In Other Words

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Although there aren’t many cars, the city is humming. I’m aware of a sound that I like, of conversations, phrases, words that I hear wherever I go. As if the whole city were a theater in which a slightly restless audience is chatting before the show begins.

Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.

I believe that what can change our life is always outside of us.

from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.

I understand that the imperfect refers to a sort of introduction—an open-ended action, without boundaries, without beginning or end. An action suspended rather than contained, confined to the past. I understand that the relationship between the imperfect and the simple past is a precise, complex system, to make time gone by more tangible, more vivid. A way of recounting something abstract, of perceiving something that isn’t there.

I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal. I used to love translating from Latin, from ancient Greek, from Bengali. It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time. Translating myself, from a language in which I am still a novice, isn’t the same thing.

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the light, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

Every so often, because of my name, and my appearance, someone asks me why I chose to write in English rather than in my native language. Those who meet me for the first time—when they see me, then learn my name, then hear the way I speak English—ask me where I’m from. I have to justify the language I speak in, even though I know it perfectly.

I’m a writer: I identify myself completely with language, I work with it. And yet the wall keeps me at a distance, separates me. The wall is inevitable. It surrounds me wherever I go, so that I wonder if perhaps the wall is me. I write in order to break down the wall, to express myself in a pure way. When I write, my appearance, my name have nothing to do with it. I am heard without being seen, without prejudices, without a filter. I am invisible. I become my words, and the words become me.

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren’t aware of before.

I write to feel alone. Ever since I was a child it has been a way of withdrawing, of finding myself. I need silence and solitude.

Scaffolding is not considered beautiful. It usually represents a kind of blight. It interferes, it spoils the look of something. Ideally it shouldn’t be there. If I have to walk under scaffolding, I prefer to cross the street. I’m always afraid it’s going to collapse.

Writing in another language represents an act of demolition, a new beginning.

I preferred to manipulate the truth, but I also wanted to represent it faithfully, authentically. Verisimilitude was very important to me, as a writer.