LOS ANGELES, CA — As the weekend wraps up, we've rounded up all the stories you may have missed Saturday and Sunday to prepare you for Monday.
But before we jump into the Southland's top stories, Golden State residents should know that the state just broke ground on the world's largest wildlife crossing for mountain lions and other animals caught in Southern California's urban sprawl.
The bridge will stretch 200 feet (61 meters) over U.S. 101 to give big cats, coyotes, deer and other wildlife a safe path to the nearby Santa Monica Mountains.
It is expected to be completed by early 2025.
Read more about that here
From an Orange County man who reportedly made violent threats to Webster's Dictionary over the revised definitions of the words "girl," "woman" and "female" to hundreds of Southland residents that could be eligible for refunds after a settlement accused Sameday Health of giving fake COVID-19 test results to customers — here are some of the stories you missed this weekend.
CA Sameday Customers Could Be Eligible For Refunds For COVID Tests
Swaths of Californians could be eligible for money back on COVID-19 tests after the company was accused of distributing fraudulent results.
OC Man Arrested Amid Threats Made To Webster's Dictionary Over Gender
An OC man was arrested after officials said he made violent threats to the company for the definitions of "girl," "woman" and "female."
RivCo Man Found Guilty In Fatal Shooting Of Banning Man
A convicted felon was found guilty of shooting a 28-year-old man to death in Banning last year.
CA Breaks Ground On Largest Urban Wildlife Crossing
Construction has begun on what is billed as the world's largest wildlife crossing for mountain lions and other animals in SoCal.
Woman Survives Off Yogurt For 6 Days In CA Snow: Report
A woman managed to survive for six days in the wilderness by rationing a six pack of yogurt.
Firefighters Quell Major Rubbish Fire Along 10 Freeway
Crews fought a large rubbish and pallet fire burning under an off-ramp to the Santa Monica 10 Freeway.
Man In 'Grave' Condition After Falling In Griffith Park
Authorities assisted a 76-year-old man who reportedly fell off his bicycle in Los Angeles on Saturday.
Murrieta Innovation Center Gets $2.4M Federal Grant
The U.S. Department of Commerce gifted a hefty grant to Murrieta's hub for science and innovation.
CA Woman Rescued After Falling 'Head First' Into Outhouse Toilet
Fire crews came to the aid of a Golden State woman who fell into a vault toilet in Washington after attempting to fish her phone out of it.
Arrest Made In Homicide At Desert Hills Outlet Mall
An 18-year-old Victorville man was arrested in connection with the shooting death of a man at the Desert Hills Premium Outlet Stores.
COVID-19 Hospitalizations Increase To 104 In San Diego County
The total number of COVID patients in intensive care beds was 17, an increase of four from the previous day.
9 People Injured After Pursuit, Traffic Collision In Encinitas
A man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of reckless driving that resulted in several injuries.
LA County's COVID Hospitalizations Rise Slightly
The number of COVID-positive patients in LA County hospitals has increased by nine people to 218, according to the state.
UCLA Survey: LA County Quality Of Life Hits Lowest Level In 7 Years
High prices, homelessness, rising crime and health concerns are taking their toll on the quality of life in Los Angeles County.
Sheriff's Department Searching For Felony Suspect In Vista
A sheriff's helicopter was used to broadcast details of the search to neighborhood residents Sunday afternoon.
Man Fatally Shot In LA's Florence-Firestone Area
Sheriff's deputies are continuing their investigation Saturday of the fatal shooting of a man in an unincorporated area of LA.
Beaumont To Receive New Interim City Manager
Elizabeth Gibbs has served in public administration for 32 years and has previously served as Beaumont's city manager.
This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Patch
Tempo edited by Luca Paci and published by Parthian
Talking Translation: Tempo
Susie Wildsmith talks to poet, translator and editor Luca Paci, the Co-Director of the Italian Cultural Centre Wales, about the joys and difficulties of trying to represent the texture and variety of contemporary 21st century Italian poetry in one parallel text anthology.
It is an unusually sunny day in an unusual year when Luca Paci and I meet for iced coffee in the refectory before his next class at Cardiff University. The world is opening up again, but, we now know, only briefly and we are giddy with joy at being able to meet and discuss poetry and more in person rather than across screens and phone lines. It has been a period of collective grief and of personal grief, a time where crossing barriers with the shared experience of poetry feels more important than ever. After a devastating summer, Paci needs ‘to hug, to be more Italian’. We need to tame lines gone unruly in the production process, to discuss the last of the changes to the text. More than that, we need to reach out, and so we do.We begin at the beginning. With the impetus to start something, mark something, make something, in a time of too many endings…
What prompted you to put together this anthology of Italian poetry?
