RaveAsymptoteReading Translating Myself and Others feels like visiting a private museum in the making, an archive which Lahiri has been curating for years and which puts beautifully imperfect objects on display, the unfinished results of her various transnational experiments with literature. Throughout ten essays in English and Italian, some of which have never been published before, Lahiri takes the reader on a journey from Rome to Princeton and back that revisits her own revisions and transformations—becoming, de facto, yet another version of what literature from Ovid to Kafka and beyond has immortalized as the Metamorphoses (in the plural, a form which, for Lahiri, wins over anything singular) ... Vivid imagery and metaphors help Lahiri, in the same way as they helped Ovid, to explain what is apparently untranslatable in life—whether it is death, illness or exile—but they also create an unresolved and shifting exchange of literal and figurative meanings that precludes identifying identity as something certain. Ovid gives Lahiri the pretext to enter a discussion about identities on the move, about what it means to be truly part of a country or a language ... Ultimately, the value of Translating Myself and Others lies in showing what runs under the surface and beneath the skin of Lahiri’s own writing, revealing how she plays with languages and shapes them in such a way that allows her to find a distinctive literary voice, her own linguaggio. The result is a collection that is unafraid of experimenting with weakness, obsessed with scraps of papers and notes in diaries, with what happens behind the scenes and in the margins.
