With the fervor of a true language person, Lahiri dives into the dictionaries. She savors unexpected etymologies. She offers lists of near-synonyms. She dedicates an entire essay to the optative mood in ancient Greek...Above all, she makes herself at home in the unhomey — unheimlich, eerie, uncanny — borderlands between languages ... she does not dwell on what one might call the postcolonial or political aspects of her own biography. Neither is she encumbered by the pieties that often surround writing on translation...The book, instead, is about the consequences of the apparently simple act of choosing one’s own words ... contains a hope for the liberating power of language.
Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the 'essential aesthetic and political mission' of translation. She is excellent in all three modes — so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri's writing to go sit at my desk and translate ... One of Lahiri's great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways ... a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they're complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. 'Look,' her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.
Lahiri 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.
A vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect. 'Gramsci', she concludes, 'embodied and enacted translation both ordinary and extraordinary.' The same can be said of Jhumpa Lahiri.
In the otherwise understated and graceful prose of this new book, there is remorse, even traces of dejection ... Lahiri is at her best when she writes about the Italian words that she found particularly difficult to translate – words with overlapping or multiple meanings, the kind that lead to the struggles over choice that are all-too known to every writer ... this latest set of essays proves her skill lies in the craft of experimenting with what language can do, both in Italian and English, and both as a writer and as a translator.
On the most obvious level, these essays track Jhumpa Lahiri’s deepening mastery of Italian and through it, a more profound understanding of English, the language in which she is most comfortable, if not too comfortable. Yet they also reveal a mind inclined to metaphorical thinking, endlessly circling the alchemical mystery of translation, comparing it now to this, now to that: to an echo, a metamorphosis, a doubling, a mirror in which one sees someone other than oneself, a conversation, a marriage between texts, etc. Each metaphor reflects some aspects of translation, never all. Still, the cumulative effect over the course of this book sharpens our view of what the imperfect art of translation can, in fact, do ... Translation is like the air we breathe: we take it for granted until we lose it. Lahiri’s essays, to extend this metaphor, are a gust of oxygen-enriched air.
I find myself wondering if this too is translation, the act of summarizing and distilling her many thoughts on the matter in a succinct volume. I would not have thought it so before reading this book ... But while Lahiri’s essays can be arcane and dense to those unfamiliar with the craft, the best of them appeal to something broader ... many of my personal critiques of Translating Myself and Others stem from my unfamiliarity with the subject material, and the projection of expectations onto the narrative ... From a writing perspective there is great joy and intrigue to be found in Lahiri’s ruminations on self-translation, the idea of a living manuscript that inherently changes shape when translated from one language to another, both the new text and the original ... This is a collection to be read in bits and pieces, some of it most suitable for the translators among us, but others broadly accessible. This is a love letter to not only translation, but to literary criticism as a whole. Its existence as art, science, and craft, something to be deeply appreciated.
Beautiful metaphors relating Lahiri’s pandemic experience to the works of Gramsci and Ovid illuminate the intricacies of translation that move beyond language into sensations and emotions ... Lahiri’s arguments are accessible to monolingual readers and are packed with applicable linguistic information. The original sections in the source language often accompany the translations, including through two appendices of essays that were translated from Italian for the book ... thought-provoking collection of essays about the art of modern translation.
Reading 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.
... a lyrical meditation on translation and a manifesto establishing translation as an artistic pursuit as creative and authentic as writing in the original language ... In reflecting on her twin vocations of writing and translation, she is critical of the public perception that translation represents a lower form of creativity because of received notions of the authentic versus the derivative. Lahiri deconstructs this notion by arguing that no writing is truly original but a constant renegotiation of old myths and situations ... The collection also offers us Lahiri’s insights as a literary critic responding to works of other translators. Lahiri’s extraordinary efforts in reading Italian are exemplified in her chapter on Antonio Gramsci ... This personal essay is powerful in its reticent expression of grief even as it reinforces the role of poetry in anchoring the author during life’s colossal upheavals.
As 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.
