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Translating Myself and Others
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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.
Reviews
"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."
"offers fascinating commentary on Lahiri's experience translating her own work ..."
"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 ..."
"While these vivid descriptions bring translation to life, elsewhere her essays 'on translating others' can be complex or baffling ..."
"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."
"Readers will have a newfound appreciation of the translator's ability to illuminate."
"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 vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect."
"One of Lahiri's great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways ..."
"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' ..."
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