https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2705-3105
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ABSTRACT
Jhumpa Lahiri’s translingual text In Other Words (In altre parole, 2015) functions in the article both as a test case to explore disciplinary boundaries and as a case study to examine the ‘trans’ prefix. Firstly, can the infrastructure of Italian Studies accommodate non-Italianist writers and researchers? What sort of conversations might a Transnational Italian Studies scholar have with a comparatist? Secondly, to what extent does Lahiri’s text merit the prefix ‘trans’, especially if we adopt Jessica Berman’s view of the ‘trans’ prefix as disruptive of the normative? An analysis of In Other Words focusing on four trans-prefixed terms – transnational, transgender, transvestite, and translation – reveals a tension between essentialised concepts of national belonging, gender, and language and more performative instances of the same.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Jhumpa Lahiri, In altre parole (Milan: Guanda, 2015). Prior to this, Lahiri’s book-length publications were written in English: Interpreter of Maladies (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); The Namesake (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Unaccustomed Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); The Lowland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, 2013).
2 Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words, trans. by Ann Goldstein (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Charles Burdett, Nick Havely, and Loredana Polezzi, ‘The Transnational/Translational in Italian Studies’, Italian Studies, 75.2 (2020), 223–36 (p. 234).
3 In Other Words: ‘I can write in Italian but I can’t become an Italian writer’ (‘Posso scrivere in italiano ma non posso diventare una scrittrice italiana’), pp. 170–71.
4 Other blocks on Comparative Literature methodologies modules typically included: Reception and Circulation of Texts; Translation Matters; Intermedial and Intercultural Adaptation; Animal Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Petrocultures; Medical Humanities; Digital Humanities.
5 Texts included: Kai Wiegandt, The Transnational in Literary Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020); Paul Jay, Transnational Literature (London: Routledge, 2021); Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009); Matthew Hart, Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); Neriko M. Doerr, The Native Speaker Concept (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009).
6 See Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
7 For an analysis of Comparative Literature’s self-interrogation, ‘indiscipline’ and ‘meta-humanities position’, see David Ferris, ‘Indiscipline’, in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalisation, ed. by Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2006), pp. 78–99 (p. 79). As Charles Bernheimer put it a decade earlier: ‘Comparative Literature is anxiogenic’, ‘Introduction. The Anxieties of Comparison’, in his Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 1–17 (p. 1).
8 Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi, ‘Introduction’, in Transnational Italian Studies, ed. by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 1–22 (pp. 2, 10).
9 Charles Burdett, ‘Embedding Transnationalism in Modern Languages Pedagogy: A UK Perspective’, Forum Italicum, 57.2 (2023), 315–23 (p. 317); Emma Bond, ‘“Transnational Italian Cultures”: Editing as Method’, Forum Italicum, 57.2 (2023), 299–305 (p. 304).
10 Harry Levin, ‘The Levin Report, 1965’, in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, pp. 21–27 (p. 22). This volume includes the 1975 Greene Report.
11 Ursula Heise, Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 5, 7. This is a modified print version of the online submission dated 9 March 2014, available at <https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/search-results?combine=heise> [accessed 31 August 2023]. See also Haun Saussy, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalisation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Calls for contributions to the 2024 online report can be found at Waïl S. Hassan and Shu-mei Shih, ‘CFP – State of the Discipline Report’, <https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org> [accessed 31 August 2023].
12 Claudio Fogu, ‘The Transnational Italian Studies Major at UCSB: A Paradigm Shift’, Forum Italicum, 57.2 (2023), 342–46 (p. 343).
13 Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, ‘Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?’, ‘Trans-’ special issue, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36.3/4 (2008), 11–22 (p. 12).
14 Jessica Berman, ‘Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?’, Modernism/Modernity, 24.2 (2017), 217–44 (p. 221).
15 Wiegandt, p. 7, n. 20. Wiegandt goes on to cite Jessica Berman, ‘A Transnational Critical Optic, Now’, College Literature, 44.4 (2017), 475–82.
16 Berman, ‘Is the Trans’, p. 218.
17 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928; repr. New York: Harcourt, 2006); Joanna Russ, The Female Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav (New York: Random House, 1985).
18 The term ‘transvestite’ has now largely been superseded by ‘cross-dressing’ due to the medicalisation of the earlier term.
19 Lahiri uses the terms ‘dominant language’ (‘lingua dominante’) (pp. 4–5), ‘principal language’ (‘lingua principale’) (pp. 34–35), and ‘stronger language’ (p. xiv: Author’s Note, no translation) to refer to her English.
20 Claire Kampf, The Multilingual Subject: What Foreign Language Learners say about their Experience and why it Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 99.
21 Burdett et al., ‘The Transnational/Translational in Italian Studies’, p. 231. Similar disciplinary discussion can also be found in Burdett and Polezzi, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–15.
