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 I think it's retained a certain character that the other big cities have a more kind of Western overlay at this point. And Calcutta is not far behind and it's changed radically from the city I knew when I was a young girl. And now I think with developments, globalization, what have you, you have lots of development and all the five-store hotels you could ever want and all the companies and banks and things and fancy roads and all of that stuff that back in the 70s Calcutta didn't have those things and then the airport was distinctly”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean. I know that there, I mean, I hate to make these kind of sweeping generalized comments. I don't believe in them. But it's a city that believes in its poets. That believes in its politics, believes in humanity in some sense. And life is so extreme there in so many ways. People are put to the test and you see life being put to the test constantly around you and there's nothing you can really Except easily or take for granted about yourself or about the universe if you've been there. I mean it just, it's a jolt to your consciousness, but a fundamental one, an essential one, to shake us out of this whatever takes over if you protect yourself.”
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, it has its not knowing New York City in the American context. I mean, it's just its own thing and it's so strong in its flavor and its power and its energy. So it has to be reckoned with. I think.”
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 one of the most fascinating places on Earth that is, you know, I mean, it's just a city that is like no other life, a cultural life, a history. utterly its own and hard and beautiful I mean its beauty is not what one you know sort of conventional you know people say oh well is it a beautiful city well no I mean yes parts of it can be yes of course but not in that conventional sense and it's it's challenging on a whole host of levels and I of course I don't know it as a tourist right because my family's from there and I've never known it in any other way other than when I was very young where my grandparents lived and then my aunts and uncles, my cousins and so forth. So I have my own relationship to it. But”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, and so I published the book I wanted to publish, but a lot of people have said to me, I just couldn't read the book, you know. It was just too heavy, too dark, too whatever, whatever. And they miss, I think the sort of bittersweet quality of, say, a novel like the namesake.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case as we get older, right? So I think that, and I Read a lot about what people say about my work. I also don't live in a Vacuum in outer space. And so I sent reactions to certain things. And I think as the years have gone by and the books have evolved, the vision has become a little less forgiving, less tolerant, a little less Bittersweet and more just maybe bitter. And, you know, and that's fine. I mean, you know, I remember even with the lowland. I don't think my editor would mind if I share this with you, but at one point she said, well, it's just really grim sometimes, you know, what goes on. And we share a love of Hardy. And I just said, would you really have said that to Hardy? She didn't say anything else.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I certainly recognize that in her work when I read her and I wrote to her, I wrote some letters to her that were sort of public letters that I read in Rome some years ago. In public, and maybe she was there, or maybe she wasn't. In any case, she did write back to me. And I talked precisely about this. I talked about How she uses Doing that at all. But I think about it a lot. And so I was very struck by that element of her work and this focus on characters who write, characters who become writers, how books shape and form us on the one hand and how they betray us on the other hand and can't really contain what life is this sort of contradiction at heart.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teach translation now, and I talk a lot to my students about translation being the most intimate form of reading and how there was the time when translating and interpreting and analyzing sort of were all one thing and now there are translators and then there are people who look at books and analyze them and there are scholars and et cetera and it's not necessarily the same activity And it strikes me because now many years, I mean, so I wrote interpreter of maladies. I was my first book. I called it that. I heard the title in this strange. And now years later, years have gone by and I'm now just setting out on a new phase of my creative life as a translator. And so I think it's all one continuum, but I just wasn't one can't see, one can't realize these things in the moment. It's only looking back that you kind of see certain patterns.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not, but I don't think I was aware of it at the time. You know, I mean, I think Just yesterday I was a Was talking in Princeton at a place called Dorothea's house, which is sort of dedicated to Italian-American culture, so on. And we were talking about the most recent book and talking about, at one point I was talking about this idea of in antiquity, in Latin, the word for translator is interpreter”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think one thing that's always sort of in there is this idea of translation and bringing back and crossing over. I mean, one thing. Certainly, that was happening in the Renaissance was that these people were literally traveling to Venice, to Florence, to Rome, and seeing this architecture, which is sort of born from that place and then bringing those ideas back, translating the works of Vitruvius or Alberti or whomever, and then using those ideas to build, literally to build buildings in England. And then from there we have things here. In the United States. So that also interested me.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Symbol of corruption. It's a sort of horror love horror kind of love hate attraction repulsion Contradictory attitude, which I tried to. Unpack a little bit in the course of the dissertation.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of phase of my life, Italian writing in Italian, but it was I went with a special eye toward the architecture looking at the places that I was seeing in slides as a grad student in Boston and connecting to them for the first time really experiencing those spaces for the first time. And then when I came these plays When I was always interested in where Shakespeare said his plays, I was interested in his use of Italy as a setting and then that just sort of got me started thinking about what was the relationship of in Renaissance England, what was it all about and what did Italy represent to England and to English artists, dramatists and what was this choice all about? Why were they setting clearly kind of English political drama on foreign soil and what that meant”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mature friendship. Yes, he's very Congratulations. Yeah, I mean, he's a very well-spoken man and with a broad range of interests, aesthetics, philosophy, architecture. Anyway, and he taught part of this class and talked about the language of architecture, Italian architecture in particular. And I just was really struck by the class, the idea of it, looking at space so carefully, these beautiful spaces, what they meant, the vocabulary implicit in architecture. So that was sort of step one. And then I went to Florence in this time. I went to Italy for the first time. I went to Florence with not only did it lead to this whole other...”
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, something's just, you know, now that you ask me, I'm thinking, okay, so what led me to this classes, again, that I was taking as a graduate student was a class, a seminar. It was a sort of a broad seminar with lots of different professors anyway. So there was this one professor named Roger Scruton who writes a lot about architecture.”
