The Weidenfeld Lectures 2025: "Imperfect Speakers": Understanding Exophonic Women (3)

Registration is required. Register here for Lecture 3.

Language is the writer's instrument; what happens when there is more than one language to choose from, or when a native language is replaced by another? What inspires, or necessitates, a writer to practice exophony: to cross a linguistic boundary? And in the case of bilingual or plurilingual writers, what factors determine the language(s) chosen for creative expression? These lectures will focus on a series of women who, either for political or personal reasons, altered their linguistic points of reference, radically questioning-and perhaps willfully subverting-notions of nationality, identity, and the "mother tongue". We will trace the reception of exophonic women writers and consider how exophony complicates the translator's task. Throughout the lectures, the Latin poet Ovid will serve as a touchstone in order to define exophony both as a condition of exile and an act of metamorphosis.

The 2024 - 2025 Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College will be Jhumpa Lahiri. Her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the O. Henry Award (1999), PEN/Hemingway Award (1999), and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2000), among other prizes. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2014 the National Humanities Medal. In an essay published in the New Yorker in 2015, Lahiri announced that she would only be writing in Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College (Columbia University). She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani (Roman Stories). She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarerlla. Her most recent book in English, a collection of essays entitled Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. 

Previous Weidenfeld Visiting Professors include Elif Shafak (2017 - 2018), Ali Smith (2011 - 2012), and Umberto Eco (2001 - 2002).