22 Burdett et al., ‘The Transnational/Translational in Italian Studies’, p. 234.
23 From a disciplinary tourist’s perspective terminological hesitations and variations seem symptomatic of the uncertain status of the transnational with respect to the discipline of Italian Studies: Claudio Fogu, for instance, claims that the transnational was ‘no mere intellectual “turn”’ but that it ‘was, or better, it had to be made into a paradigm shift for the humanities as a whole.’ Fogu, p. 342.
24 Judith Surkis, ‘When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy’, American Historical Review, 117.3 (2012), 700–22 (p. 704). For Mary Snell-Hornby the ‘turn’ metaphor in general is an example of English language’s ‘definition deficit’ when it comes to academic clarity. See ‘What’s in a Turn? On Fits, Starts and Writhings in Recent Translation Studies’, Translation Studies, 2.1 (2009), 41–51 (p. 46).
25 Surkis, p. 722.
26 Alice Yaeger Kaplan, ‘On Language Memoir’, in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. by Angelika Bammer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 59; Helen O’Sullivan, ‘Learning Words: Language Learner Narrative in the Twenty-First Century’, in Readings in Twenty-First-Century European Literatures, ed. by Michael Gratzke, Margaret-Anne Hutton, and Claire Whitehead (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 367–84.
27 O’Sullivan, pp. 370, 382.
28 Not a fan of the work, Tim Parks is especially riled by ‘The Imperfect’ chapter, which prompts an exasperated ‘What a muddle this is.’ Parks continues in parodic mode: ‘Floundering with her tenses, Lahiri grabs for the life vest of analogy’, ‘L’Avventura’, New York Review of Books, 24 March 2016, <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/24/jhumpa-lahiri-lavventura/> [accessed 31 August 2023].
29 Indeed Claudio Fogu, Stephanie Malia Hom, and Laura E. Ruberto note that the mobility of culture and persons leads to an implosion of ‘a stable idea of genre’: ‘Introduction’, California Italian Studies, special issue ‘Italia senza frontiere / Borderless Italy’, 9.1 (2019), 1–12 (p. 8).
30 Jay, p. 55.
31 ‘A Transnational Critical Optic’: ‘I want to claim that we might best deploy the transnational as a critical optic or practice that engages with the discursive categories of nationality while recognizing activities that critique and transcend them. Through this optic the term “transnational” comes to function through the power of its prefix, indicating a position, action, or attitude toward the nation and its cultural apparatuses, rather than as a way of describing a given set of texts or a canon of writers’, p. 476. Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan: ‘the transnational is an optic owning the capacity to sharpen our insight into any question or experience relating to languages and cultures’, ‘An Introduction,’ in Transnational Modern Languages. A Handbook, ed. by Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 1–8 (p. 5).
32 Jay, p. 52.
33 Rebecca Walker, ‘A Language of Her Own: Wilful Displacement and Nomadic Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 15.1 (2021), 1–18 (p. 14).
34 Jay, p. 52.
35 Fogu et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 1; Stephanie Malia Hom, Italian Mobilities, Empire’s Mobius Strip (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 5. Teresa Fiore points to graduate students’ comparing of Lahiri’s privileged position with that of immigrant writers in Italy: ‘Introducing Transnational Italian Studies to a graduate program’, Forum Italicum, 57.2 (2023), 347–57 (p. 352).
36 Lahiri’s failure to mention the destructive elements of globalisation in In Other Words, including migrants crossing into Italy, is noted by Sohomjit Ray, ‘Translation, Poetics of Instability, and the Postmonolingual Condition in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words’, Modern Fiction Studies, 68.2 (2022), 544–65 (p. 557).
37 Jay, p. 71.
38 Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). First published as Dove Mi Trovo (Milan: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2018): ‘Then she starts to teach one of her companions how to say goodbye in our language […] ar-ri-ve-der-ci’ (p. 156).
39 Berman, ‘Is the Trans’, p. 218.
40 Ibid., p. 233. Sinead Moynihan explores ‘the implications of viewing the acts of writing and passing as analogous’ in her Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 10. See also Karen Kopelson, ‘Tripping Over Our Tropes: Of “Passing” and Postmodern Subjectivity – What’s in a Metaphor?’, JAC, 25.3 (2005), 435–67, in which she addresses Pamela Caughie’s Passing and Pedagogy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
41 Yildiz, pp. 6, 9.
42 A reviewer of this article kindly drew my attention to Tiziana de Rogatis, Homing / Ritrovarsi. Traumi e translinguismi delle migrazioni in Morante, Hoffman, Kristof, Scego e Lahiri (Siena: L’Edizioni Università per Stranieri di Siena, 2023) which explores potentially traumatic relationships with one’s so-called mother tongue.