Everybody knows novelists like Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Elena Ferrante but if you ask people about Italian poetry I suspect you would struggle to find a name apart from Dante. There is very little contemporary Italian poetry published in the UK apart from the usual suspects: Montale, Ungaretti and Quasimodo who are really (male) mid 20th century authors. When it comes to the 21st century there is an awkward void. I am also passionate about poetry in translation. A language without works in translation is a diminished one and will soon wither.
There’s real range evident in the selection of poets, their style and themes…
I have always wanted to give the English-speaking reader a sense of the unique and diverse texture of Italian poetry. I selected this mix of established and new poets based on my experience of the scene as a working poet and literary critic. The anthology tells the story of contemporary Italy. The politics, culture, society, current affairs and history. The (melo)drama and tragedy. I would like to think that the reader will be more knowledgeable about the present state of Italy after going through the collection. In this respect perhaps the book could work as a sociological reflection.
How did you select the translators to work with?
Translators and poets frequently travel in pairs like Jehovah witnesses. When you choose a poet there is often another poet who translates or interprets their work. It is a real labour of love and there is a lot of care and attending to the words, form and style. Many of the poems selected had been previously translated but they often had appeared in academic journals or small selections. There is something magical about the juxtaposition of two good poems in the same context; their energy is expanded, and you discover new connections.
Although you haven’t personally translated the poems in this anthology, you do work as a translator. What does translation mean to you?
Translation is a big part of my life. I translate all the time, in different contexts: at home with my (bilingual) family; at work; when I teach. Perhaps we don’t realise it but every kind of communication requires a specific degree of translating skills. You don’t need to be a professional to translate. If you explain something complicated in other words you translate.
As Umberto Eco puts it, translation is (a form of) negotiation. I’ll give you an example taken from my experience. My first ‘foreign language’ was French. I used to speak French with my wife when I was in Paris for my Erasmus exchange and then when we moved to Scotland in the late 90s I switched to English. Initially I used a kind of baby talk, so frustrating. I was working as a kitchen porter in a Tex Mex in Glasgow. It was fascinating but I could not speak, I had to listen all the time! Learning a language is a great exercise in humility. It is that kind of gentleness and humility that is so important when you translate thoughtfully. Negotiation is an essential skill here.
How has living in Wales influenced your approach to language and translation?
There are a lot of exciting things about Wales and one of them is the Welsh language. It is the only original British language that is still widely spoken. In many ways it is more similar to the Italian than English, since it has a great Latin influence. The cadence and rhythm in Welsh poetry are also very continental. So, when I translate from Welsh I often pass through Latin or French. I was very privileged to have Menna as a poet to translate. She is extremely patient and encouraging. For Bondo, her last collection of poets we had a verbatim translation which then was ‘sublimated’ into Italian in kind of alchemic process. I found that the most important part was to serve the text as well as I could. Predictably, learning another language has opened other doors of perception!
I have also had the honour of being part of the executive committee for Wales PEN Cymru for three years now. We have campaigned for freedom of speech especially in Turkey. PEN promotes literature and defends freedom of expression. We campaign on behalf of writers around the world who are persecuted, imprisoned, harassed and attacked for what they have written. There are committees representing writers in prison, translation and linguistic rights, women writers and a peace committee. We have put on an impressive number of events but still need support from the writing community. Subscribe today, the membership is only £4 a month!
What is the translation style that appeals to you most? Has this changed over time?
It really depends on the situation. As I said, translation is everywhere, we just don’t think about it. For example, if I want to crack a joke in my poor Welsh I don’t need to care about the literal translation. What is important in this context is to convey the fun, the laughter. If I succeed in it, I have performed a good translation. Grammar, structures, and the literal meaning of the joke are irrelevant in this case.
However, if I translate a poet, say Menna Elfyn, I need to know how to serve her poem in another language. I need to know a number of things about Elfyn’s use of Welsh and her style to prepare my work. And then I need to make a number of choices which are again dictated by the context. If I am translating into Italian there will be a number of things I need to explain to the reader either implicitly or explicitly.
Why was it important to you to have an editorial role rather than a translating role in the creation of this book?
