PositiveZYZZYVALahiri depicts the soul of translation ... a dizzying reflection on her personal relationship to language ... Too few of the essays address these dilemmas, though they make up the strongest part of the book. The collection also includes introductions published for Italian novelist Domenico Starnone, whose books Lahiri translated, but these pieces often read merely as praise for their authors. Elsewhere, in an essay about Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Lahiri makes an unfortunate comparison between Gramsci’s confinement as a political prisoner under a fascist regime to her strictly-enforced time slot at an Ivy League library with reduced access to bathrooms and water fountains during COVID. It reads as a needless insertion of self and does not do much to propel the essay forward as a meditation on translation ... Overall, Lahiri achieves the task of portraying her profound love for linguistics and the ways languages give new life to one another in translation. It is, after all, the result of great passion and ongoing study that she is able to fluently and evocatively write in a wholly foreign language. One may surmise that the distinct lyrical quality is the result of her multilingual tongue adopting varied tonalities and rhythms. The beat of Lahiri’s writing is impeccably strong.