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 I wrote in the commentary I wrote to the thesis, if I'm not mistaken, I mean this was a lifetime ago, but I think that was part of the lens I brought to my reading, to my critical reading of the stories, was that she was a writer very attuned to space, to physical space. And so I must have been affected by this in some sense. And then my doctoral dissertation kind of built on this in that I wrote about Jacobian English drama and where it was set, specifically often in a corrupt Italian palazzo. And so what that meant. So I think as a reader of literature when I was a student of literature, I was very attuned to where things Were set and why and what it meant to have that literal architecture being an element of narrative.”
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 couldn't read it and I still really can't. And I couldn't write in it either. And I still really can't. And yet I worked around this obvious obstacle and I asked my mother to read a number of these stories out loud and I taped her. Then I listened to them and kept playing them back, playing them back, and I translated in this way. And I can read enough, I mean, painfully slowly, but it's not completely incomprehensible to me so that I could then also go back in addition to the tapes, I could also look at the text and sort of see how things were structured, where the breaks were, etc., etc. And I even caught my mother a couple of times. She kind of skipped, you know, a paragraph here and there, and I would call her up and say, what about this part where she's describing, 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
“At some point I was asked to translate something and I thought, well, what can I do here? And I had studied Latin and ancient Greek a little bit and I had some French. And then I had Bengali as my first language.”
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, I saw what it meant to her, you know, and I saw, I mean, as with everything with trying to get the right ingredients, what have you, but the literature was, you know, I could see that those books simply weren't available here, and they were in some sense her lifeline. Anyway, so she would talk about these, she would talk about the work of this particular author, among others. And I was struck by the thing she described, you know, a very prolific author of short stories and novels of some very incisive short stories about kind of domestic life and sort of classified unfairly, I think, as a writer for women, which I don't think she is. At all. I think she has a much more universal power and vision. Anyway, in graduate school, I was taking this translation workshop. And so the assignment”
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 knew about her through my mother, who is a devoted reader of Ashapunadevi's work and talked about her a lot. I mean, it's interesting, you know, I mean, my mother read a lot, but she didn't really read in English very much at all, but she read in Bengali. And I remember the effort of going to Calcutta, ordering the books My mother, the list she would give my uncle who had the connections with all the booksellers on College Street in Calcutta, which is like the book kind of district and the drama of this, you know, going and ordering all the books from the publishers and waiting and bringing them back in the brick shop, piling them the whole thing, and then bringing them back to the United States.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not what literature does. Literature does the opposite, and it allows us to cross over those boundaries in a beautiful way, in a magical way.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, I think what I'm responding to is the sense of displacement in those authors and in almost any author, I mean, even Willa Cathar, you can read this way Homer, you can read this way. So many authors, you can read this way, which is why I think some years ago I was asked this question by the New York Times book review about what was my problem with immigrant literature. And I made a kind of maybe cheeky remark about how I didn't believe in it. But this is, it wasn't being cheeky, it was just being what I felt was true, which is that this is something I've responded to in literature from the very beginning. And if I didn't have this response to literature, then, you know, these writers wouldn't have fed and inspired me the way they did because there would have been a quote-unquote barrier between their experiences and their times and mine. And that shouldn't be the case, right?”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rise to another level of reading and So that's probably what I was reading a lot of. I loved Hawthorne even then. So I was in 10th grade when I was 15. I read the Great Gatsby that year. And then the following year, I was introduced to Hardy, who has become so important to me as well. So it was in high school that I encountered fortunately certain authors who have stayed with me for all of this time and who continue to inspire 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, I think I had started reading Russian literature around that age. I had some friends, my family had friends with some, you know, one of the three daughters. One of them was a little bit older. She was already in college, and so when I would visit them, I would see these big Volumes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy on her desk these Norton critical editions. They were really appealing to me. And so I think I tried to kind of”
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 couldn't mention it. I couldn't name it as such. And I think that's telling. It was saying something. The fact that in the earlier books I was, you know, I was writing about the ocean. I was writing about this kind of small campus, little town and describing these settings that I knew very well, the settings I had grown up in, but I couldn't come out and say that it was Rhode Island and I kept calling it some suburb of Boston. And, you know, so I think the writing of that piece unlocked something. And then in the lowland there in Rhode Island, and I don't pretend anymore”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I was asked to write about Rhode Island. I said, yes, but partly it was to get over this sense of discomfort about your very opening work? Well, I mean, I think what was helpful about it is that It opened up the setting of the lowland which Set in part in Rhode Island, but it's the first of my books in which I can actually mention Rhode Island by its name, whereas the other books that preceding books are set in these sort of, you know, fake Rhode Island slash Massachusetts kind of, you know, this area, this terrain, that it really is Rhode Island just to boil it down.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did And so then I think I lived for as long in New York. As I did in Rhode Island, but of course one's childhood is one's childhood and is formative. In a way that later experiences are not so. Yes, I mean, it is a part of who I am, absolutely, but I don't feel, I mean, I've always had a very uneasy. And, you know, you mentioned the essay in state by state, one of these books that have been kindly assembled here, such a lovely display. Really, I'm so touched. But I was asked to write about Rhode Island in this anthology called state by state which invited a number of authors to write about their home state or a state that they had some sort of connection to. In any case, so I chose Rhode Island.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncomfortably. I mean, now, with all due respect. I mean, it's true. Well, first of all, thank you all very much for coming and for your warm welcome. It is true that I lived there well, let's see how long did I live there from the age of three to eighteen. So fifteen years.”
2017-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source