One of the most difficult tasks for an editor is to give poems the right platform to be appreciated, but it is a great job and that’s why I chose it. If you succeed, you create a narrative, a story with the poems you select. Similarly writing the biographies of the poets is exciting when you read them through the lens of their works. Poems, lives and events collide on the pages and the books becomes epic. Literally: a work of epics you offer to the reader.
Luca Paci
You are also a poet. How has that shaped your selection of poems?
I see poetry as my way of being myself in the world and as a way of making sense of the world around me. The ancient Greeks had the word Logos which is also present in the opening of the Gospel According to John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Words are everything and poetry knows it.
I am especially proud of the mix of genders, age, and social background within Tempo. We have Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, a very exciting poet in terms of biography, style and content, egregiously translated by Cristina Viti. She reminds me a bit of the late Jan Morris.
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel is a great writer who deserves to be known much more both in Italy and abroad. I like the work Antonella Anedda who is translated by the poet Jamie McKendrick but also Laura Pugno and Chandra Candiani. I also gave space to poetic strands that are often suspicious of each other. Spoken word and lyrical poetry for instance. Or more experimental, concrete and rhymed.
All the poems I have included represent for me a huge dip into the poetic matter. There are different generations talking to each other and grappling with life in their own poetic terms. What fascinates me is that mundane events are transfigured, history is mythologised.
Do you think contemporary Italian poetry differs from say Anglo-American poetry?
It is very difficult to generalise because there is the risk of overlooking at the details and a lot of details make the whole picture. My impression is that Italian contemporary poetry has a number of forms but is embedded into (bio)politics. The individual is seen as a part of a nation and society that is failing his citizens, their desires and expectations. In opposition, it seems to me that the Anglo-American tradition is perhaps more focused on the individual as agent of freedom and desire. The biopolitical situation is radically different and consequently its expression is not the same. However, we can learn a lot from different traditions.
Why was it important to you that this book should be a parallel text edition?
Britain is crossing a very reactionary phase after Brexit which is a direct result of the politics of austerity enforced by the current government. This has led to the closure of dozens of modern languages departments all over the country. Over the past five years Wales has lost Italian departments in Aberystwyth, Bangor and Swansea. I suspect that German will be next. Learning a foreign language is not compulsory for GSCEs or A-levels. So, the parallel text edition becomes a strong cultural and political gesture.
We need more foreignness in our lives. We need to see, speak, be exposed to different cultures and this passes through language, translation, literature and poetry. Accessibility is so important. If the general public find Italian poetry exciting perhaps they will buy more poetry in general and develop a greater sensitivity for the humanities and humanity.
Tempo: Excursions in 21st Century Italian Poetry is a parallel text anthology in English and Italian edited by Luca Paci and can be purchased here.
Luca Paci was born in Novara, north Italy in 1970. He studied Philosophy at Pavia University and on the Erasmus programme in Paris, where he gained a First-Class degree. He moved to Swansea and in 2004 obtained a doctorate on the intellectual history of Benedetto Croce. Paci is currently the Co-Director of the Italian Cultural Centre Wales, the Italian Film Festival Cardiff and part of the executive board of Wales PEN Cymru. The past five years he has been teaching Italian Studies at Swansea and Cardiff University. He is a translingual poet, editor and translator into English, Welsh and Italian. Paci has published a number of essays, articles and poems in English and Italian. Among his translations are La Ragazza Carla/A Girl Named Carla by Elio Pagliarani (2006) and Bondo by Menna Elfyn (2021).
Susie Wildsmith is publishing editor at Parthian Books where she specialises in poetry and fiction and developing new writers. In recent years, she has visited the Guadalajara, Paris and London book fairs as well as being an International Publishing Fellow in Istanbul and a guest speaker with publishing conferences in Valencia and Galicia. Wildsmith has worked with authors, editors and translators from Turkey, the Basque Country, the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, and Slovakia including two recent releases from 2021 Spanish National Poetry Award winner Miren Agur Meabe. She lives in south Wales where she also writes poetry and fiction as Susie Wild; her latest poetry collection is Windfalls (2021).
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The man, Jeremy David Hanson, 34, threatened in October to shoot and bomb the company’s offices because of its definitions of “girl,” “boy,” “trans woman” and other words, federal authorities said.
A California man was arrested this week on charges that he sent messages to Merriam-Webster in which he threatened to shoot and bomb its offices because he didn’t like the company’s dictionary definitions relating to gender identity, the authorities said.
