Life’s Work: An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri

The daughter of a librarian, Lahiri loved reading and writing at an early age. But she made it through college and four graduate programs before compiling the short story collection that became her first publication and, to her surprise, won a Pulitzer. Other stories and novels—most drawing on her experiences as a Bengali American—followed before she moved to Rome and began writing and publishing in Italian and translating between it and English. She teaches at Princeton, and her new book is called Translating Myself and Others. HBR: When did you realize that you were a writer? Lahiri: It was something I was always doing, thinking about, or wishing I could do. I was a reader, and I would write as a kind of accompaniment, a reaction or response. I went to college in New York City, the center of publishing, and as an undergraduate, I was surrounded by people who were really focused and serious about writing. I was much more tentative. After university, at graduate school, when I was in my twenties and living in Boston, I emerged as a writer. There was something about that environment that nurtured my very hesitant creativity, something in the air. I was spending more and more time inventing and writing stories. And by the time I was about 30, it hit me that this wasn’t going to go away. It wasn’t a hobby. It was something that I wanted to spend most of my energy trying to do better. Did you feel you were coming late to the party? A little. I know many people who do many things with their lives and then sit down to write beautifully. The undergraduates I teach now are focused on pursuing writing as a career. But I never thought of it that way, and I still don’t. You did want to get published, though. How hard was it to get Interpreter of Maladies out there? It took a while. My very first published story was thanks to a summer writing course I took at Harvard with a wonderful man named Stratis Haviaras. He put my story in the Harvard Review. Then a lot of time went by. I would send my stories here and there, and now and again I would get a positive reply amid a lot of rejections. Eventually I compiled a collection and sent it out to a couple of agents. I got more noes. Then I got a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, and I went there to write. I met with another agent, and I was expecting the same reaction: “These are interesting stories, but I can’t sell them, or I’m not motivated to try.” But she said, “Let me see if I can sell them.” And she did. When the book won the Pulitzer, how did it feel? Strange and bewildering. Very premature. I worried that they had chosen the wrong book, because there were no expectations for it at all. It was published as a paperback original at a price that didn’t feel like an investment. I was an unknown author. No book tour was planned, very little publicity. So bare-bones. Then it started getting critical attention, so they said, “Hmm, maybe we should send you on a tour.” The book was published in May or June. Nothing happened all summer, and then, in the fall, I suddenly found myself on planes and trains to do events. Still, nobody expected it to gain the attention that the Pulitzer eventually brought it a year later. Did you feel pressure to match or top that success going forward? I think that would have been an impossible thing to do. What I realized is that three very generous people who were on a committee and believed in my book granted me that recognition. There is something kind of arbitrary about all these prizes. Very few are democratic, with lots of people voting. It’s a panel. I had that perspective because when I received that prize, it didn’t really correspond to my sense of myself and where I was at that point in my journey. You moved from stories to a novel and back again, and now you’re writing in Italian. Why not stick to what was already working? I just follow my inspiration. Writing is a calling. I’ve never thought, Is this going to be successful? Is this going to strike a chord? Is this going to please people? Is this going to get me a lot of readers? Is this book going to sell well? My publishers and my agent think about those things, and that’s their job. But my job is different. My job isn’t a job. Italian was the language that called to me at a certain point, and then it became—quite surprisingly, but now rather definitively—the language of my creative expression, at least for the moment. I’m writing in Italian because that’s what I need to be doing. It’s not rational. In your new book, you say that a new language allows you to “experiment with weakness.” It’s important to not always be in control, to be in communication with a part of you that is still insecure and trying to figure things and yourself out—especially for artists. Writers are in some ways always children. Things are happening around them, and they’re observant, reactive, and vulnerable. A different language enables you to understand what you take for granted and what you can’t because you’re working at a disadvantage. You’re questioning everything you’re saying, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. How does the language you write in affect what you create? It’s not like you’re a different person. But you have a different vision. It allows you to see in a different way, with a different spirit, a different state of mind. I feel that when I write in Italian: a different relationship to reality. What do you learn through translating the work of others, or even your own work? I keep learning about language, which is what I love more than anything: thinking about words and how they come to be, how they change, what they do, what they can’t do, and connection and lack of connection between languages. This has always been the focus of my life as a reader and as a writer, and translation allows me to make it the priority. And it teaches me so much about writing. I tell my students that translating takes you inside the boiler room of the house, so you understand why the house is warm and comfortable. It’s really the best way to learn how to be a writer. The outsider experience—first as the child of Indian immigrants in the United States, and then as an adult American expat living in Rome—is a theme in your work. Have you learned to overcome that outsider feeling or use it to your advantage? Very much the latter. I will always feel like an outsider wherever I am, and I continue to explore that in my work and my life. Translation is a way of insisting on that, because you are always on the outside of the text. Did the fact that you’re a woman writer ever make you feel like an outsider or pigeonholed? I never take for granted the fact that I can write, because I know that literature has historically been dominated by male voices. I learned this and studied this and am very much aware of the struggle for women’s voices to be heard. Just look at the Premio Strega, the Strega Prize, and how many times a woman has won it [11 out of 74], and it’s quite clear. There’s still more to be done. As a professor, what’s the most important lesson you pass on to students? And what are you learning from them? I always try to pass on the lesson of reading slowly and carefully and creating that habit and practice for one’s life. And I learn a lot from them. It’s illuminating to see the larger context of how they think, what their priorities are, what they’re looking for. Which professional relationships have been most important to you? Teachers, editors, agents, translators? Well, my teachers from high school forward, my writing and literature professors. I studied with Elie Wiesel at Boston University and amazing people at Columbia and Barnard, who taught me Shakespeare and Latin. And I certainly learn a lot from fellow writers, often just conversing with them about life, work, other writers. But I think the deepest influence has come from writers I know only through their work. I’m sitting in my study now, staring at my bookcase, and looking at Chekhov and Virginia Woolf and Dante and Horace and Joyce. These are the relationships that made me a writer and a teacher, and without them there would be no editorial, publishing, or agent relationships. Is one thread common in all the writing you love and in your own work? It goes back to language. What makes it beautiful? What makes it sing? Conversely, what is it that we can’t put into language but try to anyway? I’m always interested in those questions of communication, silence, and miscommunication. All the writers I’ve admired have asked them.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri

Partner Center