Mentions personal use of Interpreter of Maladies.

Transcript context

…Yeah, and I think one thing that’s always in there is this idea of translation and bringing back and crossing over. One thing that was happening in the Renaissance was that these people were literally traveling to Venice, to Florence, to Rome, and seeing this architecture, which is born from that place, and then bringing those ideas back. Translating the works of Vitruvius or [Leon Battista] Alberti or whomever, and then using those ideas literally to build buildings in England, and from there we have things here in the United States. So that also interested me. 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.…

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