Jhumpa Lahiri and the issue of tranlsation

What if anything should we make of Jhumpa Lahiri's metamorphosis into an Italian writer, or actually a writer in Italian? Her terrific short stories that told of the lives of Indian immigrants to America and their family struggles, especially as the parents remain "Indian" and the children full assimilate into Americans. Above all her stories (and novels, to a degree) have been noted for their beautiful prose - almost every paragraph ending with a potential  "pull quote." So at some point in midlife she moves w/ family to Italy and learns the language and now seems set on composing in that language - and she's still great (she does her own translations into English, strange as that seems). Is she just a show-off? Or just plain super-smart? Or does the confrontation w/ a new language push her prose and her thinking to a higher level, as if beautiful prose in English were too easy, almost sub-conscious, for her and the required attention in a new language forces her to focus more intently on the act of prose writing. (Was it the same for Conrad? But of course he never translated his own work back into Polish - why would he? One oddity of JL's decision is that she has moved away from not only her native language but from the "lingua franca" of the contemporary world to a much more obscure language. Oh, well.) A great example of JL's new style is her piece, The Boundary, in the current New Yorker. Though I suspect most readers will figure out what's going on before reaching the closing paragraph, and I won't give it away, this story with its tricky narrative voice is a great meditation not only on the social problems of immigration, race and ethnicity prejudice, and 3rd-world v 1st-world disparities of wealth and culture, it's also a reflection on the act of writing (as was the previous NYer story, John Edgar Wideman's piece on a writing seminar) - a beautiful and surprising story that loses nothing in style or structure in its language migrations, by an American writer working in Italian and translating herself back into English. (Who if anyone will read the Italian version, btw?)

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