Jhumpa Lahiri on Loving, But Not Yet Trusting, the English Language

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was a treatise on marriages—ones that fail, reduce, deplete, or transform. Twenty-three years after it was published, transformation remains a recurring motif in Lahiri’s work. Language, one such source of transformation, is rarely a choice and rather a default, something we seldom deliberate. When Lahiri, at 45, briefly abandoned English to fully immerse herself in Italian in Rome, it was in search of that very deliberation. She found it in In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian as In altre parole (2015) and translated by Ann Goldstein… Read Full Article