MixedAstraAs a book of personal essays, Translating Myself and Others is less about translating or others than it is about the ways in which translation refracts Lahiri’s multiple selves: author, translator, academic, and language learner ... I’ve mentioned Lahiri’s multiple selves, refracted by the collection’s centerpiece: translation. Lahiri the translator and language learner are novices compared to the expert, much-lauded persona of Lahiri the author and academic. It is Lahiri the academic, who has settled into herself, that I find most compelling. Lahiri the academic, when she directs her gaze outward ... [a] lack of dialog with other thinkers on translation ... Throughout these essays, it’s as if Lahiri, feeling misunderstood, were hoping to build a literary home for herself that is ample enough to accommodate her lives as author, translator, academic, and language learner. A home in which she can write, on her own terms, in whatever language she wants, and think, on her own terms, about whatever subject she wants. Preferably without pesky questions or objections.