43 Yildiz, p. 204.
44 For an extended comparison of clothing and books – specifically book covers – see Jhumpa Lahiri, The Clothing of Books (New York: Vintage Books, 2016).
45 Vestimentary discomfort also troubles the first-person narrator of Whereabouts, who struggles to choose the right shoes for the climate (p. 14), catches her scarf in her necklace (p. 20), and finds that her sweater chafes in the heat (p. 38). Clothing is also linked to desire unfulfilled as she recalls how the ‘frilly white dress’ she coveted in childhood was denied her by her mother (p. 74).
46 Ingrid Piller comments on a shift of focus in sociolinguistic studies from the production of language to perception, noting ‘visual perception may override speech production in the evaluation of nativeness in speech’, ‘Passing for a Native Speaker: Identity and Success in Second Language Learning’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6.2 (2002), 179–206 (pp. 183–84).
47 Sandra Gilbert, ‘Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature’, Critical Inquiry, 7.2 (1980), 391–417 (p. 394).
48 Alastair Pennycook, ‘Performativity and Language Studies’, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1.1 (2004), 1–19 (p. 15).
49 Piller, p. 201.
50 Doerr, p. 38. Doerr identifies the ideological premises of the ‘native speaker’ concept as: ‘its link to nation states, an assumption of a homogeneous linguistic group, and an assumption of a “native speaker’s” complete competence in his/her “native language”’, p. 17.
51 Ibid., p. 38. The term is taken from Vivian Cook, ‘Going Beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching’, TESOL Quarterly, 33.2 (1999), 185–209 (p. 185).
52 Loredana Polezzi, ‘Translation’, in Transnational Modern Languages, pp. 305–12 (p. 305).
53 Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 57.
54 Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others.
55 Ray, who compares Lahiri’s remarks about Goldstein in the ‘Author’s Note’ to her comments on the process of translating The Clothing of Books, not dissimilarly refers to Lahiri’s view of translation in both cases as one of ‘transparent transfer’ (pp. 558–62).:
56 Tim Parks (‘L’Avventura’) suggests that the strangeness of Lahiri’s Italian is in fact removed by the translation, but that Goldstein, conversely, renders unproblematic passages of the author’s Italian into English which sounds ‘quaint and off-key’. Lahiri’s Whereabouts, which she translated herself, has, I suggest, several oddities including: ‘it can’t take the upper hand’, referring to a bond between the narrator and a male friend (p. 6); ‘The new light disorients, the fulminating nature overwhelms’ (p. 14); ‘she’s at loose ends’ (p. 16); ‘I’m going through a hard patch right now’ (p. 100).
57 See Ray for a useful discussion of the bilingual edition of In Other Words and the ‘inherent possibility’ of translated literature to ‘disarm and deter a monolingual reading practice that is assumed to be the norm’, (p. 545).
58 Burdett et al., ‘The Transnational/Translational in Italian Studies’, p. 234.
59 Polezzi, ‘Translation’, p. 312. When Tim Parks suggests that it is no coincidence that ‘the current enthusiasm for literary translation in the Anglo-Saxon world has come at the same time as a steep decline in language learning’, he is certainly right, but it is also the case that, as Polezzi suggests, language learning can be bolstered by working with translations. Tim Parks, ‘A Translation for Our Time?’, The New York Review of Books, 11 September 2019, <https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/09/11/a-translation-for-our-time/> [accessed 31 August 2023].
60 Ray, though writing about translation, passes over the short stories with a parenthesis: ‘(the volume contains two short stories written in Italian as well)’, p. 554.
61 ‘Half-Light’, which opens with a dream which Lahiri herself had, allows her to try on the role of an Odysseus-like male protagonist returning home from a foreign land to feasting and questioning his wife’s fidelity. Speaking the foreign language he has acquired on his travels renders this Odysseus figure ‘a stranger in his own house’, ‘forestiero in casa propria’, pp. 196–97.
62 The notion of ‘owning’ a language and of embracing language ‘polygamy’ (a metaphor that Lahiri might appreciate!) is discussed with respect to migrants in Clorinda Donato’s ‘The Linguistic and Cultural Rights of Students in the Italian Language and Studies Classroom’, Forum Italicum, 57.2 (2023), 384–89. As an interesting point of comparison see also Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo, ‘“A invençó do Brasile”: Juó Bananére and Non-Italian Italian Literature’, which describes Bananére [pseud.] as ‘an Italian Writer of Non-Italian literature, and a Non-Italian Writer of Italian literature’, California Italian Studies, 9.1 (2019), 1–11 (p. 11).
63 Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), p. 50.
64 Ferris refers to ‘the ongoing consequences of two defining and contradictory forces within comparative literature: comparison without bounds, and the possibility of a discipline’, p. 82.