“I see very little when I’m writing,” Jhumpa Lahiri tells me. We’re speaking over Zoom. In her square on the screen it’s 5 p.m., and a warm July light filters into the Rome apartment where she has lived on and off for just over a decade. Over the course of our conversation, a light breeze sometimes lifts her long hair; she is serious, with a precise attention to her language, occasionally circling back to revise a word and then explaining her reason for the edit. “I mean, I’m kind of right up against it and I don’t understand what I’m doing most of the time. I don’t have a sense of what it’s supposed to mean.”

Take “The Steps,” from her new collection, Roman Stories (Knopf). Arriving in the middle of the book, it follows a number of characters who use the same set of outdoor stairs each day—each has their own section entitled by their descriptor: the expat wife, the mother, the girl, the screenwriter—inspired by, Lahiri says, “a staircase that I live next to.” Not a famous staircase, but a significant one in that it connects the class-shifting, sprawling neighborhood of Trastevere, below, with Monteverde Vecchio, full of early 20th-century villas and the American University of Rome, above. “The staircase is an uneven gray, but in the middle there’s a colorful section—faded by now—of alternating red and yellow, to commemorate the important victory of a beloved soccer team. Here and there, trapped in porous stone, tiny lakes of moss and weeds,” she writes.

“It’s part of my quotidian consciousness and an amazing open theater, if you will,” says Lahiri. After we finish speaking, she plans to meet a friend at the bottom of the steps before they go see Barbie. “And then as a writer, I was always observing the variety of life, lives, ages, experiences, perspectives, and it felt to me just so blooming with stories.”

She started writing the story not long after she baffled friends and members of the American literary community by not only moving her family to Rome, but abandoning English—the language in which she won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies—in favor of Italian. (Since 2015, Lahiri has written and published first in Italian and then, doing most of the translations herself, in English, a process she wrote about at length in Translating Myself and Others. She translated Roman Stories with Todd Portnowitz.) “The Steps” began as a vignette about a mother working as a child’s caretaker while separated from her own children. “It was,” Lahiri says, “one of the first very short stories I wrote in Italian.” After setting it aside for nearly a decade, she returned to it in the summer of 2020. She had been back in America teaching creative writing at Princeton University when the pandemic put a temporary end to her freedom of movement; when she and her family were able to return to Rome, a mandatory two-week quarantine in their apartment brought greater significance to the steps, which became their primary point of contact with the outside world: Friends stood on them and passed her a newspaper; she’d call up a produce seller from the nearby piazza who would deliver lettuce, potatoes, and fruit in a bag handed over their gate. For entertainment, Lahiri would watch people go up and down. “I had the idea of representing a day in the life of this staircase.” It was only after she finished writing it that she began to see themes emerging from her accumulation of images: the upstairs-downstairs class polarity, the way the steps encouraged communion and detachment.

Much of Lahiri’s work explores these tensions of belonging and dislocation, of connection and separation: Interpreter of Maladies (which a New York Times headline on a Michiko Kakutani book review described as “Liking America, but Longing for India”), the 2003 novel The Namesake, and the 2008 story collection Unaccustomed Earth largely center on Bengali immigrants and their families making lives in the United States. Though Roman Stories, which takes place in and around Rome, also focuses on newcomers and so-called outsiders to Italy, Lahiri has stripped away names and nationalities. Characters refer to “foreigners,” “my country,” “their kids,” “they,” and “us.” There are instances of violence and xenophobia, but also tenderness. A couple visiting the city mourns the loss of their son, years earlier; a man entertains an infatuation with a near-stranger at an annual party; a family flees their racist neighbors; the teenage daughter of a vacation home caretaker observes a family on holiday. (Given all the family ties, it feels fitting that as we speak, first her husband and then her daughter appear from some unseen room, notice her on-camera conversation, and disappear again. The collection is dedicated to them, along with Lahiri’s son: “For Noor, Octavio, and Alberto: ten years later.”) The book’s apt and beautiful cover is an Ian Teh photograph of trees experiencing “crown shyness,” an adaptive phenomenon in which the leafy crowns, rather than touching to form a contiguous canopy, remain distanced so that when viewed from below seem separated by channels of sky.

