PositiveThe New Left ReviewThree essays on novels that Lahiri has translated by Domenico Starnone, first published as companions to them and slightly unbalancing the collection, are nonetheless among the best, demonstrating the well-rehearsed idea that translation is the most intimate form of reading. This is in keeping with all the essays: these are records of intense relationships rather than holistic critical appraisals. Lahiri uncovers resonances with translation throughout Starnone’s novels which, given the terms of her encounter, feel inevitable. Lahiri’s responses to other writers – Calvino, Gramsci, Ovid – are similarly focused, a priori, on translation ... The essays also contain personal anecdotes and reflections, which are typically forthright, even defiant, in their contentions ... Lahiri is consistently present in her particular critical sensitivities and recurring attention to subjects such as exile, etymologies and ghosts. Yet her presence is nevertheless oblique ... The portrait, and her pleasure in directing it, is indicative of a certain distance that Lahiri maintains. Her self-presentation is clear yet ambiguous, an evocation of reticence and indirection as much as an assertion of character. Translating Myself is similarly calculated and precise, and however open it may appear, it is never straightforwardly confessional ... Moving between Bengal and the north-eastern United States, the collection is also preoccupied with translation in a wider sense – of people, traditions, and cultures. Lahiri portrays this adroitly from multiple generational standpoints ... With its intimate considerations of translation, articulated with metaphor upon metaphor, Translating Myself appears to be addressing the question of what a translated voice, with its particular invisibility, affords Lahiri. The answer remains elusive.
Chris Power
Positive3am MagazineOne way of experiencing all this could be disappointment: the book is patchy and the patches fail to completely cohere. But I found that faint incoherence compelling...Power keeps us guessing at the relationship between the rooms of his novel and denies us the relief of orientation ... Something about this elusiveness echoes the loneliness — and specifically male loneliness — that, per its title, runs throughout the novel ... finally solitary in the way of its male characters: apparently open and expressive but in fact spiky, suspicious, and self-involved. Did I ever really know it at all?
