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Abstract :
[en] In the Introduction to Translating Myself and Others (2022), a book of essays discussing her recent experiences both as a translator from Italian into English and as a writer in Italian, a language with which she had “no familial, personal or professional connection”, Jhumpa Lahiri emphasizes the multiple ‘cultural translation’ dilemmas that she has encountered, first as a child of Bengali immigrants “speaking and living in English and Bengali” in the USA, then as a successful writer bearing a burden of ethnic representation.
In fact, prior to 2015, when she decided to write only in Italian, Lahiri’s English-language work was overwhelmingly framed by presuppositions of “biographical connection” (Sarah Brouillette) between her life as a child of Bengali immigrants and her Bengali American characters. Ironically, while taking this earlier trend of scholarship to task for its overemphasis on binary oppositions between India and the USA and its fixation on identity politics, critics working within the field of translation studies have recently contended that the “logic of abstraction” at play in Lahiri’s Italian-language work was going hand in hand with a resolve to bypass “biographical readings of the multilingual condition”, which still evacuates the relationship between language, literariness, and the complexities of Lahiri’s second-generation positionality.
In my talk, rather than contending that her Italian-language texts can be read in isolation from any cultural frame, I will show that Lahiri’s recent decision to write only in Italian started giving more visibility to her reimagining of herself as a writer who has always been “linguistically orphaned”. What is more, by tracing the metaphor of Rome throughout her English-language output, I will build bridges between Lahiri’s English and Italian works, suggesting that the city of Rome (and later the Italian language) mediate the ‘translation dilemmas’ of a minor subjectivity continuously travelling towards meaning.
