Because I just say what I feel, and I think this is one of the things about writing in Italian that people aren't prepared for is that I actually don't pretend anymore. And I try not to, you know, I'm not concerned about making everybody happy. But no, I mean, one of the things I say in the book, in this essay, is that I actually can't, these books don't even, I mean, as much as I appreciate truly this lovely display that you made, but this isn't my book anymore. Once the cover is on it, it's not my book. And again, I mean, having lived in Italy and having Italian writer friends, so many examples of novels there. Have covers chosen by the author. Imagine that.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between what's on the outside and what's on the inside often and what that feels like from a writer's point of view, because it's both a disconnect and a source of can-be at least for me, a source of real anguish because you can't really disconnect yourself from what you look like. You can try. But you can't really”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They put it on the table, but still you can Yeah, I mean, I talk a little bit in this little essay about being drawn to certain books just because there's some allure appeal, something I'm projecting, something the book is projecting, something I'm projecting onto the book, some relationship I want to have with the book because it's, I don't know, some landscape I want to find myself in someday or I don't know, you know. I mean, if you think of a book as a mirror, right? And if you just sort of think, well, that's how I would like to look if I were a tree or if I were a whatever, you know, some image. But the essay is really about Disconnect”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, but she is inspiring to me deeply because of this incredible effort she made her whole life to try to express herself in a learned language. Now, of course, the difference between her and myself is Is that she, I think she always had a sort of antagonistic relationship with Frank. and to express herself in it because she was living in Switzerland and she felt that she couldn't really function as a writer without expressing herself in French. Whereas I've sort of gone out of my way to do this crazy thing that everyone discouraged me from doing, which is writing in Italian.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, she wrote this trilogy and she wrote some other books too. So she was Hungarian and left during the invasion to fled to Switzerland with her small kids, her husband and her dictionaries and writes about this and an amazing little book called The Illiterate An Alphabeta. I read it in Italian. It must be called something else in French an alphabet. But she taught herself how to write in French and all of her literary work is in French. And I read her. I came to her in Italian, so I came to her in translation, but not in an English translation in Italian translation. And my life was never the same after reading her. I mean, she's just one of those readers. You remain forever altered, extraordinarily powerful, a deep, profound, profound writer, dark. And just the kind of stuff that you don't find very easily.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or engage with it. And so, but I think now of Italian writers has opened up something because I think for me, I mean, I just finished translating my first novel from Italian and it has been such a formative experience for me and powerful and just deepened my awareness of what words are in literature and language and all of that. It's just been, I kind of can't believe it's taking me this long, you know, but I'm excited. But I think someone like Paviz was like blazed away in some sense.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he was influenced. I mean, this is what's interesting. He was influenced by reading and translating Melville among others and his Italian has a different energy as a result of that translation. And I think those translations and his relationship with English. And I think this is what's kind of missing in American literature right now in some sense. I feel like with the exception of poets, American poets who have devoted time and energy to other literatures to translation, whether it's Ezra Pound or other poets, WS Merman, Mark Strand, I mean, you have examples of people who translate and make that part of their creative work, but relatively few fiction writers stop to think about it.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work very, very dark, very true, and wrote lots of short stories as well as a series of kind of slim novels. And he worked really hard as a translator, not only his own translations of many American authors, had a very rich relationship with the English language, but also sort of oversaw a lot of translation projects.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I actually haven't read it yet. I would like to, I keep meaning to pick it up when I'm over there. But he was a colossal writer from Turin, that great literary city, where you have Primo Levi, Natalia Ginsburg, Enaudi, the publishing house, all concentrated in this part of Italy in the north over toward France. And Pavese wrote very much in the autobiographical vein and did things that, you know, again, I think now it's, oh, it's fashionable when the writer becomes a character and, oh, we all write about ourselves and there's a lot of memoir and things. But these are things that he was doing in After World War two, you know, he had a tragic life. He suffered deeply He committed suicide. He left behind an incredible sort of writer's notebook. That is an extraordinarily powerful”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well Pavez is huge, you know, he translated Moby Dick and we were in Sicily a couple of years ago and we were sailing around the Aeolian Islands and we had this long conversation one day with our skipper about how according to him, Pavez's translation of Moby Dick surpasses. Workers Malville, and does it?”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Italian it says La Mia Chitaomista, which means my blindness is a point of view, and I was really I really marveled at that because I felt like it kind of explained, at least to me, the purpose of writing in Italian, because of course she wasn't totally blind. She was partially blind, and I'm not totally blind in Italian either, but I feel kind of partially blind. Now, I don't want to compare myself to her because she had actually a physical, you know, issue with her eyesight and she didn't choose that for herself. And she suffered for it, whereas my project is something that comes from me and it's voluntary, but it is this kind of voluntary blindness, right?”