Assistant Professor of Italian Studies Alessandro Giammei was quoted in a recent New York Times article about the author Jhumpa Lahiri and her new novel Whereabouts, which Lahiri published in Italian in 2018 as Dove Mi Trovo and translated herself.
From the article:
Alessandro Giammei, an assistant professor of Italian at Bryn Mawr and a former colleague of Lahiri’s, was an early reader of both the Italian and English versions. In “Dove Mi Trovo,” he was struck by the elegance of the language and the precision of Lahiri’s word choices. “You cannot read this book without moving your mouth in Italian,” he said.
“The incredible detail of her observational writing that is classic Jhumpa Lahiri is not in ‘Whereabouts,’” Giammei said. If, in English, Lahiri is an eye, he added, “in Italian, she’s an ear.”
Lahiri visited Bryn Mawr's campus in the fall of 2019 to talk to students about her work and her curatorship and translation of short stories by Italian authors of the 20th century.