Translating Myself and Others

Starred review from March 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.

April 1, 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

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Starred review from February 15, 2022
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."

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