These self-appraisals are more interesting than the rather technical essays on other writers (three of which are on her friend Domenico Starnone’s novels) ... That is not the only blind spot in a book that shows too little of the 'myself' in the title. The hole that runs throughout is the answer to why Lahiri moved to Italy, and to Italian, in the first place. She didn’t answer it in In Other Words and she doesn’t here ... Why provoke curiosity you won’t satisfy? Without seeing the input that led to the output, we feel as she does in her essay on Gramsci’s prison letters: 'We experience only a single strand of a double thread' ... Suddenly, when it is almost too late, this cool, detached book bristles with life and love.
The insights she offers sometimes nicely blend the personal with the more general ... a nicely varied collection of pieces reflecting on translation, through a very personal lens ... Her pieces show how translation is, indeed: 'the most intense form of reading and rereading there is' -- and what is found and gained by that deep engagement with text and with language.
The collection is singular for Lahiri’s ability to integrate the personal and the theoretical, drawing her examples from literature and from life ... Though the topic of translation studies might have a limited non-academic readership, Lahiri writes so beautifully that this collection will have broad appeal for anyone interested in literary essays.
... absorbing ... Essays on translation might seem an unlikely conduit for a writer’s most intimate thoughts and feelings, but Lahiri is an engaging guide, and her pensive ruminations provide a window into her soul ... a subtle yet ultimately engrossing work, somewhat academic at times, yet infused with the kind of understated, often startling capacity for observation that has always been Lahiri’s literary superpower.
... Lahiri gives voice to the translator’s experience ... offers a rare glimpse at a translator letting off creative steam between periods of close attention to someone else’s words, and it serves as a rebuke to those who consider translation an uncreative activity ... Despite her clear-eyed vision of the translator’s role in this collection, Lahiri’s thoughts on her decision to adopt Italian, then eventually become a translator (a role she had hoped to circumvent by learning a language to begin with) are somewhat vague ... While these vivid descriptions bring translation to life, elsewhere her essays 'on translating others' can be complex or baffling ... Her candidness about the hardships of translation and her enthusiasm for its rewards make you want to hear more from these fascinating figures, who spend so much time in others’ voices but have not lost the use of their own.
Lahiri’s Ovidian conception of literature — and life — is the enemy of stasis and complacency. Everything is in a state of transformation, of translation, and, because literary relationships are always in flux, there is no permanent, stable text. Just as every translation alters what it translates, every language a speaker adapts alters — and quickens — the speaker ... Lahiri continues her restless project of double-checking the world.
Possibly the most provocative piece is Where I Find Myself—on the process of translating her own novel Dove mi trovo, from the original Italian into English as Whereabouts (2021)—an essay that finds her first questioning the ethics of self-translation (probed with a surgical metaphor) and then impelled to make revisions for a second Italian edition. The weakest essay is Traduzione (stra)ordinaria / (Extra)ordinary Translation, an appreciation of Italian revolutionary and thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose Letters From Prison reveal a linguist as ferociously compelled to investigate the process of translation as Lahiri herself. Composed originally as remarks for a panel, it reads like an elegantly annotated list of bullet points that will have readers wishing Lahiri had revised it into a cohesive essay. Readers may also find themselves envious of the author’s students of translation at Princeton, but this sharp collection will have to do. Two essays originally composed in Italian are printed in the original in an appendix ... A scrupulously honest and consistently thoughtful love letter to 'the most intense form of reading…there is.'
Lahiri gives insights into her processes, as well as penetrating and perceptive thoughts on the act of translating that will be especially illuminating for readers who enjoy translated works.
In a book that is deeply personal yet unaccountably opaque with regard to Lahiri’s self-production in language, this last piece is intense and absorbing ... But though there is much to interest us in the story of Lahiri’s love-affair with Italian (for me especially, as someone who loves the language but has never had the time or patience to learn it properly), the account is wearying in repetition ... this is a collection worth reading for a number of reasons. Most important for global literary consciousness is the link Lahiri instals between postcolonial linguistic choice and translation. The spare elegance of her account of linguistic remaking, and the scrupulous record of the pains and perils of self-translation, amplify contemporary anxieties.
Three 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.
... exhilarating ... offers fascinating commentary on Lahiri’s experience translating her own work ... Lucid and provocative, this is full of rewarding surprises.