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She did. And then one of the things that also really struck me was at the end of her life she was almost blind and still the drive to write was so intense and constant and so her husband, her second husband, you know, the one who survives her was explaining that when she was in the final phase of her life and could barely see, she had these enormous pieces of paper basically and would just sort of write a couple of words, a sentence or two a day and these very kind of The words were just burning with life and with her need to express herself in spite of the disability. And these writings were collected in a book called The Last Diary, which I read. And they're almost like little fragments epigrams, some of these little entries. And one of them said,”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like a cart full of her books, and that was really exciting. But no, so anyway, so I started reading her with great interest. She's an incredibly sort of modernist writer in some sense. Her language is incredible, essential in its quality. She wrote an extraordinarily powerful book that I you know if there's, you know, life is long enough and there's time I would like to translate called Nemari Estremi. And it's a sort of two-part memoir of losing her husband. And, you know, there's so many books now about grief and the loss of a loved one and what that means, but this was something that was written. a long time ago before all these books became kind of part of our culture. So that's an amazing book of Hershey. She wrote a lot of interesting, very interesting novels.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So I waited. I waited for these books and they weren't coming. And then I said, listen, these books, I know you kindly sent them. And then one thing led to another and I found myself in Milan and again I kind of reignited this interest and he said, well, why don't you come over? And then I went to her house, and I saw her house where she used to live, and we had a very interesting conversation. I saw her desk, I saw her things, I saw her paintings, and he gave me all of her books.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, he has a warehouse in their house. I said, okay, so I wrote the husband. And so there were some back and forth. And then he sent me. A packet of books from Milano, from Milan, and they never made it to Rome. Happens.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, I had never heard of her until I was living in Rome, and I just was reading the paper one day. and read an article about her Oh Was interesting. I took a note. I took note of it. I took note of the name and I went to the bookshop and I said, I'd like to read this author. And they said, oh yeah, she's sort of hard to find, you know, kind of not that well distributed. Anyway, so I ordered some books. And in fact, what I did because it was so hard to find the books, I went through the person who wrote, this is Italy, right? Everybody knows everybody. So the person who wrote the article I knew. So I said, you know, how do I get these books? And he said, well, what you need to do is you need to write to her husband who has all the books.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't, I'm not aware of any kind of conscious influence, if that's what you're asking. But again, what's conscious, what's unconscious.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Details. But, you know, I mean, my grandfather was a painter, my uncle was a painter. I grew up with portraits of Tagoro over our house. I have a portrait of him in my house painted by a watercolor by my uncle. I have a beautiful photograph my mother dug up recently of So my grandfather's brother was a press photographer and he took the last picture of Tagore at his last public. And so I have this photograph that's just next to me when I'm writing. So I feel this kind of, you know, this constant presence, shall we say. Again, my Limitation in not really being a fluent reader of Bengali is it creates a situation it does. I mean, I've read him mostly in translation. I've read fiction. I've read poetry. I grew up hearing all of the songs like 24 hours a day in my house. So, you know.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think if you're Bengali, you just, he's like a member of your family in some sense, you know. I mean, he's a god. This pantheon-like place, right? He's not a god person. But, you know, for people, I mean, my parents, again, they aren't religious people, so they didn't give us a religious education, but they certainly taught us to respect the great minds and the great visionaries. And so Tagore is one of those, right? And the fact that he happens to be Bengali and won the Nobel Prize well, you know.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's associated with Muslims, etc., etc., and this kind of hatred, intolerance, prejudice. That is what I'm saying is it's still something that's still very much in my family's kitchen at their dinner table. I mean, my parents are not like that at all, right? And they taught me to have to be free of these kinds of... Attitudes, but perhaps that's easier for me to say because I didn't experience the trauma of losing my family losing their ancestral property, for example, which some of their friends experienced and therefore even now in 2016, they're still saying, oh, but this horrible thing happened. We're still upset about it.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on top of that, there's the residue, there's the emotional residue of what it's meant for certain people either in my family or people that my family knows who remain Deeply scarred by those events, and not only deeply scarred but actively hostile, resentful toward, you know, for the case of my family toward East Bengal and Muslims, for example. And so this was something that I took in. And I still take in. And that uneasy relationship between Hindus and Muslims in Bengali culture, right, is still very alive today. And my daughter, her name is Noor, which is a Persian name. But there were people in my family who commented on that choice of name thinking, well, you know, what does she think she's doing?”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked my parents when I was a young girl, one of the stories in interpretive maladies called When Mr. Pirzada comes to dine comes from a kind of vague memory of a man from Bangladesh, a scholar who was living in Rhode Island in the 1970s during that civil war. And my curiosity about who he was and why he was there and stories my parents told me. And then As I grew older as I became more of a conscious person, teenager wondering about things, going back to India, I was slowly starting to fill in sort of pieces like, okay, so this is what happened and it happened this, it happened at this time and then this and this is what this meant, this wave of people came and all of these people lived this thing.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I mean it's interesting my relationship with Indian history is kind of in these two parts. Two categories in some set, I mean, in some sense, you know, I didn't study any of it because I was raised here, right? And so India just wasn't on any map anywhere ever. So there was that. There was a sort of formal separation as a child growing up in this country when I was growing up. On the other hand, I come from my family and because we would go back to Calcutta quite often and because my family and their friends talked a lot about their country, their city, history, events. So I was always aware at the same time of these incredibly traumatic events in Indian history and the partition, most of all, what that meant particularly for my father's family, the neighborhood that my father grew up in, which I describe in the lowland a little bit”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not glamorous in all of these things. So you felt, okay, this is a different kind of experience, not designed for the tourist, not designed for the important person, shall we say. And so that has already changed and that distance is smaller, significantly smaller. But in some sense, you know, Yes, I think still retains its own particular flavor and energy because of this, maybe.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source