Jhumpa Lahiri: disagreement

Transcript context

…If I can trust the Internet, you have three master’s degrees in creative writing, comparative literature, and English, and for one of your degrees, you translated six Bengali short stories by Ashapoorna Devi, who’s a Bengali writer, maybe the most famous woman writer or even most famous writer in Bengal for much of the 20th century. What connects you to her and what problem were you trying to solve by engaging in her work? I knew about her through my mother, who’s a devoted reader of Ashapoorna Devi’s work and talked about her a lot. It’s interesting. My mother read a lot, but she didn’t really read in English very much at all. She read in Bengali. And I remember the effort of going to Kolkata, ordering the books. My mother . . . the list she would give my uncle, who had the connections with all the booksellers on College Street in Kolkata, which is the book district. The drama of this — going and ordering all the books from the publishers and waiting, and bringing them back in the rickshaw, piling them, the whole thing, and then bringing them back to the United States. I saw what it meant to her, and I saw, as with everything, with trying to get the right ingredients. I could see that those books simply weren’t available here, and they were, in some sense, her lifeline. Anyway, she would talk about the work of this particular author, among others, and I was struck by the things she described. A very prolific author of short stories and novels, of some very incisive short stories about domestic life and classified — unfairly, I think — as a writer for women, which I don’t think she is at all. I think she has a much more universal power and vision. In graduate school, I was taking this translation workshop, and at some point, I was asked to translate something and I thought, “Well, what can I do here?” I had studied Latin and ancient Greek a little bit, and I had some French, and then I had Bengali as my first language. But you didn’t read Bengali and Bengali characters?…

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