Maladied Interpreter

The maladied interpreter (also published on the New America Media blog)

While listening to Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories on my IPod, I could relate to Mr. Kapasi, the Indian interpreter/driver protagonist, in The Interpreter of Maladies. Mr. Das is driving an Indian-American family visiting Konarak, India. He finds out that Mrs. Das, his passenger client, thinks of him as a doctor or counselor because he is a Gujrati-Hindi interpreter in a doctor’s office. Mrs. Das tells him her secret story of infidelity and asks for his advice. He does not understand why she has just told him about her marital problems. Mrs. Das tells him that she wanted his advice and thought he was a good person to speak to because he was a doctor’s interpreter and helped people on an everyday basis. He had never thought of himself as a social worker or counselor before she referred to him as such. He thought that he was just a driver.

I have always felt that being multilingual and often the only person in a room that can understand the native language of many of the other people in the room has made me the Interpreter of Maladies. I chose Lahiri’s book because of its title. Having long since felt like the maladied interpreter, I wanted to know how her fiction presented the plight of interpreters.

Being an interpreter can feel like the garbage dump for the unsolved troubles of people who can’t communicate. However, there is often little regard for the desire or lack of desire of the de facto interpreter to hear the cries and complaints of those wishing to express themselves. It’s taken for granted that the multilingual individual must interpret or translate whatever is told to him or her. It’s as though being a polyglot is a double-edged sword. We have the power to speak and understand many people, but we may not always want to communicate or listen to everyone who wants us to relate their pain to others. Just like the driver/interpreter only saw himself as a message carrier between the Gujarati speaking patients and the Hindi language doctor, I wish that I sometimes could decide if I want to be just a conduit and not seen as the change-maker or physician for all of life’s illnesses, whether they be physical, emotional, financial, or romantic.

It’s no surprise that I was listening to the short story as I was getting a foot reflexology massage to help me relieve my spleen troubles that are caused by my emotional burden of listening to and caring for those who can’t communicate or figure out how to solve their own problems.

I was the maladied interpreter listening to The Interpreter of Maladies.

Lahiri’s short story came alive the next day as both my parents were sick and I was their chauffeur.

Next time, I will be the healthy polyglot enjoying a Pulitzer prize winning author’s prose.

P.S. I am now working on a book called Language is Music, to teach people how to easily learn foreign languages using music and other audio formats. I hope to make more people proficient and fluent in foreign languages to increase global understanding and alleviate the demand for interpreters, especially the reluctant ones like myself.

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