CROSSING A BOUNDARY

JHUMPA Lahiri is not at home, but she is not out of place either.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

(L-R) Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Anastasio, director, Italian Cultural Centre, and translator Gioia Guerzoni | SAYANTAN GHOSH

(SAYANTAN GHOSH)

The eldest daughter of a generation of Indians and Bengalis who moved out of India in the 60s into the New World, Lahiri found success in English with her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999, Houghton Mifflin) that explored diaspora stories of displacement and identity.In 2012 and several books later, she moved to Rome with her family, and has found herself in Italian. As she told a packed hall at the Italian embassy in Delhi on Friday, “In between the hexameter of Ovid [she is translating his ‘Metamorphoses’ from Latin to Italian] and 8th-century Rome...that’s where home has been in the last five years.”

Beautifully turned out for the evening, Lahiri was also in India for the first time with this new aspect of her identity — “the Italian side” for which she shed skin, so to speak, adopted a new grammar, and put herself on a willing journey of expatriation — some would say, like Italo Calvino’s Baron who abandoned living on the ground one day to live on the trees.

The reaction to her ‘Italian Project’ certainly set off major alarms, revealed Lahiri at a gathering before the panel discussion between her and translator Gioia Guerzoni, moderated by Andrea Anastasio, director, Italian Cultural Centre, New Delhi.