Poets & Writers Theater

“It’s very disconcerting to translate oneself, but it’s a kind of pure contact with the work you make.” In this event welcoming Jhumpa Lahiri as the new Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author reads from her new collection, Roman Stories (Knopf, 2023), translated from the Italian by the author and Todd Portnowitz, and joins Brandon Taylor for a conversation about her work.

“My father was raised in Calcutta, in the neighborhood where all of these Bengali films were shot,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri about growing up surrounded by Bengali cinema and how it influenced her second novel, The Lowland (Knopf, 2013), in this 2017 interview for Criterion Collection.

Jhumpa Lahiri talks with Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's novels, about Ferrante, literature, translation, and writing at the Center for Jewish History. Lahiri, who is featured in the the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, has a new memoir, In Other Words (Knopf, 2016), which is translated from the Italian by Goldstein. For more from Lahiri and Goldstein, listen to the latest episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.

“All translation must be regarded first and foremost as a metamorphosis, that is to say a radical, painful, and miraculous transformation,” says Jhumpa Lahiri in her 2021 Sebald Lecture on literary translation and the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, presented by the British Centre for Literary Translation.

“Even after publishing my first book, I felt that the writing of the story came out of a place of deep isolation for me.” Jhumpa Lahiri discusses the creative process that informed her latest novel, The Lowland, which made the 2013 Man Booker shortlist.