The man, Jeremy David Hanson of Rossmoor, Calif., who was arrested in California on Tuesday, threatened to kill every employee of the Massachusetts-based company, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in a statement on Friday.
He was charged with one count of interstate communication of threats to commit violence and released on conditions in California, the statement said. He is set to appear in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts on April 29.
From Oct. 2 to Oct. 8, 2021, Mr. Hanson, 34, sent anonymous comments and messages to Merriam-Webster, which publishes a widely used online dictionary, condemning the company for changing the definitions of words including “boy, “girl” and “trans woman,” according to an affidavit filed by an F.B.I. agent this month.
“There is no such thing as ‘gender identity,’” he wrote in a comment about the definition of “female.” “The imbecile who wrote this entry should be hunted down and shot.”
One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of female is “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”
Previous copies of unabridged versions of the Merriam-Webster dictionary at the company’s headquarters.Tony Luong for The New York Times
Mr. Hanson escalated his threats from there, sending messages saying that the company’s headquarters should be “shot up and bombed,” the statement said. He wrote that, by changing certain gender-based definitions, the company was taking part in efforts to “degrade the English language and deny reality.”
In October, Merriam-Webster reported the threats to the F.B.I., which tracked Mr. Hanson through his I.P. address, the bureau’s affidavit said. Because of the threats, the company closed its offices in Springfield, Mass., and New York for five days, prosecutors said.
It was not clear if Mr. Hanson had a lawyer. Messages left at a phone number listed under his name on Friday night were not immediately returned.
His mother told investigators that her son had autism and was “fixated on transgender issues,” the affidavit said.
In recent years, Merriam-Webster, the country’s oldest dictionary publisher, has updated certain definitions to be more inclusive of shifting attitudes around gender.
Representatives for the company did not immediately return emails or phone calls seeking comment on Friday night.
“Hate-filled threats and intimidations have no place in our society,” Rachael S. Rollins, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said in the statement.
Prosecutors said that while they were investigating Mr. Hanson’s messages, they found threats that they believed he had made to the American Civil Liberties Union, Hasbro, Land O’Lakes, a New York rabbi and others. He repeatedly used the word “Marxist,” they said.
In the statement from the U.S. attorney’s office, Joseph R. Bonavolonta, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston division, said that Mr. Hanson’s threats “crossed a line.”
“Everyone has a right to express their opinion,’’ Mr. Bonavolonta said. “but repeatedly threatening to kill people, as has been alleged, takes it to a new level.”
Lahiri, photographed in Princeton, New Jersey, by Heather Sten.
“A translation dilemma is among my earliest memories,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book begins, as she recalls a kindergarten teacher insisting she and her classmates write Mom on a Mother’s Day card, when Lahiri called her mother by the Bengali term Ma. In Translating Myself and Others, out May 17 from Princeton University Press, she collects recent essays on the process of translation, writing in Italian for the past decade and her new identity living between languages. Many essays in the book were written in English, a few translated from Italian and one originally composed in a hybrid of both.
Lahiri was born in London to Indian parents who settled in Rhode Island when she was 3. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, the 1999 story collection Interpreter of Maladies—her obsession with translation right there in the title—which, like her bestselling novels The Namesake and The Lowland, depicts Indian-Americans caught between two cultures.
In 2012, she moved with her husband, the journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and their two children to Rome, where she’s since published four books in Italian (and edited a collection of Italian stories) with more on the way, including In Other Words (2016), a meditation on learning to write in a new language, translated by Ann Goldstein, and Whereabouts (2018), a poetic, elliptical novel about a woman meandering through her unnamed Italian city that Lahiri translated into English herself. Lahiri has also recently translated three novels by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone.
She now teaches creative writing and translation at Princeton, making frequent trips to Rome. In July, she will join Barnard as a professor of English and director of creative writing. A book of poetry, Il quaderno di Nerina (Nerina’s Notebook), was published in Italy in 2021, and her collection Racconti romani (Roman Stories) is set to be published there this fall. Her U.S. publisher, Knopf, plans to bring both books out in English, with a timeline to be determined.
To the inevitable question—is she writing any fiction in English now?—Lahiri has a quick, contented answer: “No.”
This new book seems like a declaration that you are now a translator as much as a fiction writer, and that translation is its own artistic form. Do you see it that way?
