In altre parole is being translated into various languages and, during this period, I am asked to evaluate one book cover after another. The UK and the American editions have a picture of me in a library in Rome. The Dutch edition has another photo of me, in close-up and out of focus. They think that it conveys the personal and introspective nature of the book. The French bears no image at all.
My first reaction to the idea of having my picture on the cover was negative. I was afraid that it would be judged as an act of vanity, a brazen way to market a niche book. I later reconsidered.
Both photos of me were taken by Marco Delogu, someone who knows me, who has read my books, someone I trust. Together we chose both portraits. Before he took the shot in the library, we talked about it. I told him what I wanted and he listened to me. Thus, for the first time, I was able to participate in the creation of a book jacket. In the end the author is the book, and represents the work directly, also sincerely. Better a photo of me than an annoying, irrelevant image. Maybe it makes sense that, in America, in England, in Holland, I have become my own cover.
Even when I don’t particularly like one of my jackets, I end up feeling some affinity for it. Over time, the covers become a part of me, and I identify with them. Recently, in Italy, a peculiar thing happened: I was sent a complimentary book by an Italian publisher, and this book—the Italian edition of a novel written in English by a writer of Indian origin—has the same cover as the current American edition of my first book of short stories. It is identical in every detail.
Opening the envelope, taking it in, I was dumbfounded. At first I thought that it was my own book, but then I realized that it had more pages and that the title and the author’s name were different. I quickly called my agent. “But this is my jacket!” I told her. Apparently such things can happen. In any case it’s too late, the fat twin to my book is already out. The other day at the Rome airport I came across a stack of them, believing for a second that they were mine.
Years ago, I thought that that cover had been made to measure. I thought that it would belong to my book, only mine, and that it would remain faithful to me. Instead, the same jacket that dressed my words has since abandoned me for another author, in another country, without, however, leaving me altogether.
7.
The Living Jacket, the Dead Jacket, the Perfect Jacket
Today, the printed book is no longer the only manifestation of a published text. What is the significance of the cover when there is no longer a physical volume? I don’t read e-books, but I don’t think that jackets have the same function, the same presence, on a screen. Strangely, the screen privileges the text, and the graphic garment no longer dresses or protects. It remains a detail, an accessory, an element that is ancillary and, I would say, gratuitous. It becomes even more of a label. A paper cover, over time, gets dirty, gets ruined. On the screen, nothing of the kind takes place.
An American painter I know and admire, Richard Baker, has for many years dedicated a series of paintings to classic book covers. He usually selects, as his models, pocket editions, that is, the most modest and inexpensive of editions (among his subjects are several of the original Penguin paperbacks). Many are books that have changed his life. The paintings resemble hyperrealistic gouache photographs. Baker depicts the books faithfully, with affection but with an unsparing eye. He ingeniously copies, and also transfigures, the graphic designs of others.
All of the books have been lived with, held in hand day after day. Their covers are tattered, yellowed, bleached by the sun. It is as if they were faces, furrowed, worn. They are, through and through, alive.
Each one of Baker’s paintings is the portrait of a book, but they tell us much more. They recount the passion of reading, both Baker’s and all of ours. They narrate the literary education of a generation. They preserve on canvas a world, a culture that is declining. They elicit nostalgia, recalling an era that no longer exists. Above all they show the relationship, the strong ties of affection, almost a fusion, between reader and book. Baker has said that books “come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our skin.”
By immortalizing the book covers of his life, Baker depicts how they age and, in the end, die, like we do. They express something fleeting, never definite, never permanent.
What is the perfect book jacket? It doesn’t exist. The great majority of covers, like our clothes, don’t last forever. They make sense, give pleasure, in only a specific arc of time, after which they are dated. Over the years they need redesign, change, just like old translations. A new jacket is given to a book to reinvigorate it, to make it more current. The only part left intact is the original text, in the language in which it was written.
Like Richard Baker, I remain faithful to the book covers that have changed my life. If I see an edition of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Shakespeare’s Complete Works other than the one I read in college, it seems like a different book. I fear that the unknown edition, the one I did not hold, that did not accompany me to the library, that I did not mark up and study, that I did not fall in love with, would not elicit the same emotion in me.
