Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I'm kind of trash at learning new languages.

It's always been a stumbling block for me. I took, I think, six years of French from junior high to high school and only managed to barely pass every time.

So I've always been kind of, I don't know, jealous of Jumbo Lahiri, who about a decade ago

moved to Rome to study Italian, and she did it. She mastered the language well enough that she

started writing books in Italian and translating them into English. She's got an essay collection out now

titled Translating Myself and Others about this process. And in this interview

with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, they get to talking about how translating makes you think differently

about language, about the words you use, and how translating just makes you a better writer.

A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story.

But right now, you probably need more.

On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes.

Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning.

Listen now to the Upfirst podcast from NPR. The writer Jumpa Lahiri is known for her stories about the immigrant

experience, books like interpreter of maladies and the namesake, rich fictional stories from

and of two worlds.

Well, Lahiri is less known for the other kind of writing.

She does translation.

For the last several years, the author and Princeton professor has been translating works from Italian to English, including her own work.

And in a new essay collection titled Translating Myself and Others,

Lahiri explores what draws her to translation. She joins me now. Jimpa Lahiri,

welcome back to all things considered. I'm glad to speak with you again. Thank you so much.

Clear the air, if you would, on something that I gather annoys you, which is the notion that translation is

...