Jhumpa Lahiri’s Bengali/English/Italian Triangle

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 into the paradoxical position of an ethnic ‘mainstream’ figure, and the scholarship on her early (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.
In 2015 though, Lahiri pulled the rug out from under critics who read her work via the well-trodden optics of assimilation and ethnic retention by publishing In Altre Parole (In Other Words, 2016), a generically hybrid collection of essays and short stories written in Italian, a language with which she had “no familial, personal or professional connection.” More recently, Lahiri’s reimagining of herself as a writer who has always been “linguistically orphaned” took an even more complex turn when she translated her own Italian-language novel Dove mi trovo (2018) and some of her Italian-language stories (included in Raconti Italiani, 2023) into English. Because her Italian-language work appeared to follow a Beckett-like “logic of abstraction”, critics such as Núria Codina Solà (2023) suggested that the Bengali American writer was turning self-translation into a practice of “untranslation,” thereby escaping “biographical readings of the multilingual condition.” Taking stock of the scholarship on Lahiri’s English- and Italian-language work and drawing on Jacques Derrida’s musings on language in his “Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin”, my talk will explore Lahiri’s relationship with her “triangle”, i.e., Bengali, English, and Italian, and argue that her self-translated ‘Italian’ work problematizes the association between language and notions of origin, authenticity, and authorship.