I remain attached even to certain ugly covers of books I would read and return in high school without ever owning them. In the end, the beauty of the cover has nothing to do with it. Like every true love, that of the reader is blind.
—
If it were possible for me to choose one of my covers, how would I choose? The uniform jacket of an editorial series? Or something original created specifically for my book?
On the one hand, I want desperately to belong, to have a clear identity. On the other, I refuse to belong, and I believe that my hybrid identity enriches me. I will probably always remain torn between these two roads, these two impulses.
I would certainly prefer the uniformed elegance of a series to an insipid cover, or one that pains me. And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer’s voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way.
If I could dress a book myself, I would like a still life by Morandi on the cover, or maybe a collage by Matisse. It would make no commercial sense, and would probably not mean anything to the reader. But I recognize myself in the abstract eye, the chromatic palette, the language of each of these painters. It would make sense to me.
I wrote this last sentence one evening. The following morning, after I’d stated my wish, something marvelous happened. Right in front of the gate to the building where I live in Rome there is a bus stop with two signposts close together.
By lovely coincidence, as I was writing this speech, Rome was host to two exhibits: Morandi and Matisse. When I exited my building the following morning, looking up, I saw, on the signpost to my right, a poster of a still life by Morandi, and to my left, a work by Matisse. For a few moments I stood between them and, imagining myself transformed into the pages of a book, I was jacketed by both.
Afterword
In 2014, while on holiday in Capalbio, Italy, I received a call from Beatrice Monti della Corte—cofounder, along with her late husband, Gregor von Rezzori, of the Santa Maddalena Foundation—inviting me to deliver the lectio magistralis, the keynote speech, for the ninth edition of the Festival degli Scrittori in Florence the following spring. The theme of the speech was open, though it should have something to do with writing, Beatrice said. I accepted her proposal gladly, but also with some trepidation, recalling the eloquent lectio that Carlos Fuentes had delivered some years back, which I’d had the pleasure and privilege of hearing in person.
On a train that autumn, talking to my friend Sara Antonelli, a professor of American literature in Rome and a translator into Italian of some of my most belov
ed authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy, I pondered topics for my speech. I considered writing about the significance of titles: a title, after all, is the first element of a book one encounters, something that both represents and stands apart from the text.
“What about covers?” Sara suggested, taking this idea a step further and into a different kind of language—the visual. I was immediately inspired, and as we kept talking I began taking notes on the journey between Florence and Rome.
I wrote this essay, originally titled “Il vestito dei libri,” in Rome, in Italian. It was first edited by Sara, then by Michela Gallio, an editor whom I met through my Italian publisher, Guanda, and with whom I have worked closely on various projects. It was translated into English by my husband, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and then the Italian text and the English translation were published together as a chapbook by the Santa Maddalena Foundation, with the invaluable assistance of Brigida Bec-cari, for the occasion of the festival. I presented it, in Italian, in the Cenacolo di Santa Croce on the evening of June 10, 2015.
The following June, in the United States, I revisited both texts in order to prepare the English translation for publication. Back in Rome, after slightly modifying the translation, after correcting a couple of mistakes and adding one or two new thoughts, I had to rework the Italian text, translating myself, this time from English, in order to arrive at the final version. I’m struck by this repeated crossing between the two languages in which I write. I realize how useful it is to move back and forth linguistically. I also realize that the process is endless and that, as a result, the final version continues to elude me.
The bilingual edition published by the Santa Maddalena Foundation exemplifies the naked book I talk about. The cover—stark, cream-colored—bears only the title of my address and my name, without any design other than the emblem of the festival it belonged to. It is part of a small, exclusive series. Now that original book with two languages inside will become two separate volumes, each containing a single language. The American edition will wear its cover, the Italian another. The journey of this little book—born as a double text wearing a neutral uniform, then split in two, dressed in two separate garments—seems right.
I am grateful to Alberto for rendering this essay into English, and to Robin Desser, my editor at Knopf, for publishing it in its current form.
About the Author
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.
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The Clothing of Books Page 3