Podcast #102: Jhumpa Lahiri on Language and Disorder

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
March 8, 2016

Jhumpa Lahiri is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesake, and The Lowland. Her most recent book, In Other Words, is her first work of nonfiction. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're pleased to present Jhumpa Lahiri discussing finding home in language, an unlikely relationship, and the inspiration of disorder.

Jhumpa Lahiri LIVE from the NYPL

Jhumpa Lahiri LIVE from the NYPL

Perhaps its unsurprising to learn that Lahiri considers language one of the great relationships of her life. She describes language almost in divine terms:

"In a sense, language is the most intimate relationship of ours lives, at least, I think, for me. That is not to say I don't love deeply people and have profound relationships with them. But I think language is so much more powerful than we are, so to have a relationship with language is a very profound thing. To seek another language is so powerful and so humbling."

Lahiri's most recent book, In Other Words, is a memoir exploring her journey into learning Italian, which included moving to Rome to immerse herself in the language.

"The strange contradiction of [deciding to learn] Italian, which I have tried to explain in the book that people have asked me about is it's all a series of contradiction, this whole path, the whole project. And I think the central one is I'm looking for some kind of rootedness, some kind of home, some kind of place, point of reference, all of these things that were lacking in my life, and why? Because I want to feel comfortable. I want to feel comforted in the world. I don't like this sense of why I don't fit in anywhere? Why don't belong anywhere? Why can't I call anyplace home? This anxiety. So what do I do? I look for it in a totally new language in which I am completely alien, and I feel very much I am very much a stranger, a foreigner, I mean by definition I'm a foreigner in that language, and yet I feel at home. It's the feeling of feeling at home within the obvious atmosphere of the Other and of foreignness, and so I think there's something to be explored there in that what do other languages give us?"

Speaking of the new language as a way of introducing a good form of complication to her life, Lahiri spoke of the need for creators to embrace a sense of disorder:

"If you're creating, if you're choosing to live outside the balance zone, and if you're actually more interested in disrupting the balance and turning it upside down and poking into it and taking it apart and pulling the threads out, I mean this is what we're doing as artists, right? I mean, yes, it would be nice if it were all nice and harmonious and order. But disorder is the greater power, right? And you have to be in touch with that."

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