Jhumpa Lahiri Continues to Explore the Nature of Being an Outsider
originally Published: Oct 9, 2023The Pulitzer Prize-winning author discusses her new short story collection, “Roman Stories.”
In 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri moved her entire family to Rome, partly to pursue fluency in Italian, a process she’s written about extensively in several essays and a nonfiction book called Translating Myself and Others. During her stay in Rome, Lahiri began writing her own fiction exclusively in Italian and then translating her own work (and the work of other writers) into English.
Now, Lahiri lives “between” Rome and New York, and her newest collection of short stories, titled Roman Stories, includes some of the earliest she wrote in Italian and translated herself. Over a stateside phone call, Lahiri said these stories, written over the course of 10 years between 2012 and 2022, come from life in Rome. “From my observations, my impressions, my experiences, from sort of a combination of things seen, heard, [and] felt,” she says. “And they come from my ongoing interest in writing in Italian and seeing how much more I was able to say using a new language, using new words.”
The themes from Lahiri’s stories, like issues of identity and community in connection to immigration, are very much present in her new work. Her stories follow born-and-raised Romans who can’t quite make their city feel like home, immigrants who struggle to find their place in the Eternal City, and expats whose ability to jump from place to place sometimes hampers real connection. Shondaland talked to Lahiri about the human drive to move, our consistent struggle to feel connected, and the way her translation work has shifted over the years.
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SHELBI POLK: Has your process for translating yourself changed much in the last decade of doing this?
JHUMPA LAHIRI: It's less deeply discombobulating. I mean, it is in general a discombobulating experience, as I talk about in Translating Myself and Others. There's a chapter I devote to this strange process of reworking something you've already written now to be thought about in another language. There's less nervousness surrounding the issue of working in English again. I don't feel scared to shift between the languages, especially as a translator. I still feel that my thought process and creative process in Italian, I don't question it in the same way. I'm not as worried that it's a fleeting thing that will vanish if I don't devote myself to it exclusively.
SP: Not as fragile, perhaps?
JL: Yeah, not as fragile. Not as tenuous.
SP: That's really cool. I know so many of the questions you're asked are about writing about the immigrant experience and the cross-cultural experience. But I am really curious about the difference between doing that in an American setting and in Rome. How did the setting in which you were writing these stories affect that core tension?
JL: Well, I'm looking at outsiders of all kinds. And these stories in that sense, I think they cover a broader range of some experience of being an outsider and looking at "insiders" who also feel like outsiders. So, I'm pushing the definition, I think, of what it means to be a foreigner to a greater degree in this book because I take away so many of the specifics of where exactly people are from or what exactly their backgrounds are, their ethnic identity or their racial identity. I make suggestions to the reader of where these characters might come from or why they're coming up against the kind of behavior, or treatment, or attitude. But I don't spell it out to the reader, and I feel that this has enabled me in this book to really get to the heart of the question of what is an outsider. What defines an outsider? What defines a person who is part of a culture, part of a society, as opposed to not being part of a culture and part of society? And I think that as a person, as a writer, who has never felt part fully part of any culture and society, that was important to me to really press that issue and to question, you know, what is the moment? What demarcates the difference between outsider and insider? And my answer to my own question, so much of it is really a state of mind. Because we know that even when we have official documents, papers, passports, green cards, what have you, in my experience, it's not a black-and-white question. It's not an obvious solution to the enormously complex questions of cultural identity, belonging, origins — all of these sort of big container words that we, as human beings, of course, spend time thinking about and questioning.
As soon as we ask ourselves, "Who are we?" We ask ourselves, "Where are we? Where am I from? Where did I come from? Where did my family come from? Why am I here now? What were the movements? What were the migrations? Were they voluntary? Were they forced?" There are so many variables at play. And yet, I feel that we still search for very simple solutions to describe people, to put labels on people, to say, okay, this person is that as opposed to this. And I wanted to put a collection together in which everybody's an outsider. Practically everybody in the book that I write about, all the characters have a sense of both belonging to Rome, feeling connected to the city in a fundamental way, but also feeling that they are somehow on the margins of it. There's something there that's not letting them fully feel that they are part of the city. And I think we can take that idea and think about it more broadly, more existentially, if you will. To think about, well, isn't this how we always feel, sort of, maybe all the time? And the person who's saying to themselves, to himself, to herself, "This is my place, and those other places are not my place." I think if you dig a little bit deeper into that statement, all sorts of holes start to emerge. Is it really your place? Really?