The final story, “Dante Alighieri,” was also the last story she completed in the collection. In it, a woman attends the funeral of her mother-in-law, and over the course of the service recalls a teenage romantic entanglement in America with a young man who wrote her a love letter, signing Dante as his name; the woman went on to become a scholar of the poet and build a life in Rome. “Dante was not one of the authors I ran to try to read when I felt that I was a competent reader in Italian,” Lahiri says. Instead, she waited until some preternatural sense told her she was ready—a kind of sure-footed wandering in the dark that to me seems similar to how she writes. Of her process, she says, “If it’s meant to mean something, it will mean something.”

In conversation with Vanity Fair, Lahiri discusses the unwieldy draw of Rome, and the art of all kinds of translation.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: How did you come to realize that Rome was a place you wanted to spend a good portion of your life? What is it about the city?

Jhumpa Lahiri: It was a sensation, an intuition. Looking back, I realize that I have been extremely interested in ancient history—and ancient Rome and Ancient Greece in particular—from a very young age. I think many children are. And then I went on to study Latin, and every time I went back into that world of Greco-Roman antiquity, I felt that I was going to a place where things had a certain coherence and importance for me that I wasn’t finding in other things.

Rome wasn’t the first place I visited in Italy. I’d been to Florence, I’d been to Venice, I’d been to a couple of other places. Rome, I was waiting for, maybe the way I waited to read Dante. And then we finally did come to Rome, and I knew. I mean, within two days, I said to my husband, this is where I need to live my life. It took another 10 years to logistically organize this desire, or this pull, I should say—it was really more of a pull toward the city. It was sensing that this city was going to resolve a lot of things for me. And it did. I mean, resolve is not an interesting word to use. I would say Rome has been a metamorphic city for me. It’s been a city of radical transformation for me as a human being, as an artist. And that was what I think I was sensing. Something was waiting for me back there.

Was it scary to realize that? Because it did herald a huge uprooting.

It wasn’t scary. It superseded the idea of, “Oh, this is kind of logistically very complicated. Oh, I have two small kids. Oh, we have a life pretty solidly established in Brooklyn, New York, and we seem to be on a train that’s already left the station.” I heard other people around me commenting like, “Oh, really? So, you’re going to move home with your family? Wow. Well. Okay.” I sort of absorbed these comments, but I felt a little bit like Ahab. I did feel a little bit mad. I was so possessed by this idea. I thought we were going to just live here for a year, you know? One year is a millisecond of time in a city like Rome, but I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just knew on a very inchoate level that something would not be complete in my life if I didn’t go there. But there was never any fear in me. In fact, it was the opposite of fear. It was more a strange lack of fear. Foolhardiness. I don’t know how to explain it, but I had my eye on something in the far distance.

In the stories there’s so much love for the city, but there’s also a lot of difficulty; there are a few instances of racial violence and a sort of push-pull of people who have been drawn to Italy and then encounter racism and xenophobia.

Extreme xenophobia. I moved to Italy in a moment where the far right was really gaining ground, and I was extremely tuned into what was going on, reading the papers and talking to people and experiencing how people looked at me, at times. A sensation one gets riding the bus. That was part of the experience of coming here. That’s why I didn’t like that word that came to mind, that it resolved something. It resolved something inside of me existentially. But the last thing I want to perpetuate is this idea, that myth, that this is a magical city—and it is a magical city—but there are intense problems, attitudes, violence. What interested me given my past, given my upbringing, given my family story, is: how is this playing out for immigrants here today? And because there’s such a large Bangladeshi community in Rome, I would end up having conversations with a lot of people who come here for work, to raise a family; talking to them about their experiences, and their abiding ambivalence about being here, and at times their deep disappointment, and wanting to be somewhere else.

I was just learning how to live in a completely new world, in a new context, in a new language. And learning how to feel both very at home and deeply aware of my position here as an outsider, a non-white person, in this rather racially homogenous country. It was interesting to think about that, across time. First, for my mother and father to live in London in the late ’60s, when I was born. Hearing stories about how when my mother was pregnant with me and they were looking for an apartment and it said “Europeans Only” in the windows.

And then going to the United States, and how we experienced life there, in a small town in New England in the 1970s. And then here, it’s another experience. In the course of a given day, I can have so many different types of experiences. If I go places where people know that I’ve lived here for a decade, there’s one sense of deep belonging, deep rootedness, that I’ve never felt anywhere else on earth. But all it takes is hopping on a bus or a tram or going to another neighborhood, and then suddenly there can be something very different happening. And that of course makes me think more broadly of how people are perceived in various situations, which is what gave rise to many of these stories of people who, unlike me and my family, don’t have the choice of saying, “Oh, we don’t really like it here. Why don’t we just get back on the plane and go back to wherever we came from.”

