“Interpretation and Jhumpa Lahiri”

The New Yorker magazine has an uncanny record of publishing new work by authors I’m currently teaching in my classes, or articles relevant to subjects I’m teaching. A new short story by Jonathan Lethem will appear while I am halfway through his novel Girl in Landscape for my Coming-of-Age Novel course. A story based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis—by my favorite contemporary Kafkaesque writer, Haruki Murakami—will appear just as I’m wrapping up my unit on Kafka in the Twentieth-Century Novel. A review of the first Amazon Kindle, written by the novelist Nicholson Baker, will appear just after we finish discussing the summer reading for Twentieth-Century Novel, Baker’s 1988 book The Mezzanine. And there are further examples I could cite. The coincidence is nice, and it gives me an opportunity to mention some recent work by these living authors in class, but it’s also a little eerie, as if the New Yorker were keeping tabs on me, observing my syllabus from afar and orchestrating these convergences.

So I wasn’t too surprised when the December 7, 2015, issue arrived, featuring a “Personal History” story by Jhumpa Lahiri, just as the first iteration of this Short Story class was winding down last semester—and we were right in the middle of Interpreter of Maladies. The personal essay is titled “Teach Yourself Italian,” with the subheading, “For a writer, a foreign language is a new kind of adventure.” There’s a nice black-and-white photo of Lahiri, gazing with intense eyes at the camera. The first section is headed “Exile.” The essay begins:

                       My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.

                        Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. 
                        But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs 
                        mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not 
                        readily encounter it.

                        I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic 
                        outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.

            I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost
fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her 
language. (30)

Right away, we recognize some familiar themes from Lahiri’s fiction—cultural exile, language and culture migrating (or failing to migrate) to a new geographical territory, movement between continents. But something seemed off. This doesn’t sound like Lahiri’s prose, the graceful, carefully crafted, detail-oriented sentences that shape her short fiction. There’s a choppiness, a slight stiffness; the sentences are short, with fragments and comma splices. And the paragraphs are short. There’s the stiff use of “one” as a personal pronoun. There’s a kind of tentativeness to the sentences, like feeling around in the dark rather than confidently asserting a state of affairs.

The essay goes on to describe Lahiri’s own efforts to teach herself Italian, using a book called, conveniently enough, Teach Yourself Italian. She becomes obsessed with the Italian language, and with it, Italian history and culture. She writes her doctoral thesis on Italian architecture and its influence on seventeenth-century English playwrights. She travels to Italy, where, despite feeling confident that she “knows” the language, she is “barely able to ask for directions on the street.” Eventually, she moves with her family from the United States to Rome, where she begins to write in Italian rather than English. The essay details her “linguistic metamorphosis” as she explores the “very different literary path” that another language offers her: “I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself.”

The prose manages communicate its ideas clearly, and the short, choppy sentences often have a poetic directness to them. But they remain short, for the most part, with simple grammatical constructions. At the very end of the essay, there’s a clear explanation for this shift in narrative voice: Translated, from the Italian, by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri, of course, composed the essay in Italian—writing about her struggles to grasp the language and its nuances, to think in the language, and to express her ideas in this foreign form in the unfamiliar language itself.

It turns out that this essay is an excerpt from Lahiri’s newest book, In Other Words, which was composed in Italian and translated into English, which builds on the themes in the essay to explore her “love affair” with the Italian language, and her struggle to find a new voice with which to express herself after growing dissatisfied with English.

A nonfiction book about an Indian American writer’s fascination with Italian language and culture might seem like an abrupt transition, for a Pulitzer Prize winner in short fiction in English. But I was struck, as I read again through the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, how constant this theme of interpretation is throughout Lahiri’s work, how fascinated she is with people’s efforts to communicate across cultures, their failures and successes in doing so.

The title story, of course, concerns a literal “interpreter of maladies.” Mr. Kapasi had always imagined himself doing “real” and consequential work with his linguistic aptitude: “He had dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides” (52). But instead, in addition to part-time work as a tour guide, where he “interprets” India for visitors, he works in a doctor’s office, finding clever ways to convey the metaphorical descriptions of symptoms that patients bring to the doctor: “He complained that he felt as if there were long pieces of straw stuck in his throat. When I told the doctor he was able to prescribe the proper medication” (51). The Indian American wife in the backseat of his cab is suddenly interested in him, finding his work “romantic,” and thus begins a short-lived but intense period where Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi engage in what he describes as “like a private conversation” between them (54).

