Built Interpreter of Maladies.

Transcript context

…To continue the whirlwind tour of your career — in preparing for this, I reread Interpreter of Maladies, and this was the sense I had this time around: that one of your characters, Mr. Kapasi, who is the interpreter of maladies — so if people come to the doctor and they only speak Gujarati, he’s able to translate that for the doctor and explain what the symptoms are — that in a sense, in the book you view yourself, the author, as the interpreter of maladies. People are disconnected in different ways, and you’re the one doing the interpreting; and he’s at the center of the book, and he’s a stand-in for you. Is that just my imagination? Probably not, but I don’t think I was aware of it at the time. Just yesterday, I was talking in Princeton at a place called Dorothea’s House, which is dedicated to Italian-American culture and so on, talking about the most recent book. At one point I was talking about this idea, in antiquity: in Latin, the word for translator is interpreter. I teach translation now, and I talk a lot to my students about translation being the most intimate form of reading and how there was the time when translating and interpreting and analyzing were all one thing. Now there are translators, and there are people who look at books and analyze them, and there are scholars, etc. It’s not necessarily the same activity. So I wrote Interpreter of Maladies; that was my first book. I called it that — I heard the title in this strange flash. Now years have gone by, and I’m now just setting out on a new phase of my creative life as a translator. And so I think it’s all one continuum. But one can’t realize these things in the moment. It’s only looking back that you see certain patterns. Another thing that struck me about this book was how much it had in common with Elena Ferrante in some ways. And of course, this is at a time when you wouldn’t have read her yet. But this notion of both feeling a need to set everything right for so many different people and being unable to, and that carrying a kind of sadness. And then interjected into the story, always, are books. Books in both have this immense power. Everyone’s reading them; everyone’s looking to them for answers. Yet at the same time, books are somehow impotent because they don’t actually allow anyone to set everything right, for parents or other sets of people. She has a bit of that, and you have a bit of that, and of course it’s completely independent. But your later fascination with her seems, already, to be in Interpreter of Maladies in some ways. Does that make sense to you?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.