In Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri and Biswamit Dwibedy: Translation, Truth and Circling the Silence

In April 2025, The American University of Paris welcomed to campus Jhumpa Lahiri, a celebrated author and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. Her visit came as she joined forty other authors in contributing to the University's Cahier Series. Lahiri’s cahier, Bone Into Stone, meditates on her translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the epic poem’s themes of origin, transformation and destiny. 

After a reading for the AUP community, Lahiri sat down for a conversation about poetry, translation and truth with Professor Biswamit Dwibedy, who co-leads AUP’s newly launched MFA in Creative Writing.  

B: In your book Translating Myself and Others, you say, "I was a translator before I was a writer." What do you mean by that?  

J: I was raised between two languages…always having to make sense, mostly for myself, of the two vocabularies—the two cultural vocabularies in addition to the literal vocabularies. I don't have an experience of life without that sense of not ‘making sense’ on either side, on both sides. So much of the English language and, for me, growing up American – the decline of vocabulary, of culture, of attitudes—all of these things did not make sense in the Bengali culture in which I was raised. And that culture did not make sense to the Americans I knew, or to the life I was exposed to.  

B: As a poet, I'm very interested in the idea of not making sense. How do we feel comfortable in that space of not making sense?  

J: Our common friend Rosemarie Waldrop is focused on these gaps and absences, and on the lack of meaning. I was drawn to that whole set of ideas in her work: when and where meaning ends. And meaning is always ending, all over the place. But all literature should, to some extent, take us to the extremes of life, and take us to the place where language can no longer do the work. Ideally be right on the edge of that. But we live in a very literalist world, and we live in a place, a time, of increasing lack of tolerance for all sorts of ambiguity and elusive statements. We live in times, politically, where there is this whole lack of truth… of those in power and how information is being handled or rather mishandled and disseminated, and we're getting warped information all the time. People are understandably attentive to language in that sense. But if we lose the positive senses of ambiguity and you know, more allusive speech, then we lose what literature has always been about. 

B: I was amazed by something you said at the talk at the American Library where you spoke of what "rings true," as opposed to what the truth is. Often I find that when writing prose, the sound of the sentence when it begins becomes even more important than it does in poetry. And with poetry, as you remark in one of your essays in Translating myself and others, it's not what it is, but what it could be that matters: the possibility in the sound, the "ringing true" and the possibilities that open up in creative work. 

J: It's like trusting a deeply subjective inner compass. But there's more pressure to listen to the other voices, the other potential voices. And there's always a danger for the writer to listen to the critic’s voice. I've done so much work trying to make my own voices, my own group of voices, keep them at bay to write the work. That's always been a struggle, to allow that inner voice to say what she has to say without worrying about disturbing. Disturbing reality, disturbing the reality of others. 

B: You also mentioned in your talk that you write what you hear. In a world so full of noise and all different variations of the truth, how does one create that metaphorical room of one's own? How does one listen?  

J: It's so hard, it’s such an increasing challenge, and I feel for young people, for young writers who are born with these things in their hands. I mean, I'll use the phone for some “downtime,” and an hour of my time will just go away. And I don’t even have social media. I don't live on my phone in that way that so many young people do and must. We tried to protect our kids from the devices and things, and it was clear that they were at a disadvantage and then when they got the phones, suddenly, they were in the swim of things because everything was on Facebook. This was the new language of how people were communicating. It's their language. And we, as parents, born into our generation, slightly suspicious of these new technologies, we're trying to protect them, and we have to give in. How do you find the noiseless space? How do you find the fundamental silence – another of Waldrop's key terms?  

Silence and the absence of meaning are two sides of the same coin. Where does language fall away? What do we do with these fundamental gaps between human experience and emotion and the words that are available to somehow articulate or record them, to create some sort of testimony that requires a rigorous state of silence? 

I worry about these young people who write on their computers, they don't write in a notebook, they don't write by hand. I look sometimes at students, what's happening on their screen, and it's like, how can one write with that? Yet they will find their way and human creativity will thrive. It has found a way to flourish, and I hope that is the case with this new generation, even if it will look very different. 

B: How did your cahier Bone Into Stone come about? 

