The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
Edited by JHUMPA LAHIRI
(Penguin classics, 528 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064
In 2013, on completion of her second novel, The Lowland, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Jhumpa Lahiri moved with her husband and children to Rome. The musicality of Italian instantly captivated her. By learning Italian, Lahiri hoped to free herself from the linguistic “clash” (as she perceived it) between the Bengali of her Indian parents and the English she acquired on emigrating with them to the US in 1970.
But learning another language was difficult. Lahiri compared her Italian to “unsalted bread” – grammatically correct but lacking in flavour. How to write and converse engagingly in a language not her own? Lahiri has kept her Italian limber since then, not least by her work as a translator. Of the 40 short Italian stories collected here, she has translated, or co-translated, six.
