Translating Myself and Others

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Overview

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translator

Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.

With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.

Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691231167
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	433,084
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jhumpa Lahiri is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Barnard College. A writer in both English and Italian, she is the author of Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone into English.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1967

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

(1) Why Italian? 9

(2) Containers 23

Introduction to Ties Domenico Starnone

(3) Juxtaposition 33

Introduction to Trick Domenico Starnone

(4) In Praise of Echo 44

Reflections on the Meaning of Translation

(5) An Ode to the Mighty Optative 60

Notes of a Would-be Translator

(6) Where I Find Myself 70

On Self-Translation

(7) Substitution 86

Afterword to Trust Domenico Starnone

(8) Traduzione (stra)ordinaria / (Extra)ordinaxy Translation 98

On Gramsci

(9) Lingua/Language 131

(10) Calvino Abroad 141

Afterword 147

Translating Transformation

Acknowledgments 157

Notes on the Essays 159

Appendix: Two Essays in Italian 161

Selected Bibliography 182

Index 191

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Jhumpa Lahiri is a marvel, a writer with the courage to renounce virtuosity for the sake of vulnerability, experiment, and growth, and it’s been wonderful to watch her love affair with the Italian language unfold. In these essays, she delves deep into the fertile interstices of and between languages, giving us a book rich with insights and pleasures.”—Susan Bernofsky, author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

“A remarkable account of Jhumpa Lahiri’s journey from English to Italian and back. Her pages on the myth of Echo are the most poignant and eloquent account of the translator’s art that I have ever read.”—Michael F. Moore, translator of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed

“With this collection of elegant essays, Jhumpa Lahiri makes her career as a writer of two languages and, increasingly, as a translator between them seem less an eccentric adventure than a necessary one. No man is an island—and no language, either.”—David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“In these stunning essays, Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly investigates the fluctuating borders between writer and translator, language and identity, artist and art. Her intellectual and deeply personal inquiries—reminiscent of Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, and Susan Sontag—challenge us to engage with our own mysterious and metamorphic relationship to language and who we are.”—Jenny McPhee, translator of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/28/2022

Pulitzer-winning novelist Lahiri (Whereabouts) explores her relationship with literature, translation, and the English and Italian languages in this exhilarating collection. In “Why Italian?” Lahiri reflects on her desire to learn the language, concluding it is like breeding a “new variety” of plant through grafting: “A foreigner who arrives from abroad, who learns a new language, who works to contribute to a new society, who integrates herself: this person embodies the word graft.” “In Praise of Echo” sees Lahiri describe translation as a “radical, painful, and miraculous transformation” that evokes the translator’s ability to “look into a mirror and see someone rather than herself.” “Where I Find Myself” offers fascinating commentary on Lahiri’s experience translating her own work—self-translation, she writes, is “like one of those radioactive dyes that enable doctors to look through our skin to locate damage... and other states of imperfection.” “Calvino Abroad” is a consideration of the Italian novelist’s relationship to language, and includes some of his own thoughts on translation (he wrote in one essay that it “requires a sort of miracle”). Lucid and provocative, this is full of rewarding surprises. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"[An] absorbing new collection of essays. . . . Translating Myself and Others is 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."

Bookpage

"These deeply thoughtful meditations . . . illuminate the art of literary alchemy."

Saga Magazine

"[Translating Myself and Others] movingly describes [Lahiri’s] history with translation from her experiences as an immigrant child . . . to her early literary-translation efforts and her eventual decision to move to Rome and learn Italian."

Vulture

"[Translating Myself and Others] movingly describes [Lahiri’s] history with translation from her experiences as an immigrant child . . . to her early literary-translation efforts and her eventual decision to move to Rome and learn Italian."

Vulture.com

04/01/2022

Novelist Lahiri, internationally known for writing fiction in both English and Italian (e.g., Dove mi trovo, or Whereabouts, which she wrote in Italian, then translated into English), is also an established literary translator and theorist of translation at Princeton. This volume collects her essays about translation (most previously published or given as lectures), some appearing in English for the first time; an appendix includes two essays in Italian. The collection is singular for Lahiri's ability to integrate the personal and the theoretical, drawing her examples from literature and from life. These texts take on the tone of a personal essay when Lahiri writes about teaching translation in Princeton seminars, or being asked by Italians why an American of Bengali descent would be interested in "their" language. Essays about Pliny or the distinction between the Italian words "lingua" and "lingue" are more scholarly in style. VERDICT 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.—David Azzolina

Library Journal

★ 2022-01-26
The acclaimed author and translator offers thoughts on the latter art and craft.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction in English, Lahiri moved to Rome in 2012 to immerse herself in Italian. Since then, she has published both a memoir and fiction in Italian and translated several works from Italian to English. This volume collects several pieces written over the past seven years—her translators’ notes to the novels Ties (2017), Trick (2018), and Trust (2021) by Italian writer (and friend) Domenico Starnone; stand-alone essays; and lectures and addresses—as well as an original introduction and afterword. A few themes emerge: Lahiri frequently returns to Ovid and Metamorphoses, most notably in her lecture “In Praise of Echo” and her moving afterword, which recounts her process of translating Ovid as her mother declined and died; metaphors of immigration and migration—Lahiri is both the daughter of Bengali-speaking Indian immigrants and an immigrant herself, twice over—ground other musings. 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.

Kirkus Reviews

"Poetic."

New York Magazine

"Translating Myself and Others is a thought-provoking collection of essays about the art of modern translation."

Foreword Reviews

"[Lahiri] explores [translation] with her customary rigor and candidness in this new essay collection, featuring several pieces originally written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri for the first time, an act of metamorphosis as dazzling to her as it is to the reader."

Chicago Review of Books

"Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay"

One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year

One of VULTURE'S 49 Books We Can't Wait to Read

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

From the Publisher

"Those interested in literary translation will value Lahiri's personal, erudite exploration of her life as a writer-translator.

"

Choice