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Translating Myself and Others

Translating Myself and Others

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Princeton University Press ·2022 ·208 pages ·Essays
Academic Press
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About This Book

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.


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Reviews

"A vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect."

Polly Barton· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Readers will have a newfound appreciation of the translator's ability to illuminate."

Michael Magras· Shelf Awareness Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"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."

LILY MEYER· NPR Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Two essays originally composed in Italian are printed in the original in an appendix ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"offers fascinating commentary on Lahiri's experience translating her own work ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"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."

Robert Weibezahl· BookPage Read review ↗ Near the Top

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