Spectator Books: how does the world look through a different language?
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week's books podcast, Sam Leith is joined by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Someone whose own fiction has negotiated the cross-cultural territory of her Bengali-American identity, Jhumpa in the last few years has been negotiating a new crossing of cultures after settling in Rome with her family and starting to write fiction and memoir in Italian. She joins the podcast to discuss the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, which she edited, and talk about what a new language gives a writer, how the war shaped Italian literature, and why - as a professor of creative writing at Princeton - she refuses to teach creative writing.
Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, the Spectator's Literary Editor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. |
| 0:11.2 | This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Jumper Lahiri, who is known best here as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels and short stories, but here she's with us as an |
| 0:22.8 | anthologist. She's just publishing the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. And Jean-Pé, the first thing |
| 0:29.7 | I had, first most obvious thing to ask is Italian is not your first language. You know, you're a |
| 0:37.3 | Bengali American and you came to Italy |
| 0:40.3 | several years ago. What is it that made you want to write or collect Italian short stories? And what do you think, kind of coming in as someone who isn't, at first in the Italian tradition, kind of brings to that project? |
| 0:54.2 | Well, as I explain in the introduction to this volume, |
| 0:58.6 | I first wanted to, for my own purposes, |
| 1:03.9 | sort of gather together writers I had been discovering, right, |
| 1:07.5 | on this Italian adventure, which for me very much involves reading and knowing better the literature, the literary tradition. |
| 1:17.9 | And so I already had a vague idea to put together a book like this. |
| 1:24.2 | And then I think what motivated me even more was the experience of teaching at Princeton |
| 1:28.9 | and wanting to share with my students some remarkable authors that I was very excited about |
| 1:36.8 | and wanted to talk about and wanted to know what they thought about these authors |
| 1:41.9 | and wanted to use as models for writing and reading |
| 1:46.5 | in general. |
| 1:48.2 | And so then the difficulty, the frustration at times of trying to find those authors in translation, |
| 1:56.3 | the growing realization that there wasn't actually a whole lot readily available in English, outside, |
| 2:04.1 | sort of handful of names and authors, Italian authors, who had sort of safely and securely |
| 2:10.5 | made the voyage into English, the fact that there were so many more, so many, many more |
| 2:15.9 | that were very exciting to me. |
| 2:18.1 | This then became a mission. |
... |
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