Jhumpa Lahiri: belief

Transcript context

…He writes like an American writer in some ways. Well, he was influenced. This is what’s interesting: he was influenced by reading and translating Melville, among others, and his Italian has a different energy as a result of that translation. Those translations and his relationship with English — this is what’s missing in American literature right now, with the exception of poets, American poets who have devoted time and energy to other literatures, to translation. Whether it’s Ezra Pound or other poets, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand — you have examples of people who translate and make that part of their creative work, but relatively few fiction writers stop to think about it or engage with it. I think my knowledge of Italian writers has opened up something. I just finished translating my first novel from Italian and it has been such a formative experience for me, powerful, and it deepened my awareness of what words are and literature and language and all of that. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long, but I’m excited. Someone like Pavese blazed the way. One of my wishes is that you someday give us a book on Italian fiction. Now here’s a writer, not Italian, but writing in another language not the mother tongue: Agota Kristof.…

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