Is that why you said in your first essay that “my life is a series of grafts, one after the other,” and that you too have become a kind of graft, after writing in Italian? I don’t know if that’s why. So I imagine that I lack it because I don’t share that full unquestioning relationship to a language because I have linguistically hybrid influences, from the beginning. How do you understand its lack then do you understand it as a lack of protection, as you call it? When people talk about a mother tongue, and that language being an essential point of reference, I don’t have that. Throughout, she references Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a perfect example of each episode metaphorically being about translation, writing, “All translation must be regarded first and foremost as a metamorphosis: a radical, painful, and miraculous transformation in which specific traits and elements are shed and others are newly obtained.” “I was born with a translator’s disposition,” Lahiri writes in her latest effort, a collection of essays titled Translating Myself and Others, “in that my overriding desire was to connect disparate worlds.” In these personal essays, she meditates on inhabiting the identity of both writer and translator.

The disorientation born from that idea informed her novel Whereabouts, which she first wrote in Italian as Dove mi trovo (2018), and later translated herself into English. Lahiri’s self-translation seeks to blur those edges by inhabiting multiple linguistic universes, all at once. Language houses the extent and edges of our worlds, revealing to us ourselves in its limitations. She found it in In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian as In altre parole (2015) and translated by Ann Goldstein (known for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s work)-detailing her all-consuming longing for one language while experiencing exile from another. When Lahiri, at 45, briefly abandoned English to fully immerse herself in Italian in Rome, it was in search of that very deliberation.

Language, one such source of transformation, is rarely a choice and rather a default, something we seldom deliberate. Twenty-three years after it was published, transformation remains a recurring motif in Lahiri’s work. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was a treatise on marriages-ones that fail, reduce, deplete, or transform.

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