It soon becomes clear, as they are alone in the car and she moves to the front seat, treating him as a kind of confessor, that she has her own “malady” she wants him to interpret. After her sudden, shocking confession that Bobby is not Mr. Das’s son, and Mr. Das and Bobby (and the father) have no idea, it’s not clear what she’s hoping to hear him say, as we discussed in class: his summation, that it sounds like “guilt,” is about as good as I’d be able to do. But we get the impression that Mrs. Das wanted something more—she doesn’t ask what she should “do,” but demands that he have “something to say” (65). She wants a “remedy,” but it sounds more like she just wants to be understood, or sympathized with. To be interpreted to herself. Her secret makes her profoundly lonely, and we observe her disconnection from her husband and children from the first paragraph. She has this almost mystical faith in the ideal of “interpretation,” only there’s no “doctor” in the equation. It’s like she wants to be understood by Kapasi, or for him to “say something” that makes her understood to herself.

There’s one moment in “Interpreter of Maladies” that seems to anticipate Lahiri’s recent adventures in Italian, where the narrator describes, through Mr. Kapasi’s perspective, the excitement he feels at the prospect of this projected cross-continental friendship with Mrs. Das: “It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right in the world, that all struggles were rewarded” (55-56). “Interpretation” here is not simply the substitution of one code for another, but a sudden dawning of understanding, an ability to see another picture of the world, “unencumbered” by “effort.”

This idea of “interpretation” as something more than simple “translation” recurs throughout the collection, in many of the cross-cultural encounters Lahiri narrates. In “Sexy,” we see Miranda develop a sudden interest in Indian culture and language because of her exciting affair with Dev. She goes to an Indian restaurant and tried to “memorize phrases printed at the bottom of the menu,” but “the phrases didn’t stick in her mind” (96). So she starts to frequent the foreign-language section of a local bookstore, where she “studied the Bengali alphabet” using what appears to be the same series of books Lahiri herself used, “the Teach Yourself series.” She even tries to “transcribe the Indian part of her own name, ‘Mira’” (97), but it doesn’t turn out so good. “It was scribble to her, but somewhere in the world, she realized with a shock, it meant something” (97).

This ambiguity of “interpretation” persists throughout the story, as Miranda is never sure she “understands” Dev, and the reader can’t tell for sure whether this is a bona fide love affair, or is she is being played by a more experienced seducer. The story’s title refers to what she views as a key early moment in their affair, when they stand on opposite ends of the bridge, alone together in the Mapporium at the Christian Science center. Dev insists that they will be able to hear each other whisper across the span of the bridge, and he urges Miranda to say something. All she can think of is “hi,” after she hears his whispered words “so clearly that she felt them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot” (91). Ever the smooth-guy, he whispers back, “You’re sexy.” She experiences this moment as a kind of pure communication, across a symbolic cultural bridge (he’s just shown her the map of India), where “interpretation” takes the form of a physical sensation on her skin.

If this is the moment that makes Miranda believe that she’s in love, the story’s account of her falling out of love with Dev hinges on a reinterpretation of the titular phrase. When she encounters the preternaturally incisive, hyper-mature eight-year-old Rohin—a symbol of her own guilt, as he’s the one who must witness his mother crying herself to sleep every night as her husband has an affair halfway around the world—he suddenly calls her “sexy” (after she puts on the dress she bought for a date with Dev, significantly). She is, understandably, shocked (not a comfortable thing to hear from an eight-year-old!), so she asks him what the word means. He won’t reply at first (“It’s a secret,” implying that he knows some aspect of the word that she will be unfamiliar with), but she persists and, “gripp[ing] his ankles, holding his feet still,” she gets him to “interpret” Dev’s earlier line: “It means loving someone you don’t know” (107).

Now, lexicographers would dispute Rohin’s translation, but it hits home for Miranda. What she had experienced as a thrilling sensation of being “known” by Dev is now revealed to be a moment of failed communication, of not being known but only being seen, or wanted. “Miranda felt Rohin’s words under her skin, the same way she’d felt Dev’s. But instead of going hot she felt numb” (107-8).

It’s a revealing moment when she asks Dev later if he remembers what he whispered that day on the bridge, as if trying to confirm Rohin’s suggestion of a failed communication. Dev responds “playfully,” flirtatiously, and claims that he remembers: “Let’s go back to your place” (109). Well, no, Dev, those weren’t your actual words—but clearly this is what he meant by “You’re sexy.” He wasn’t seeing or knowing her in some profound way, expressing his love and their spiritual connection spanning continents; he simply wanted to go back to her place, which sums up his experience of their affair quite succinctly. Rohin’s interpretation turns out to be spot-on.