In one story, “The Delivery,” a young woman is walking on the road having run an errand, noticing how it feels to wear a beautiful skirt, when she’s shot by a stranger. The story then shifts perspectives to one of two boys, a friend of the shooter. When you started writing that story, did you always know you were going to shift into his perspective?

I started with her, and then I was just so curious to know who would do this—just because it’s a hot summer day and it’s boring, and why not? What would give rise to that kind of violence? I think it’s very important to try to understand what is happening in the minds of other human beings, even if it’s an uncomfortable feeling.

Many of these stories, they come to me simply because I’m reading the newspaper and I’m coming across these incidents. These are things that happen. I remember a couple of years ago, there was a guy just waiting for a bus at night, and he got severely beaten up and lost his eye. These are things that come up and people sort of glance at them in the paper, and then life moves on. But they don’t move on from me. They accumulate, and then they come out in stories that give me an opportunity to pause and explore the psychological, the emotional reality.

Rome looms so large. It represents so many, many, many things that are so important, that are so grand, that are so beautiful, that are so enduring, and that is part of what Rome is. But it’s important to me to be in this city with full awareness of what this city is, not just historically, but what it means today. The concept of integration, it’s such an open question here. There’s so many situations where I am the only person in rooms full of 500 people, the only person who looks the way I do. I can find myself in a movie theater, and I’m the only person who’s not white. It’s part of my day-to-day reality here.

It’s somewhat unexpected to feel that, but to also feel the pull to the city that you do.

Given that I was born into a world and a reality where I’ve always felt like an outsider, and I’ve always felt acutely aware of myself as different from other people, or my family being different from other people—and that goes even for when I would go back to visit India with my family because there I was marked as an outsider in a different way, I was American in the eyes of everybody there—so given that reality, given that my path is never to be at the center of anything, I think there’s nowhere I would rather be on the outside of things than in a city like Rome. There is built into the fabric of this city a humanity that I don’t find in other places.

Switching gears: AI is increasingly present. I would think that its proponents would see translation as a natural place for its use.

I think AI is the last thing that is pertinent to the translation of literature. It’s one thing to translate like, how do I use my new MacBook, or whatever. But translation is a calling and it’s a human attitude that is based on curiosity, and empathy, and reading, and choosing, and deliberating—dwelling for days, if not weeks, over a single word. Creating solutions for inherent problems that are not easily solved. AI can provide a solution, but as with any literary text, it takes a village of translators to contribute interesting solutions to great works of literature, which are steeped in ambiguity—which are built on ambiguity. I don’t know what machine can simulate that process because I don’t know what the machine is doing in terms of considering and eliminating and then, in the end, eventually choosing one solution over another, while remaining very aware of the solutions, of the roads not taken.

If you read the forward to a translation, the translator usually will say, I could have made these choices over here, but these were the ones I decided on in the end. Translation of literary work is an interpretation of that literary work. And so it’s also bound up with the work of the literary critic and the reader slash literary critic. It’s such a hybrid operation. It’s not something, I think, that artificial intelligence can ever replace.

Are you still working on your translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

We finished the first draft this year, and now we’re awaiting the first round of comments from our editor. It was two and a half years of, basically, all I did really in terms of my creative work. Since June, July, I’ve been deprived of this daily contact with Ovid, and I miss it, actually.

Do you miss writing fiction when you’re in those long bouts of pure translation?

No. Because I know that if I wanted to write something, I would. I’ve almost always had to make room to write stories alongside the things that were happening in my life. Most of my first book I wrote while I was writing a doctoral dissertation.

Stories, they announce themselves and they say, okay, you have to write this now. I just recently wrote a new short story. It had been a while, because I wrote the Dante story a couple of years ago, as I said, and since then I’ve been very steeped in Ovid, though I did work quite a bit on the translation of this book, with Todd. They’re all very connected to me, these activities. It’s all a kind of playing with words, playing with language, whether it’s translation, whether it’s writing stories or poems or a novel, whether it’s going over a translation of my own work that someone else has produced and reengaging with the story from that angle. Everything is always going back to this central point: of language, and how to handle it.