131. The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories has a title that relates to one of its characters, a Gujarati man who works in Orissa as a translator for a doctor who cannot speak Gujarati. Lahiri recounted that the title originated from her student days in Boston, when she met a translator for a doctor who had several Russian patients. It’s interesting as an account of the primacy of a title – i.e that a title can exist in some ways prior to and independently of a work of art:

The title came to me long before the book did, or, for that matter, the story to which it refers. In 1991, during my first year as a graduate student at Boston University, I bumped into an acquaintance of mine. I barely knew him, but the year before, he had very kindly helped me move...to a one-bedroom apartment. When I asked him what he was doing with himself, he said he was working at a doctor’s office, interpreting for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients who had difficulty explaining their ailments in English. As I walked away from that brief conversation, I thought continuously about what a unique position it was, and by the time I'd reached my house, the phrase ‘interpreter of maladies’ was planted in my head. I told myself, one day I'll write a story with that title. Every now and then I struggled to find a story to suit the title. Nothing came to me. About five years passed. Then one day I jotted down a paragraph containing the bare bones of ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ in my notebook. When I was putting the collection together, I knew from the beginning that this had to be the title story, because it best expresses, thematically, the predicament at the heart of the book—the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves. In some senses I view my position as a writer, in so far as I attempt to articulate these emotions, as a sort of interpreter as well.

Consulted:
Houghton Mifflin (Lahiri’s publishers) website: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/interpreter_maladies.shtml#conversation