J: I had been aware of the Cahiers Series, and I was always drawn to them. I know Neel Mukerjee, who has written one. And he once said, “Oh, you know, you should write one of these, they're all about translation.” And then Isabella Ducrot, who is my friend, who lives in Rome, she wrote one of the early ones. I met Dan [Gunn] at her house in Rome, and when we met he said, “Oh, would you consider writing one of these?” I said, sure, sounds like an interesting project. That was the birth. And I wondered what to write about. I was, am still so immersed in the Ovid project. So, it seemed like the right thing to do. The translation of Ovid’s The Metamorphoses was commissioned by Modern Library. The publisher reached out first to my colleague, Yelena Baraz, at Princeton, as the Latinist; they wanted a Latinist and a writer to work on it together. So that's how it came about. They contacted her, she contacted me, and that's the origin of the project. 

B: I like the idea of one book leading to the writing of another. Could you say a little more about the interrelatedness between these books?  

J: I'm just really interested in general in intertextuality and the increasing sort of closeness between projects. I think Domenico Starnone, whom I've translated, shed some light on this subject of how you can refer back and forth across books, because I think we're always writing one book, one Ur-book, one platonic book. I think it's helpful for me to think of it that way—this book is also about that, and that book is also about this. We don't want to repeat ourselves, but it's also false to think that there's no interconnective tissue. So I'm getting a little more, I suppose, relaxed, playful, with the idea, that the books can talk to each other, that the projects can talk to each other. When I first started writing, I was so aware of obeying the rules, and I don't even know who was really writing these rules, but they were there. And they kept shifting, but they were always very solid. Now, one thing I appreciate about this new phase of writing—call it the post-Italian phase—is that I do feel a little bit more like I'm authorizing myself to do things that are a bit less “by the book”, and am not as worried about what people are going to say; because people will say anything they want, no matter what you do. I feel like we have one life to live, and we have the time we have, and if you don't say what you really have to say, what was it all about? You have to say what you have to say. You have to try.  

B: There’s an idea that appears in both Proust and Jabès that, “you're always just writing that one book.”  

J: There's something that made all of us who write do this in the first place, some awareness deep inside of us. And I think we're always trying to get to that, even though we can't ever really break it down, and get to the heart of the matter, because when we try to get close to it… 

B: It's always poetry, or maybe all writing is just circling the silence.  

J: It is, that's what it is. It's circling the silent place. We cannot…there are no words to talk about it. Ask me to explain, don't ask me to describe. There are no words to describe what I'm seeing, what I'm feeling in this moment. I think that's the job of poetry and literature, to lead the reader to that place where—I can't explain it to you, but I can suggest that you think about it or try to think about it.  

B: Maybe that's what Rosemary Waldrop means in her Lawn of the Excluded Middle, that empty space—she also talks about in relationship to a woman's body–this emptiness, this abyss that we are all circling around. The great poet Fanny Howe has this line, “Every conversion begins with a single word.” And I love that, not just like religious conversion, but also being in the world, if you want to be a nicer person, you just have to say one word nicely. And that conversion begins… I was just wondering, was there a word or poem or book in Italian that made you…that triggered the transformation? 

J:  I did start reading a lot of Italian poetry actually, when I stopped reading in English, and started walling myself off inside of Italian as a reader. I started, I tried, with short stories, but I think that the language that really crossed over was the language of poetry: Bassani, Ungaretti, Saba, Pasolini, a lot of 20th-century poets. And their language landed in a way that made the conversion possible.  

B: What was it like writing your own poems in Italy? How long did that process take?  

J: It was kind of a nine-month fever…very strange. I still don't really know if they're poems or not, but people say they are. So, I accept that. In this case, I accept what people say. I've never studied poetry formally, as a writer, as a practitioner, only as a reader. I can say, I know this is a line, this is a stanza, this is a meter…I've studied poetry all my life as a student, but as a writer it felt like a foreign language, and I didn't know the rules of it, didn't know how to handle it. And so, I didn't know what that was doing—but I kept hearing it. I kept hearing these poems in my head in Italian, and kept writing them down in a notebook, and then, it became this strange book of poems. 

B: I am looking forward to reading them, both in Italian, when I learn the language, and when they're translated. I hope that will be soon. Would you, would you consider translating? 

J: I have considered translating. It's a tricky book to translate, but one of these days I should probably sit down and translate it. There's a whole section of poems that are kind of untranslatable…they're poems about gaps. They're poems about how a word in Italian sits in my brain, coming from the linguistic formation that I have, and sort of plays with that idea. So, it's hard to imagine some of the poems being translated to English, because they won't have any sense. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Special thanks to Professor Dan Gunn and AUP students Jaza Mya and Shreeda Subedi for their editorial assistance and support in transcribing this conversation. To learn more about AUP’s new MFA in Creative Writing, visit this website and apply today.