Barnard is well known as a home for women in the arts. Be it through prolific writers, transformative artists, or influential journalists, the College’s lasting impact on creative thought has been shaped by generations of artistic Barnard women.
On October 17, two such icons — Laurie Anderson ’69 and Jhumpa Lahiri ’89 — shared an unforgettable exchange about their personal perspectives on creative processes, as part of a monthslong 60th anniversary celebration of New York City’s elegant Rizzoli Bookstore.
The landmark bookstore, which is recognized for its carefully curated collection of books on art, design, fashion, literature, and photography, invited Lahiri to speak — who in turn invited Anderson to join her — at the packed event. “[Rizzoli] asked me, ‘Who is the one artist you would like to be in conversation with?’” said Lahiri as the conversation began. “And I said, ‘Laurie Anderson.’ I just wanted to see you again.” For audience members, being able to witness their rapport and shared dedication to art making was a treat.
Lahiri, who returned to the College last year as the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was chosen as the “class speaker” for her Humanities and Arts group.
Anderson, whose latest album, Amelia, tells the story of Amelia Earhart’s final voyage, shared with Lahiri her inspirations and vision for stronger human and artistic connections.
“I never had a career, so I just do different things,” said Anderson, of artistic temperament. “I didn’t think, I better have a career. And I would advise that for people who are worried about what to do [that they] do two or three things. If it doesn’t fill you with anxiety [and] it sounds like fun, do it. It worked out for me.”
The two alumnae also shared an obvious love for their alma mater. Several times throughout the talk, Lahiri referenced her Barnard students and the importance of teaching them literature in translation. “I teach my translation students a beautiful essay by the Italian translator Anita Raja in which she says that ‘Translation is not transcribing but rather rewriting in a different language.’"
Read on for highlights, edited for length and clarity, from the evening’s conversation.
On Artificial Intelligence:
Laurie Anderson: It would be interesting to have a kind of archive of your writing, of your thoughts. Sometimes, as a writer, you go back to your notebooks, perhaps, and look at them. What if you had a massive notebook that had everything in it? I love AI, and I have a lot of faith in it also. It does a lot of stuff, but I think we can see through it. I am not worried that machines are going to start sounding like humans. I’m worried about the opposite. If you think of how much we live in a story machine now, which is what I would call a madhouse, [we see that] living in the United States is living in a madhouse right now of stories. I find this — especially the disinformation, things that are being inserted by human beings who are writers and creators — really disruptive and super dangerous. So I don’t find AI dangerous at all, I find it really fascinating.
I loved Barnard — I really did. I loved Barnard, and I loved living in New York for the reasons that pretty much everybody does.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I’m one of those people who’s terrified of AI and nervous about what this means for translation and the translation of literature in particular. I understand the efficacy of AI for translations in certain contexts. But then, when I think of my own love for translation as a form of practice, as a form of discovery, and a meditation on language and difference, among other things, I begin to grow more and more alarmed. The danger, of course, is that people who hear that I am translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses will say — and people ask me already — “Why are you bothering doing this?” It’s an incredibly complex text, and I gather AI could generate at least a decent first draft in the style of both my co-translator and myself. I want to be open, but not when it comes to literary translation. I think that would be an enormous loss for the future of literature, and it would also be a loss for the way that human beings — through trial and error [as well as] the act of interpretation, choice, empathy, and the time that is spent — are able to transform texts.
On Translation and Transformation:
LA: All those things that are called interpretations, [like translations], are an art form. A lot of books don’t stay on the page; there are books that should be spoken, should be heard out loud, [but] are just in libraries, or you have to read it all by yourself, and as a communal experience, hearing those words out loud and not acted out spoken by a person who loved those words. I’m talking about a communal experience of language — people are hearing language together.
JL: Translation is falsely considered a nonartistic process. As I said, translation is writing a text in another language. And the only thing that’s different is that there’s a certain component of the text that [the translator] is not inventing, but it’s actually a rather minor component of the text. There’s nothing derivative about translation, nothing secondary about it. And the challenge of it, if I may say as someone who has both written books and translated them, is that the responsibility is 100 times greater than writing one’s own book. Every solution, when translating a literary work, demands a creative solution. It’s so much like music, like what actors do. It feels like an excavation. It’s just a question of which solution, which alternative, sits better with you. But then the problem is, we are also changing as we move through the text. The text alters us just as we alter it.I think the beautiful thing about translation is that it’s shifting. There is no definitive translation.
Every solution, when translating a literary work, demands a creative solution.
On Their Love for Barnard:
LA: At Barnard, they said you should decide what you want to do. And so I said, “No, I don’t think I will.” And they were okay with that. I had to decide to focus on art history, and I was happy to do that. I always had a secret studio downtown while I was in Barnard, and [it] had nothing to do with school — I was very happy about that. I was just trying to keep the bunch of balls going. I never questioned why it was at Barnard when they said, “You have to choose a major,” I was like, “I can’t do that.” I loved Barnard — I really did. I loved Barnard, and I loved living in New York for the reasons that pretty much everybody does. I have a teacher who I still see, Barbara Novak ’50. I loved her so much — [other students and I] had a fan club. She got jobs for all of us as soon as we graduated, and even when we were still in school, writing for art magazines. It was a doorway to the so-called real world. You didn’t have to kind of go to school and think, What’s the real world? You were living in an environment already. It’s been really wonderful, and Barbara, who is 95, is a legend.
JL: [Before college,] I was looking at various colleges across the country and said to myself, ‘Laurie Anderson went to Barnard in New York City. Okay, that’s the place to go.’ I came to Barnard because of Laurie Anderson.
A Night at Rizzoli
