SPEAKER 1: So we have with Rushdie someone

who really grows up in this succession crisis and this migrancy

of a certain sort where he's still very much
connected to the India of his youth.
But Jhumpa Lahiri, she's a generation removed, just as a small child comes
to the US when their parents move, having gone first to England and then
to the US.
And then in The Interpreter of Maladies, which
is five years later than East West, I think of it
as a kind of almost response to Rushdie because she
has stories set east, stories set west, and east west stories also.
But now it is a generation later.
It's a kind of post-post-colonial phase.
And I wonder what, for writers of the younger generation,
this colonial heritage would seem to mean, this migrancy.
SPEAKER 2: I think it would mean something different
because for the earlier generation, the relationship was
India and Great Britain.
This is, of course, equally true for the great Caribbean writers of the '50s.
SPEAKER 1: Sam Selvon.
SPEAKER 2: Sam Selvon, Naipaul, George Lamming, Wilson Harris.
You know, this was this sort of two part--
I don't want to say polar, but this two-part relationship.
And with somebody like Jhumpa Lahiri, and now
there are generations after her, it's leaving India as a child,
coming to England, which was often a staging post, and then moving on.
And by the way, I think she was brought up in this area, which--
SPEAKER 1: Right, right, very much.
Rhode Island.
SPEAKER 2: --two other-- I know two other people
who have exactly the same trajectory.
Younger than her--
SPEAKER 1: So she has these parents whose memories are India.
She doesn't really even remember England.
She comes like two years old or something.
SPEAKER 2: It's just a quick transition.
SPEAKER 1: That's right, and then grows up in Rhode Island
and then goes to graduate school in Boston College,
gets a Ph.D. In Renaissance Theater, which is interesting.
So it's not so much Bollywood.
It's like theater.
But-- and there's a kind of theatricality.
Her stories are really very much like stage sets.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: It could really stage very well on a stage,
like that beautiful first, really just like in the kitchen, the living
room of this little house.
For Rushdie, say, with the [INAUDIBLE], American culture
is a slightly strange import coming in.
SPEAKER 2: Into there, coming in through the media.
SPEAKER 1: That's right.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: Whereas here, she's in the United States.
SPEAKER 2: But she's in the United States
and I think for her, that becomes the stage,
the naturalized or normalized stage, the mise en scene,
into which, then, come the memories of the parents
or other migrants who come in and settle in and live here.
So it's a kind of reversal of perspective.
But it is still a double perspective.
I think one of the important things about these writers
is whether they've experienced the past in another country or not,
it is part of their world.
They hear it in the voices of their parents.
They see it in photographs.
SPEAKER 1: It's so interesting that The interpreter of Maladies
starts out with that first story, a temporary matter, which is really
about this young couple very much like her age, her environments,
in the Boston Cambridge area, and this kind of falling apart
of her heartbreaking little story.
And then it has stories in the middle.
The title story is set like in [INAUDIBLE] as this kind of-- Indians
coming back as tourists to the land of their parents,
encountering this guy who'll interpret for them,
and he thinks they can have a connection [INAUDIBLE].
And then the final story, the third and final continent,
is going back to imagine her father and mother first coming and settling
in the United States.
It's a kind of journey back.
SPEAKER 2: Yes, journey back, and also that when
you've had that kind of initial displacement, whether it happened
to your parents or whether it happened to you in the stories
that the parents have told or in visits back or people who come to visit you,
then when you've had that kind of story, you often write out of a disjunction
that no scene, whether it's the US, whether it's the home, whether it's
the state, Rhode Island, whether it's the territory,
none of these territories have a kind of inevitability to them.
SPEAKER 1: And it's interesting just as the time we're speaking now,
Larry has just published this new book written in Italian.
SPEAKER 2: In Italian.
SPEAKER 1: She displaces-- she's not displaced enough.
She goes to Italy, moves her family, learns Italian,
starts writing in Italian.
SPEAKER 2: Yes, and I think she said somewhere
or somebody said about the book that she discovers through it a freedom
to write in a second language assuming that some form of her parents'
language and Bengali and her own English are kind of co-parenting languages,
you know.
Like in my case too, we spoke Gujarati and English more or less
at the same time.
But here with Italian, she begins to see herself,
I think, almost fictionally in another context.
And this reminds me so much of Benjamin's concept of the foreignness
of translation, you know, where he says that the act of translation,
whether it's from German to Hindi or Hindi
to German, what it most makes you aware of
is not the strangeness of the other language,
but in the process of translation or cultural translation,
as we've been talking about it, you become aware of your own foreignness.
SPEAKER 1: And in this case, Lahiri seeks this out.
It's very interesting.
If Rushdie has a sort of classic trajectory of Bombay, England,
and then more or less becomes a New Yorker,
Lahiri is going in the opposite direction.
But also, it's now a global world where she picks Italy, of all places.
SPEAKER 2: Yes.
SPEAKER 1: She's not going to London or--
SPEAKER 2: No, she's not going back.
SPEAKER 1: --some center.
She's going precisely [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 2: She's going to Italy, where she moved and lived for many years
till quite recently.
I think she's just returning to Princeton.
But I think that for her, it's again a theatrical move.
It's like saying, scene change, you know, scene three.
Now you are in Italy.
Now do what you do.
Make your life again in your work in this other language.
And of course, the interesting thing about the book
is that I think it's a bilingual tradition.
It's published both in the, as I understand it--
SPEAKER 1: Right, bilingual, right.
And then a translation of the Italian.
SPEAKER 2: So you have both side by side.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER 2: And I think that is a very interesting and courageous
interpretation because in the seam of the book where the two pages end
and meet, you begin to get this notion of what is translatable
and what is untranslatable.
And of course, if we just extrapolate from that,
the possibility of people living side by side,
whether they are in a migrant situation or a situation of refugees,
living side by side demands not a fence or a wall between people
so that they can tolerate each other.
But what it demands is that people are able to experience
that scene, that untranslatability.
In some ways, I know it sounds pious, but to respect that
and then to work around it, its difference has to be worked.
Difference is not what you come with in a negotiation of peoples.
And that's what I tried to suggest when I wrote
and continue to write about hybridity as a form of translation.
SPEAKER 1: Well, thank you so much for this very, very illuminating
discussion.
SPEAKER 2: I don't know about that, but I hope you enjoyed it.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you.