Jhumpa Lahiri e Moravia

 

Can you talk about your new collection of stories. You have borrowed the title and concept from Alberto Moravia, who published his own set of Roman stories in 1954. What made you want to do that?
I have read and admired Moravia’s work for many years. Racconti romani struck me as both a fresco and a portrait of the city: a dense assembly of stories that is epic in scope. In fact, his stories were my first encounter with Rome, long before I ever visited. Many years later, Moravia was the first writer I read directly in Italian and fully understood, and when I began to write in Italian, I turned to him to guide me. The clarity of his style and the control and precision of his language taught me how to arrange words and sentences, in a new language, on the page. My title is in part a homage to him, but I also wish to signal some of the differences between his Rome of postwar Italy and the Rome I have lived in and known for the past decade. That said, his characters, like mine, are outsiders or people who have lost their way, almost always in crisis, and often living on the edge. Geneva Abdul, The Guardian

in questa bella interevistsa Jhumpa Lahiri parla di traduzioni, lingue e Italia.