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Abstract :
[en] Following her having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her literary debut, the short story collection "Interpreter of Maladies", the Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri was ushered overnight into the ambiguous position of a minority star author. Framed as it was by presuppositions of “biographical connection” (Sarah Brouillette) between her life as a child of Bengali immigrants and her Bengali American characters, the reception of Lahiri’s first four fictional works overemphasized the stock themes of assimilation, ethnic retention and cultural hybridity while turning a blind eye to the literary merit of her books. Lahiri’s unfortunate staging of herself as “cultural translator” in the wake of the publication of Interpreter of Maladies was perceived to further vindicate one-dimensional ‘cultural’ approaches to her work, which encouraged some critics to take her to task over lack of authenticity (Dhingra Shankar 2009; Hai 2012; Srikanth 2012) and cultural treason (Trivedi 2009).
Unsurprisingly in that context, Lahiri caused quite a stir in 2015, when she published "In Altre Parole" ("In Other Words", 2016), a self-described “book of memory” and a generically hybrid collection of essays and short stories written in Italian, a language with which she had no familial or personal connections. Lahiri’s reimagining of herself as a writer-translator took an even more complex turn in 2021, when she translated her own novel "Dove mi trovo" (2018) into English ("Whereabouts"), a novel further moving toward abstraction and metaphors. Starting with an overview of the multiple ‘cultural translation’ dilemmas that have underpinned the second-generation perspective of Lahiri’s ‘American’ work and its reception, my talk argues that self-translation from Italian into English, her “stepmother tongue,” allows Lahiri to trace an ars memoriae that bypasses any identifiable cultural coordinates and finds belonging instead in abstract spaces and metaphors.