I do see it that way. I felt the need to reiterate this more complex and more accurate definition of what translation is. My identity as a writer has come to its fullest form now that I am also an active translator, and I’m thinking so much about translation alongside my own writing. The line between the two is very malleable. I find that very stimulating to think about, to recognize how much of translation is writing and to recognize, conversely, how much of writing is a form of translation.
What language do you think and dream in now?
It depends on what the dream is, what the thought is. If you have more than one language, you are living, thinking, dreaming, in my case writing and reading in more than one language. I have Bengali thoughts in my head, I have English thoughts in my head, and I have Italian thoughts in my head. There’s no one language, because I don’t come from any one language. Technically I was brought up with Bengali, but because English entered in so early and then played such a heavy role in my formation as a person, as a reader and a writer and student, in my conscious memory I can’t remember any kind of monolingual universe.
In your new book, you refer to what you called an “anguished decision” to come back to live in the U.S. after you’d been living in Rome for a few years. Why was that so anguished?
It was anguishing because I didn’t want to leave Rome, where I feel happiest. I wanted to remain in that place where I feel the most fulfilled and the most inspired I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s like a relationship, right? You want to be with the people you love. In my case, I wanted to be in the place I love. But I did come back because there was an opportunity to teach at Princeton, and I was curious enough about what that might be like.
The main thing it has enabled me to do is to produce essentially all of the books I’ve written in the past decade, because the financial stability I have now from a teaching job enabled me to take greater risks in my writing. All of the essays I wrote, many of them for this translation book, I just wrote because I wanted to write them. Some were commissioned for no money. It’s given me enormous freedom to write in Italian. There were different kinds of expectations, shall we say, placed on my English language production, different kinds of print runs, different kinds of book tours, different kinds of audiences.
You’ve said that when you started writing in Italian, some people thought you were throwing your career away. Where did that reaction come from?
It came from all over the place, more in the Anglosphere, less in Italy. People in audiences, at events, people who came up to get their book signed, who were disappointed and saying, “Aren’t you ever going to write in English anymore? What happened? I used to like you.” But it was important for me to remind myself that my writing has never been a career in my head. Not to be naive. You write a book and you get this big advance and you sell all these copies, and there is an economic reality. I experienced that economic reality and have been very grateful for it. But I also feel like I’m in a different position right now, so that I can say yes, I want to take on this translation project that’s going to take me the next six years, that couldn’t possibly amount to a living wage.
You dedicate this book to your mother and write very eloquently about how translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses while she was dying was a kind of consolation. How so?
Ovid is describing a state of transformation again and again and again, shifting from that character to this person, to that deity to that animal. That was the thing that enabled me to translate, if you will, what was happening to her body as a metamorphosis. In some sense, death is a metamorphosis from living to dying, your body literally alters to a state in which it is no longer functioning. It was the fact that I was so deeply immersed inside of a poem that was so attentive to that, to that reality of what happens when we die. I found that really revelatory and difficult to take in, but I had to take it in because it was happening in real life.
Here, in her own words, a few of Lahiri’s favorite things.
“The glass-top table was given to me by my friend the poet Alberto de Lacerda. He taught me at Boston University in graduate school. It has been beside my reading chair since 1997. On the table is a copy of Oliver Twist I bought in the bookshop in the home of Charles Dickens when I was 12 years old. It was the first time I set foot in an author’s home. It was so thrilling. On top of the book is a list. When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare course with Edward Tayler. He wrote down these six points, kind of a road map to how to write; it felt like he was an oracle. The jar with shells and rocks in it is a sampling of the things I pick up on the beach when I’m in Wellfleet [Massachusetts]. I can’t really be at peace if I don’t have a piece of the sea in my house. Behind it in a box frame is a Roman postcard of a young woman playing a double pipe that I discovered and grew attached to long before I ever went to Rome. It’s very powerful to be drawn to something that you don’t realize comes from a place that’s going to call to you and become another home. In front of that is a statue of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, given to me by an aunt of my mother’s in Kolkata who was a Sanskrit professor. She gave it to me as a kind of talisman for my studies, and I’ve kept it by my desk since my college years. In the large frame is a watercolor by my grandfather. I believe this was from his imagination, not from being in Kashmir, which is the landscape. The marbled-paper box on the table is the first object from Italy I ever possessed. I keep my pen cartridges inside of it. The perfume bottle on top of the box belonged to my mother. She died a year ago. She was not a very vain person, but she loved fine perfumes. She used the stopper to apply vermillion to her hair, which is the traditional symbol of a Bengali married woman. If you look carefully, you can see the stain of the vermillion powder that she would apply to her hair parting around the base of the stopper.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lahiri, photographed in Princeton, New Jersey, by Heather Sten.
