Jhumpa Lahiri

Translation at Boston University

I was a third-year graduate student when I took Mary Ann McGrail’s translation seminar in 1994, not knowing quite what to expect. Apart from producing rudimentary translations in the course of studying Latin and Ancient Greek, I’d never thought formally, or with any particular aspirations, about what translation meant. The premise for Professor McGrail’s course struck me as unusual, given that each of the students had a unique linguistic background. But I discovered that these differences worked in our favor; the spirit of the seminar was collaborative, spontaneous, each of us contributing what we knew. We listened to each other reading texts in original languages, asked each other questions about the challenges of transforming the identity of these texts, and read a series of great books in English translation. I remember reading Bulgakov, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn for the first time and, as a consequence, thinking about the political, aesthetic, and ethical value—and, I hasten to add, necessity—of translating literature across time and space.

There was, during my years of graduate study in the University Professors Program, tremendous energy and passion for literary translation. It was central to the cultural and intellectual conversation. William Arrowsmith had recently died, and his spirit and legacy, in the wide corridors of the sixth floor of the School of Theology, were still palpable. Agni and Arion, both published by the University, regularly devoted pages to translated work. The mission of practicing, celebrating, and disseminating translation bound together an extraordinary group of scholars, poets, writers, and thinkers who taught at B.U. Among those I knew and learned from, either in person or through their work, were Donald Carne-Ross, Rosanna Warren, Christopher Ricks, Roger Shattuck, and Alberto De Lacerda. Two of the most memorable courses I took as a graduate student involved reading exclusively in translation: Kafka with Elie Wiesel, and Pessoa with Alberto De Lacerda. All this began to take root: I was inspired to attend lectures by Gregory Rabassa, to listen to David Ferry talk about Horace and Gilgamesh. The translation seminar with Mary Ann McGrail led to my M.A. thesis in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts—a translation of six short stories and a critical commentary of the Bengali writer Ashapurna Devi. It laid the foundation stone, in some sense, for my eventual dissertation in Renaissance studies, which focused on questions of interpreting, transporting, and transposing an Italian architectural idiom onto the Jacobean English stage. And it was at B.U. that I started to study Italian.

So much of what I do, think, and care about today can be traced back to the translation seminar. My fiction, which began to evolve during that same period in Boston, has always been about communicating, about language, and it is perhaps no coincidence that I have written a number of stories about characters who translate, who interpret, who juggle linguistic identities, who struggle to make themselves understood. My recent fiction, written directly in Italian, my newfound interest in translating classic and contemporary Italian authors, and the strange step of now translating myself out of Italian back into English are experimental steps that nevertheless strike me as the logical continuation of a journey I began long ago at B.U., in a fertile climate of polyglot border-crossing.

At Princeton, I teach a translation workshop every semester, and am committed to teaching literature in translation. In my translation workshop, I strive to replicate that same energy and collaborative spirit I remember from the seminar at B.U. I invite translators to campus at every opportunity and encourage students to write a translation thesis. The other day, I was below ground at Princeton’s Firestone Library, searching for a book by Cesare Pavese, when I happened to notice an English version of Dialogues with Leuco. Opening it, I saw that it was a joint translation by Arrowsmith, who was a graduate of Princeton, and Carne-Ross. I thought back to that constellation of poets, scholars, and translators who were my professors in the early nineties, and I remembered the attention, at once rigorous and vibrant, each of them paid to works of literature that make the precarious journey from one language to another. The book seemed to transmit heat and meaning as I leafed through it, those pages of Pavese, translated from Italian to English, compressing decades and knitting together so many strands of my own journey. In the darkened library stacks, that constellation still burned bright.