In recent years, I've been working at universities. I worked at Princeton and teach at Barnard, Columbia. It's part of practice now to acknowledge the land on which we sit and on which we speak. These things weren't part of the discourse, perhaps, when I was going to college, but they are certainly part of the discourse today. And I think they're helpful because we do need to remember not only the very important fact that so much of the land that we are sitting on did belong to Indigenous populations. But even before that, if we can just take an even broader view of all of these ideas of nationhood and identity being so tightly bound up and specific. They're actually very modern ideas. When we think about the history of time, we think of the human race, which has always been a race of migrants and people shifting and moving and searching, and then uploading and reestablishing, re-creating beginnings. This is one of the most powerful forces, I think, of human nature. But also, one of the most problematic because sometimes it's done to us, and we have no say. So, we all have the full spectrum.
"I think, as l've been exploring from book to book, we are all migrants. Even if we are born and die in the same house, I believe that we are passengers, and we are moving from moment to moment, from year to year, from phase to phase of life, and nothing is fixed.”
SP: I especially liked that tension in the narrator of the very last story in this collection, "Dante Alighieri." For her, it's not just where you’re from that makes you feel different. It’s how you relate to where you’re from and everything that comes with it. It’s much more than just the external markers.
JL: I believe so. "Welcome home" is a lovely expression, a lovely thing to say, and a lovely thing to feel. But then there are moments in my life when someone will say, “Welcome home.” And I have a hard time accepting this nice expression because I’m thinking to myself, “But I have this other home.” Yes, this is our home, but I have another home simultaneously. And I’ve also had other homes in my life, and all of these homes, in some sense, are like a stacked reality. They've all been homes. They've all been places which have served as home. So, to me, it's much more of a layered notion. And these statements, these phrases and expressions, it's a little bit like a tablecloth that's a little bit too short. There's always a little corner poking out. What you're saying isn't quite covering the surface of the table, and then I'm made to feel aware of that.
And I think as a child of immigrants, that was something I never was unaware of. Because it was so clear to me that my parents were living their day-to-day lives in a very concerted, determined way to build a life in the United States, raise a family, and so on, and so forth. But I was not raised in a home that fully represented the idea of home. So, when that is your reality, it's very hard to have these blanket notions of this is home and welcome home. Now I'm away, but now I'm home again. I think, as I've been exploring from book to book, we are all migrants. Even if we are born and die in the same house, I believe that we are passengers, and we are moving from moment to moment, from year to year, from phase to phase of life, and nothing is fixed. And sometimes these notions of being from a place as opposed to being from another place can actually be quite limiting, and perhaps even dangerous, in my opinion.
SP: I also found that the interrogations of estrangement within families too, especially parents who just couldn't understand their children, deeply resonate. Did you have that parallel tension of belonging versus almost foreignness within families in mind going in, or was that something that emerged as you wrote?
JL: Well, I think all of my work from the beginning is looking at how this idea of foreignness is experienced and understood not only by different kinds of people but by people within the same family. Especially that parent-child divide. I've written about this so much in my first books in English. What does identity and being on the inside or outside of something mean to the parent generation, the generation that actually immigrates, and uproots, and so on, so forth? And then through that next generation, that's trying to, in the case of those former books, be American, who feel very caught or alienated from both sides of the equation, alienated from the origins and alienated from the immediate surroundings.
And so in this collection, I think that, yes, there are tensions, certainly, between parents who still feel more of a visceral tie to the place they left behind and the children who have their own issues. I don't think it's easier or harder for one generation versus another. And I am now a parent. I have two grown children, and I have raised my children in two different parts of the world. So, I also see how these questions persist. They don't resolve themselves from one generation to another. In my case, I don't know. Maybe if I had decided to stay in Brooklyn, New York, my whole life and raise my kids here, maybe my children would have had a much more grounded, unquestioning sense of who they are and where they're from. We moved to a different continent, we moved to different parts of the U.S., and now we're back in New York. Both of my children happened to be studying in the city. So, it's an interesting kind of coming full circle but not exactly. It's interesting. It's rich, but it's complicated.
SP: Absolutely. The last thing I wanted to ask about was your translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Can you give us an update on that?
JL: Eventually, hopefully, yes. We just got the first set of pages back from our editor. This week, we'll have a conversation, and we'll sort of think about next steps. The whole thing has to be revised, I imagine, many times. There's a critical apparatus we'd like to write, there are notes, there's an introduction. There's all sorts of paratext material that we have to sit down and think about and then produce. So, given what's going on in my life, and what's going on in my co-translator's life, Yelena Baraz, I imagine a couple of years at least of just labor, and then we’ll see about the publication dates. It’s a long-term project for us.
Email: shelbi.e.polk@gmail.com
Phone: +1 (972) 904-7388
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