“A translation dilemma is among my earliest memories,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book begins, as she recalls a kindergarten teacher insisting she and her classmates write Mom on a Mother’s Day card, when Lahiri called her mother by the Bengali term Ma. In Translating Myself and Others, out May 17 from Princeton University Press, she collects recent essays on the process of translation, writing in Italian for the past decade and her new identity living between languages. Many essays in the book were written in English, a few translated from Italian and one originally composed in a hybrid of both.
Lahiri was born in London to Indian parents who settled in Rhode Island when she was 3. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, the 1999 story collection Interpreter of Maladies—her obsession with translation right there in the title—which, like her bestselling novels The Namesake and The Lowland, depicts Indian-Americans caught between two cultures.
In 2012, she moved with her husband, the journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and their two children to Rome, where she’s since published four books in Italian (and edited a collection of Italian stories) with more on the way, including In Other Words (2016), a meditation on learning to write in a new language, translated by Ann Goldstein, and Whereabouts (2018), a poetic, elliptical novel about a woman meandering through her unnamed Italian city that Lahiri translated into English herself. Lahiri has also recently translated three novels by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone.
She now teaches creative writing and translation at Princeton, making frequent trips to Rome. In July, she will join Barnard as a professor of English and director of creative writing. A book of poetry, Il quaderno di Nerina (Nerina’s Notebook), was published in Italy in 2021, and her collection Racconti romani (Roman Stories) is set to be published there this fall. Her U.S. publisher, Knopf, plans to bring both books out in English, with a timeline to be determined.
To the inevitable question—is she writing any fiction in English now?—Lahiri has a quick, contented answer: “No.”
This new book seems like a declaration that you are now a translator as much as a fiction writer, and that translation is its own artistic form. Do you see it that way?
I do see it that way. I felt the need to reiterate this more complex and more accurate definition of what translation is. My identity as a writer has come to its fullest form now that I am also an active translator, and I’m thinking so much about translation alongside my own writing. The line between the two is very malleable. I find that very stimulating to think about, to recognize how much of translation is writing and to recognize, conversely, how much of writing is a form of translation.
What language do you think and dream in now?
It depends on what the dream is, what the thought is. If you have more than one language, you are living, thinking, dreaming, in my case writing and reading in more than one language. I have Bengali thoughts in my head, I have English thoughts in my head, and I have Italian thoughts in my head. There’s no one language, because I don’t come from any one language. Technically I was brought up with Bengali, but because English entered in so early and then played such a heavy role in my formation as a person, as a reader and a writer and student, in my conscious memory I can’t remember any kind of monolingual universe.
In your new book, you refer to what you called an “anguished decision” to come back to live in the U.S. after you’d been living in Rome for a few years. Why was that so anguished?
It was anguishing because I didn’t want to leave Rome, where I feel happiest. I wanted to remain in that place where I feel the most fulfilled and the most inspired I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s like a relationship, right? You want to be with the people you love. In my case, I wanted to be in the place I love. But I did come back because there was an opportunity to teach at Princeton, and I was curious enough about what that might be like.
The main thing it has enabled me to do is to produce essentially all of the books I’ve written in the past decade, because the financial stability I have now from a teaching job enabled me to take greater risks in my writing. All of the essays I wrote, many of them for this translation book, I just wrote because I wanted to write them. Some were commissioned for no money. It’s given me enormous freedom to write in Italian. There were different kinds of expectations, shall we say, placed on my English language production, different kinds of print runs, different kinds of book tours, different kinds of audiences.
You’ve said that when you started writing in Italian, some people thought you were throwing your career away. Where did that reaction come from?
It came from all over the place, more in the Anglosphere, less in Italy. People in audiences, at events, people who came up to get their book signed, who were disappointed and saying, “Aren’t you ever going to write in English anymore? What happened? I used to like you.” But it was important for me to remind myself that my writing has never been a career in my head. Not to be naive. You write a book and you get this big advance and you sell all these copies, and there is an economic reality. I experienced that economic reality and have been very grateful for it. But I also feel like I’m in a different position right now, so that I can say yes, I want to take on this translation project that’s going to take me the next six years, that couldn’t possibly amount to a living wage.
