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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.'
... exhilarating ... offers fascinating commentary on Lahiri’s experience translating her own work ... Lucid and provocative, this is full of rewarding surprises.