You dedicate this book to your mother and write very eloquently about how translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses while she was dying was a kind of consolation. How so?
Ovid is describing a state of transformation again and again and again, shifting from that character to this person, to that deity to that animal. That was the thing that enabled me to translate, if you will, what was happening to her body as a metamorphosis. In some sense, death is a metamorphosis from living to dying, your body literally alters to a state in which it is no longer functioning. It was the fact that I was so deeply immersed inside of a poem that was so attentive to that, to that reality of what happens when we die. I found that really revelatory and difficult to take in, but I had to take it in because it was happening in real life.
Here, in her own words, a few of Lahiri’s favorite things.
“The glass-top table was given to me by my friend the poet Alberto de Lacerda. He taught me at Boston University in graduate school. It has been beside my reading chair since 1997. On the table is a copy of Oliver Twist I bought in the bookshop in the home of Charles Dickens when I was 12 years old. It was the first time I set foot in an author’s home. It was so thrilling. On top of the book is a list. When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare course with Edward Tayler. He wrote down these six points, kind of a road map to how to write; it felt like he was an oracle. The jar with shells and rocks in it is a sampling of the things I pick up on the beach when I’m in Wellfleet [Massachusetts]. I can’t really be at peace if I don’t have a piece of the sea in my house. Behind it in a box frame is a Roman postcard of a young woman playing a double pipe that I discovered and grew attached to long before I ever went to Rome. It’s very powerful to be drawn to something that you don’t realize comes from a place that’s going to call to you and become another home. In front of that is a statue of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, given to me by an aunt of my mother’s in Kolkata who was a Sanskrit professor. She gave it to me as a kind of talisman for my studies, and I’ve kept it by my desk since my college years. In the large frame is a watercolor by my grandfather. I believe this was from his imagination, not from being in Kashmir, which is the landscape. The marbled-paper box on the table is the first object from Italy I ever possessed. I keep my pen cartridges inside of it. The perfume bottle on top of the box belonged to my mother. She died a year ago. She was not a very vain person, but she loved fine perfumes. She used the stopper to apply vermillion to her hair, which is the traditional symbol of a Bengali married woman. If you look carefully, you can see the stain of the vermillion powder that she would apply to her hair parting around the base of the stopper.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
NEW DELHI: The New India Foundation announced the three awardees of the inaugural NIF Translation Fellowships, chosen from across 10 Indian languages for the research and translation of three historically significant non-fiction texts originally published in Bangla, Kannada and Marathi.
Instituted to promote non-fiction translations from various Indian languages to English, the Translation Fellowships are envisioned to create an expansive cultural reach for works that have thus far been confined to those who understand the original language of their composition.
The awardees of the inaugural round of the NIF Translation Fellowships are Venkateswar Ramaswamy (literary translator) & Amlan Biswas (statistician), who will translate Nirmal Kumar's 'Diaries 1946-47' from Bangla, NS Gundur (academician and literary historian) who will translate DR Nagaraj's 'Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe' from Kannada and Rahul Sarwate (academician and historian) who will translate Sharad Patil's 'Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad' from Marathi.
Awarded for a period of six months with a stipend of Rupees 6 lakhs to each recipient/team, the Translation Fellowship offers the opportunity for direct mentorship under the Language Expert Committee and the NIF Trustees, apart from providing financial, editorial, legal, and publishing support.
There are no constraints on genre, style, nationality of the translator, or ideology of the material chosen for the Translation Fellowships as long as they are published after 1850 and illuminate the development of modern and contemporary India.
The Jury for these fellowships included the NIF Trustees: political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, historian Srinath Raghavan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the Language Expert Committee in all 10 languages, comprising bilingual scholars, professors, academics, and literary translators.
Speaking on this initiative, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Trustee of New India Foundation said, "The Translation Fellowships of the New India Foundation have been awarded for the translation of three books that span the genres of personal memoir, philosophical dialogue, and critical theory, by three towering intellectuals of their time: Nirmal Kumar Bose, DR Nagaraj, and Sharad Patil. Written in Bangla, Kannada and Marathi respectively, each book is a fine contribution to the rich intellectual tradition in these languages. We are excited that this work will be introduced to readers through annotated translations and hope that the English editions of these books will spark conversations about the relevance of their ideas today."
NIF Translation Fellowship awardees announced.(photo:@newindiafndtion/Twitter)
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